meditations for an everyday relationship with Jesus

No righteous man

Ecclesiastes 7:19-20 Wisdom makes the wise man stronger than ten rulers of a city. There is certainly no righteous man on the earth who does good and never sins.

Give it up to King Solomon who, in his wisdom, both reassures us of the supernatural strength of the spirit and impresses upon us the practical nature and the inherent shortcomings of the flesh.

I once thought Solomon a very wise cynic, but no longer. I am now confident that he saw with a greater clarity the reality of our dichotomy flesh and spirit and the futile existence of life without God, without a purpose higher than our own.

There simply must be more to us than us. Our efforts are futile without hope and remarkably short-lived without an eye on the eternal.

Once useless, now useful

Philemon 1:8 –12 For this reason, although I have great boldness in Christ to command you to do what is right, I appeal, instead, on the basis of love. I, Paul, as an elderly man and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus, appeal to you for my child, whom I fathered while in chains Onesimus. Once he was useless to you, but now he is useful to both you and me.

I am sending him a part of myself back to you.

Paul intercedes for Onesimus, the slave and property of Philemon, who has run away and has been given asylum. Paul not only authors the letter, but was the one providing a safe haven.

Paul uses his considerable creditability to persuade Philamon to no only accept his slave back but to elevate him as a brother in Christ. Paul suggests he would love to keep Onesimus as his own, a son, but that to make things right he must return and make amends.

Paul equates usefulness in this context not with an ability to serve as a slave in the secular sense (which he considers useless in the context as well), but to serve and come alongside as a brother in Christ … more or less a peer.

For in Christ slaves are leaders and leaders but slaves.