Another week and more of the same.  Maybe another week means boredom for you.  Maybe it means another home improvement project.  Or, maybe another week means rising economic hardship and uncertainty.  Maybe you’re anxious about putting food on the table or paying rent.  What does the future look like?  Maybe news of the rising COVID death toll is received by you numbly.  Or maybe its weighing you down; perhaps you’ve even lost a loved one to it.  All these are real problems.  I don’t want to be dismissive of these things.  Our God sees and knows…He knows firsthand your struggle.

While these problems are legitimate… none of them are your biggest problem.  Our Christian confession is that we (along with all of humanity) have turned away from God in sin.  Sin is our biggest problem.  It’s a big problem primarily because of who God is.  He isn’t like us.  He isn’t just quantitatively bigger than us; he is qualitatively different.  He is utterly foreign, transcendent, and incomprehensibly majestic.  Our highest notions of goodness don’t come close to capturing the overflowing fountain of supreme goodness that He is.  This God owns your very existence and upholds every beat of your heart.  Everything good you have, He gave you.  That is the God we’ve offended, abandoned, and denied.  To add insult to injury, we are numb to this even being a big problem in the first place.  Comfortably numb.

The Christian faith makes no promises to protect you from illness or give you long life.  It makes no promises that you’ll have steady income, a successful career, or a stable economy.  It doesn’t promise a happy marriage or successful children.  God makes no promises to give you what you want.  God does not exist in order to please you.  He is not simply an addendum to your prosperous life story.  Life is not going to be easy.

In our passage from Sunday (John 20:19-23), this group of disciples is the same group who a few days earlier abandoned and denied even knowing Jesus!  In this passage, the risen Christ comes to them not in anger, vengeance, or justice.  He doesn’t tell them that they better shape up or else.  He doesn’t demand they fix themselves… but instead comes in unconditioned abundant peace.  He brings peace with God.  Peace earned with his perfect life and atoning death.  Peace that has totally abolished your greatest problem, sin.  Already, today, right now… you have peace with God through Jesus Christ (Romans 5).

Christ didn’t stop there though.  It wasn’t enough that Jesus simply give the disciples himself.  He went further and “breathed” His very Spirit, the third person of the God-head, into his church.  This echoes creation when God breathed life into Adam (see Genesis 2:7).  As the faithful New-Adam, Jesus inaugurates the New Creation, bestowing it on his disciples and church by pouring out the Spirit. 

The Spirit takes all Christ’s benefits and applies them to us, sealing and impressing them upon our weak hearts.  Doing this, Jesus also brings us into union with himself, thereby releasing you from the guilt and power of sin.  Guaranteeing your inheritance, identity, and life forever in a condition that is far better than our present circumstance… glorification.  These riches are irrevocably applied to you right now.

Appreciating this eternal promise amidst our COVID-world problems is a struggle.  If these promises fall numbly on you at times… I can sympathize.  I’m going to spend the rest of this post offering a few responses to this lack of appreciation.

Firstly, our numbness evidences the reality of our sin (see discussion above).  Secondly, it reveals that we must never assume we’ve got the gospel down.  This side of glory, no one ever fully appreciates the good news of Christ.  The gospel is never something we can assume, never something we can skip over in order to get to something bigger and better.  Nothing surpasses an eternal weight of glory, or becoming a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1), or inheriting that which no eye has seen, nor ear head, nor heart of man imagined (1 Corinth 2:9).  Don’t assume you’ve gotten the gospel fully figured out… Instead, let it kindle an awe-struck wonder driving you deeper to Christ in His Word.  There is treasure to be unearthed here.

Lastly, struggling to appreciate God’s promises is why you need word and sacrament.  It’s why we need corporate worship.  In one sense, during worship we join the heavenly multitude around the throne to receive from God himself and respond in praise.  During worship, we become participants, entering into the new creation.  With bread and wine, we “taste and see” the reality of the heavenly Jerusalem.  Corporate worship is far more than the gathering of like-minded individuals to sing some tunes and talk about Jesus.  Instead, it is the intrusion of heaven here-and-now.  The more we allow ourselves to enter into this reality, the more we are remade, the more we appreciate the riches of Christ, and the more we’ll be drawn back.  So come all who are weary and heavy laden and He…. He alone will give you eternal rest.

Jesus Christ has utterly destroyed your ultimate problem and given you a kingdom that cannot be shaken.  Such that Paul can say, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed” (Romans 8:18). 

~Luke Yeager