Wrestling with God is OK, it’s all right to have questions, doubts, fears; it’s OK to wrestle with the intellectual problems of being a Christian; it’s perfectly acceptable to want to resist God’s will if it involves suffering, But when the wrestling is over, when I’m just too tired to go on, when God has got me face-down on the canvass and in my exhaustion I smack the mat and voice my surrender, there is a new life.

God has plans for you and even now he is at work, even if we are blind to it right now. Like a GPS, we have a destination. We may make a mistake, we may turn right instead of left. It might mean you arrive at your destination a bit later than you’d hoped, or after spending more money on tolls than you’d planned. But God, our guide, will still get you there.

The place of cowardice is the place where we meet God. That is the experience of Jacob the fugitive. And I think I know the reason for this surprising spiritual truth. I think it lies in vulnerability. It’s why Jonah meets God in the belly of a fish, why Peter meets God while sinking into a lake, and why Jesus receives courage in the Garden of Gethsemane. The place of our deepest fears and our most overwhelming helplessness is the place where we meet God is his most gracious and powerful.

Human beings waste a lot of time and energy resisting the inevitable – ageing, sadness, loss, death. The gift of accepting things you cannot change is one of the greatest and most elusive of God’s gifts. When we have it we truly are free. When new lack it we become small, bitter, joyless.

Before we suffer, our faith that God is good is just a theory.

Before we suffer, our faith that God will never leave us is just a theory.

Before we go through the time of trial, our belief that God has a grand future for us, is just an idea.

Before we experience the pain of the test, our faith that God will support us is just our point of view.

When we are tested we find proof that we are God’s beloved, we see with crystal clarity that God is faithful and won’t abandon us, we come to understand where we are vulnerable. Like gold in a refiner’s fire, we are tested to make us stronger, to rid us of impurities, to learn that in God’s strength, we are going to make it through.

God will take even the very worst of evils performed by human beings and turn them into opportunities for goodness. He will take the cruel eviction of a mother and child into the desert to face certain death, and use it to found a nation that blesses the world. He will take my selfish actions and somehow, despite my goatish motives, use those broken shards to build something splendid. Hear the Word of the Lord – the God of outcasts and rejects, the God of haters and murderers. Be of good courage. Sin won’t win. The Kingdom will come.

The Bible is not a psychology textbook. What it is a revelation of God’s never-ending, all-consuming, overwhelming love. God’s eternal, incomprehensible, undeserved grace and acceptance of you and me. What the Bible gives us is not pop-psychology, but a God who takes the initiative – who gives and loves and blesses despite all the reasons why he shouldn’t. Sarah laughed her cynical laugh, and so do we. Yeah right, God’s going to bless me. Hear the Word of the Lord. Sarah did nothing. Nothing that made the promise come true. God had a plan.

At the heart of all Christian ethics – Catholic and Protestant, Evangelical and Liberal, Eastern and Western is this deep truth. A truth so profound that it demands us to respect it and live by it. Every human life is sacred. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

Today, Pentecost 2020, we need the power of the living water to erode human hardness. If it took millions of years for the Colorado River to erode its riverbed to the depth of 6,000 feet, how long will it take for God’s living water – the Holy Spirit of Pentecost – to erode the hardness of human hearts?

There’s a time to be an activist, and it’s soon.

There’s a time to be a contemplative, and it’s now.

This is the time of staring into heaven, of preparation, learning, reflection, prayer, meditation, getting ready.

Because sometime soon – the next phase of God’s mission to reconcile the world to himself will begin. And we will be at the heart of it.

Gaze into heaven, experience God’s Spirit, get ready to change the world.