How can it be?

As I write these devotionals, schools are closed due to snow, and as usual there’s the ubiquitous radio phone-in about how we can’t cope with bad weather, and it seems to me they just run the tape from the last time there was bad weather – because people always say the same thing!

 

One response that’s easy to caricature goes something like:

 

“Children nowadays don’t know they’re born… They never closed schools when I were a lad. I had to walk five miles bear footed through drifts of snow twenty feet deep and then I knew I’d get twenty lashes of the cane when I got there...”

 

But in the ensuing argument in the end it often seems that the different generations just don’t get each other.

 

That is not how it should be if we are in Christ. 

 

I have something of a running joke with the organists at our 4:30 service about my lack of knowledge of hymns. It’s not a deliberate gap in my knowledge it’s just I never went to Church until I was 19 and most of the music I have experienced has been contemporary in style.

 

This week (to develop my education) I want us to reflect on words from the great hymns to inspire us and fill us with fire in our walk with Jesus…

 

Today a verse from Charles Wesley’s “And Can it Be?”

 

And can it be that I should gain
An interest in the Saviour’s blood?
Died He for me, who caused His pain—
For me, who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be,
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me? (repeat)

Paul writes, in Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

 

Wesley asked How can it be? This morning, place yourself in that verse and remember that even though your sin put Jesus on the cross, he chose to die there for you. Hallelujah!

 

David Brown