Today’s Our Daily Bread Bible verses have some particular relevance to my life and certainly relevant to all of ours.
Romans 13:10-14King James Version (KJV)
10 Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
11 And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.
12 The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.
13 Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying.
14 But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.
When I was sixteen, I survived a bit of teenage automotive foolishness, a desire to end my life which was aborted at the last second and I believe only with the help of divine intervention, that not only cemented a belief in God for me, but also the knowledge that God still acts and intervenes in the present day world. He didn’t just wind it up and let it go to it’s own undoing. But I had a hard time envisioning God as a loving God, else why would my life be so miserable? Rather, I had envisioned him more like the God in a video game that throws lightning bolts at running people, and indeed I got a lightning bolt of my own via a television antenna downlead.
My experience in solitary confinement changed that view. God telling me I am responsible for the suffering I had caused. Then lifting the burden I had been carrying for so many years. Still, there are times I feel totally in the inadequate to the task of being his subject. There are moments of doubt and even though the flesh is marginally functional these days, there is still the desire to, as the King James English puts it, fulfil the lusts thereof.
I’d like to belief that our salvation is in fact nearer than we believed, but this was written two millennia ago and we’re not there yet so clearly this may be a very long trudge through life.