The Gift Nobody Wants

"God loves not the believer who does the most, nor who feels the most, nor who thinks the most cleverly and best, nor even the one who shows the greatest love, but He loves him who suffers most" - Michael Molinos

We have almost lost the meaning in the west of what it means to be a persecuted church and to see our brothers and sisters die a martyrs death.  This was the early Christian vocabulary of what it meant to be a Christian.  In American Christianity, suffering and pain are to be avoided at all costs.  Self-help books and the gospel of feeling good and God wants you happy are the norm in most Christian bookstores.  The truth is suffering is a gift from God but it is often a gift that nobody wants.

 Maybe if we are ever going to get to the place of being ready for physical martyrdom, we need to learn "spiritual martyrdom."  This is the soul that has gone so deep into the Spirit of God where one has removed all attachments to the world and is so full of God's Spirit that exterior things do not really upset you.  God brings us to such a humble, quiet and peaceful place that nothing hardly disturbs you any more.

When God takes someone through this painful process, God will even remove the very resources of the Spirit that gives you peace and strength.  God strips and leaves you with nothing except God alone in the dark.  When God is all we have, we realize all the other things are simply surface things to the reality of God in our lives.  There is a wonderful parable by Meister Eckhart which later I will give in its more complete form.  I will just say for now that the parable ends with a poor crippled man who would rather be in hell with God than in heaven without God.  Now that is heaven on earth with God who is our all and all and our end of all.

How Can I Sing Psalm 137?

"By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and we wept . . . How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? . . . Happy is the one who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock"
(Psalm 137:1, 4, 9)

I love the Psalms.  They have shaped my life in Christ more than any other scriptures.  I meditate on them every day.  They are written in my heart.  God continually shows me new things every time I read them.  I have to confess, Psalm 137 is one of the most difficult texts in the Bible.  I often breeze by this Psalm losing both the emotion and the context of what God may be trying to show me.

Nobody wants too much light shed on their life at one time.  Nobody wants to expose all the wounds and pain that is deep inside one's hearts and soul.  But God is teaching me to quit avoiding, hiding, and trying to go around the hard places in life.  I must embrace my pain and the deep places that hurt the most.  I must allow God access to the inner deepest corners of my heart and soul if I am ever going to experience complete healing.  If I am ever going to quit waking up screaming in the night and find peace and rest in my dreams.  I am going to have to revisit and go to places within me that my body and emotions try to fight every step of the way.  But go I must!

What I see in Psalm 137 is Jesus praying this Psalm.  All I see anymore is Christ in the Psalms.  Jesus who left the comforts of heaven and came to this foreign land earth.  Jesus who takes all the pain and agony and sins of the whole world onto his shoulders.  Jesus who shows a higher way towards evil and forgives and loves human enemies but we will still find untold inner enemies within our own souls.  We should not wish ill on anyone although we certainly can pray for justice.  But the unseen enemies of the spirit world are harder to see and resist.  They torment us and tempt us and try to destroy us at every turn.

We can pray against the spiritual forces of evil and the darkness of the enemy which should be annihilated and destroyed.  Praying against the enemies of our souls of despair, darkness, depression, and fear should be utterly vanquished by the One Jesus who battled every one of these demons of darkness on the cross.  Maybe by avoiding the cross and what Jesus has done is why too many of these enemies persist and plaque us to this day?  Until the cross of Christ pierces every dark corner of our inner being, we will never experience the freedom God wants for us if we keep avoiding the cross.  The cross is our surest spiritual weapon and pathway to find victory over the dark places of our soul.  The cross is our pathway to freedom!

When we remember our past, our deepest wounds, Christ knows our suffering and pain.    God knows the cries of our hearts.  Let us be ever mindful as we read this Psalm of another description of Christ in the book of Isaiah,

"Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
He was bruised for our iniquities;
the chastisement for our peace upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all."
(53:4-6)