Archive for Salvation
The Beauty of Brokenness
Posted by: | Comments
The centerpiece of our Christian faith is the sacrifice of Christ. As he hung on the cross, he was broken. Broken for our sin. Broken in his body. What we might call a bloody mess. Yes, no matter how sanitized we would prefer to make our mind’s snapshot of Christ on the cross, the reality of it is that Christ hung there broken.
A man who had never sinned received into his literal physical body all the sin of all mankind and took the penalty that such sin required. And it broke him.
His physical body was broken. Nails in his hands and feet. Long thorns thrust into his skull. His face bleeding from the places man had pulled his beard out. His back, torn into pieces from the whipping he had endured. His body crushed from falling under the weight of the cross on the way to Golgotha.
His heart was broken as he experienced separation from his Father as he lived in his present darkness. He experienced our confusion, our loneliness, our doubts, our fears.
He was broken for me. He was broken for you. That is the beauty of brokenness.
May every time we experience the reality of brokenness, whether our own brokenness or the brokenness of others, lead us to remember Christ who was broken for us all and may we live in grateful love for the One who through brokenness has become our healing and our salvation.
Mikki
The Perfect Gift
Posted by: | CommentsFrom my heart’s perspective, one of the most beautiful stories recorded in scripture is the story of the woman in Luke 7. We Christians are familiar with it and often read over the depth of the story. Can we pause today and look in a new way?
Jesus is at a Pharisee’s house where he has gone to eat dinner. The Pharisees were very religious – self-righteously so. Jesus sits down to eat and a woman “who was a sinner” came. Now we understand that in Bible times, women were devalued, sort of sub-important people. So here comes a woman into a men’s gathering (picture the men’s monthly meeting at your church). She is “an especially wicked sinner” according to the Amplified Version of the Bible. Other versions say she was “a woman of the town”; “a harlot”; “a notorious sinner; a social outcast, devoted to sin.”
This would probably offend most of us. It certainly offended the Pharisee who concluded that Jesus must not be a prophet as he had previously thought, for if Jesus were a prophet, he’d know this woman was a slut.
This woman brought in an expensive alabaster flask of perfumed oil and standing BEHIND him WEEPING, she began to wash his feet with her tears, and wiped his feet with the hair of her head; she kissed his feet and anointed them with the fragrant oil. What a scene!
You can be pretty sure that the oil she used was purchased by money she made as a harlot.
