Skip to main content

Faith when life is hostile

A while back I watched a movie called Hostiles. It is a western drama which centres around a battle-hardened US officer Captain Joseph (Bale). He has been ordered to take his mortal enemy, the Shayenne war chief, Yellow Hawk and his family back to their tribal lands in Montana.  The whole journey is full of suffering, bloodshed, and death. But in the middle of these horrific scenes are some revealing conversations.  

Among the people in this afflicted group is a stricken widow, Rosalie Quaid who has just seen her family massacred in a raid. In a brief pause of the terror around them, Mrs Quaid sees Captain Joseph reading the Bible. So she asks him: “Do you believe in the Lord, Joseph?” The Captain responds: "Yes, I do. But he’s been blind to what’s going on out here for a long time". To which Mrs Quaid replies, “I can see what you mean”. 


As I watched that I thought to myself, this is how many of us live. We believe in God, but we think he does not see us. He is not interested! And so, what we do, is what Captain Joseph does in the film. He relies on his inner strength. His hero is Julius Caesar. The bravest man he knows  The true Christian does not live like that. We do not draw strength from ourselves, but from Him who bleeds grace for us. And we draw this strength by faith. 

The French divine Mestrezat says: “Faith is the hand by which we lay hold of Jesus. By faith, we are not only permitted to put the finger into the print of the nails, and to thrust the hand into His side, but the very soul finds refuge in His wounds”.  True faith in Jesus is not merely believing in God or having evidence that He really has died for us, it is to find refugee in His death for us! True faith is not one off. It is growing in finding strength beneath that cross of shame. It is trusting that Jesus carries the scars of grace for me. 

And because He carries those scars, He is not blind to my situation. So, I must go to Him. I will lean on His grace for my situation.  I will pursue Jesus in my prayers.  I will keep focusing on Him. I will let my troubles escort me deeper into His presence!  If you are follower of Jesus, keep going to Him in prayer. You may not get what you want but you will get more of Him than you have ever known. And in the end that is what we really need. Problems always come and go. But to have more of Jesus, Oh, what a priceless treasure! To have Jesus is to have Him carrying our every burden for us!  May the Lord help each one of us to have complete faith in the grace of Jesus in our desperate situations, especially during the current Coronavirus epidemic!

Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2020
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pornography as Occultism

There is a kind of helplessness that a man engaged in pornography exhibits. He often speaks of it in terms of a “struggle” or an “addiction.” Now both of those terms are accurate, I believe, but they distance a person from his sin in a soul-decaying manner. Pornography is not just an addiction; it is occultism. The man who sits upstairs viewing pornography while his wife chauffeurs the kids to soccer practice is not some unusual “pervert”; he is (like his forefather Adam) seeking the mystery of the universe apart from Christ. That’s the reason the one picture, stored in his memory, of that naked woman will never be enough for him. He will never be able to be satisfied because he will never be able to get an image naked enough. I say pornography is occultism because I believe the draw toward it is more than biological (though that is strong). The satanic powers understand that “the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Cor. 6:18). They understand that the pornographic ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

The Wound of Sin

Bless the Lord, O my soul, that when you were playing with the bait, unaware of the hook like so many others, He opened your eyes—allowing you to see your folly and danger so that you might flee from it. And now, be careful that you do not grasp at any of the devil's temptations, lest he ensnare you with his hook. For though you may be restored by grace, it will not be without a wound—just as a fish sometimes escapes the hook but swims away injured. That wound may bring sorrow and take long to heal. And you have already known this to be true. THOMAS BOSTON  ( Source : The Art of Man-Fishing) A sobering truth from Thomas Boston. Sin always damages. God always restores His children when we fall but it is never without the wounds. We often carry the scars of our sins. This is another m reason for us to avoid sin altogether. Sometimes in our presumption of His grace, we tend to be antinomian. Boston is warning that such an attitude is foolish since sin always damages. It always leaves ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Pussy Riot as the Messenger

I have always thought there was something uneasy, or something not quite right about Pussy Riot and the western media reaction to it. It was not just the desecration of the Orthodox Church Cathedral. I could not placed my finger on it until I read this assessment by Vadim Nikitin : How many fans of Pussy Riot’s zany “punk prayer” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s erudite and moving closing statement were equally thrilled by her participation, naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008? That performance, by the radical art group Voina (Russian for “war”), was meant to illustrate how Russians were abused by their government. Voina had previously set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge. Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere, not just in authoritarian Russia. But Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democrac...
2 comments
KEEP READING →