THE EXPERIENTIAL EASTER

A personal miracle of Grace

“And when I think that God, His Son not sparing, sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in. That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing, He bled and died to take away my sin” ¹

These lyrics indelibly mark a moment in my life when I was permanently changed, essentially altered by an outside power far greater than anything I could have ever possibly imagined or created on my own. That power was and is Love…true, perfect, gracious, merciful Love, a Love that comes only from the one being in existence who IS Love.

I was walking a very dark path, living for myself, and driving nearly everyone in my life away through my selfish, uncontrolled debauchery.  Constantly intoxicated and possessed by wandering eyes and insatiable lust, I had trashed my marriage and permanently destroyed any chance of a meaningful relationship with my firstborn daughter. Yet despite this, I pridefully continued in my ways, using people to fulfill my desires and perceived needs without any thought for what damage I was doing to them and their lives.

Then, one Spring evening around Eastertime 1987, I was driving alone to my home in Ontario, CA, from a hospital in Corona, where I’d visited a girl who had just had one of her fallopian tubes removed, along with the ectopic baby I’d planted within her in one of my many moments of drunken selfishness.

The drive was long, and the night was dark, with just enough moonlight to illuminate the ground fog rising from the fields and farmlands around me, just high enough to wisp over the hood of my car and across the windshield. A surreal environment wherein I became lost in self-examination and reflection on the numerous ways I had hurt so many others.

Within this reflection I was confronted by the reality that this young woman had been hospitalized, that she had just undergone life-altering surgery, and that a precious baby’s life was lost solely because of my selfish choices.  I was completely overwhelmed by the realization of how low I’d sunk, and by a profound sense of guilt and regret. I was utterly bankrupt; morally, spiritually, bankrupt.

Arriving home in a dazed swirl of thoughts and emotions, I walked into my bedroom and looked up for the first time in years at a picture of Jesus that had followed me everywhere I’d lived since I was a kid. Having been raised going to church, hanging that picture up wherever I lived just seemed like the right thing to do, but in reality, it was little more than a decoration…until that moment.

As soon as I looked at that picture, my knees buckled and I collapsed onto the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, inconsolably.  It was then that I heard it, an inaudible voice, not in my ears, but in my soul; the strong, clear, gentle, Fatherly voice of my Creator asking this very simple yet profoundly direct and powerful question, “Have you had enough?”  Along with these words which I can never forget, came a vision, not seen with my eyes, but again in my soul; a vision of The Father’s strong hand reaching down not to punish me, but to lift me to my feet.

I was completely overcome by the fact that, after everything I had done to Him, after consciously deciding to ignore His warnings, choosing to pursue my pride-filled, lust-fueled desires knowing it was wrong, that after hurting Him, His Son, and everyone He had given into my life, He would still be willing to forgive me and welcome me back into His arms was more than I could handle and I knew in that instant, that I’d been changed!

Like the old Jesus picture on the wall, I had kept on my nightstand for years an old Lutheran hymnal that had belonged to my paternal grandmother and, for reasons I can still only imagine, I reached out, picked up that book and noticed for the first time a single, loose page sticking out; why had I never seen this before?  I pulled out the page and found it was the hymn, ‘How Great Thou Art’; a very familiar song that I’d heard my mom sing around the house countless times when I was growing up but which, until then, had meant little to me.

Compelled by something I can neither explain nor comprehend, I started singing, alone in my apartment I worshiped and prayed for the first time in many years. And when I sang these words it all became real; “And when I think that God, His Son not sparing, sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in. That on the cross, MY burden gladly bearing, He bled and died to take away MY sin”.  At this I cried again, but no longer from grief and regret, but rather from indescribable relief! Then as if it couldn’t get any better, the next verse finished me off, “When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation and take me home, what joy shall fill my heart! Then I shall bow, in humble adoration, and there proclaim, my God, how great Thou art!”  Even as I write this today, nearly four decades later, I can’t read those words without having to fight back tears!

About three months after that moment when God saved me from self-destruction, He introduced me to the most amazing and beautiful woman!  Michele had also been recently saved by God and was struggling as a single mom to raise her daughter in the Faith and away from the abusive home and marriage they had escaped about a year earlier, a marriage polluted by drugs, abuse, and chronic infidelity.

Michele’s precious heart and natural beauty inside and outside so affected me, that I felt compelled to confess my past to her after only a couple dates. I knew she was a remarkably special woman, and I knew that she deserved to know who I was before we got any closer; I didn’t want to hurt her too.  Yet, although my sins were so much like those she had fled, she lovingly embraced me and our relationship which grew very quickly into a love unlike anything either of us ever thought possible!

Roughly ten months later, nearly a year after my life changing experience with God, we married and now some 35+ years, 6 kids and 6 grandkids later, I’m still blown away by God’s Grace!  Seriously, I had selfishly thrown away a marriage and a daughter, but He gave me a second chance! Not as a replacement of course (people are never replaceable), but rather as evidence of His forgiveness, a forgiveness so pure and unconditional that He would trust me to care for a broken mother and her daughter wounded by the sins of another man, which were far too similar to my own!

This is the experiential Easter! A perfect gift of perfect Grace and Forgiveness. A forgiveness so perfect and powerful that our deepest darkest sins cannot stand against it, all worked out through the sacrifice and resurrection of the perfect Son, by the Will and Love of the perfect Father.

Most of us believe that people cannot change, and while that is essentially true, the greater truth is that God can and does change people, I am living proof of that!  So, my hope and prayer in sharing this is that all who hear His name will also hear His voice like I did, and experience the incomparable, perfect, life-changing Grace of Easter!

PDS - Easter 2023

Edmond, Oklahoma

 ¹ From “How Great Thou Art", a Christian hymn based on an original Swedish hymn entitled "O Store Gud" written in 1885 by Carl Boberg (1859–1940)

'A God Kind of Love' by Noah Storkson (age 14)

Some people see God in beaches and sunsets, others in mountains and you have to say that that is amazing. But sometimes we have to step back and really discover how great He and His love for us is and how small we, and our problems, are.  

If you look at a picture of Earth you realize that we are pretty small. Now let’s take a few more steps back (more like quadrillions and quadrillions of steps) and take a picture of our galaxy. If you look at our galaxy and ask, “Where’s our solar system?” The answer would be, “You can’t see it!” Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years in diameter, that’s 590,000,000,000,000 miles, or 3 quadrillion 115 trillion 200 billion feet! Now do you feel small?

How about when I say that we don’t even know how big the universe is? Scientists refer to the studied universe as the known universe, because every time we make a bigger telescope we find out that the universe is bigger than we thought it was. We can see God’s hand all over it, it is beautiful! God can hold the entire universe in His hand, Isaiah 40:12 says:  “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, or with the breadth of His hand marked off the heavens?” I bet that if you looked at the universe either the Milky Way galaxy wouldn’t be visible, or it would be a speck.

The Milky Way galaxy is a spiral shape; we are between two arms towards the outer part of the galaxy, so we are in the perfect position to study the universe. Science is the study of God’s creation so we can worship him better, and God gave us this huge universe (yet small compared to him) so we can see and learn about his beautiful and awesome power. Luke 10:17 says: the seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name”. So even the demons are smart enough to fear God.

If God can hold the universe in His hand, then what are we compared to Him? Yet God still loves us and lowered His Son down to our level and allowed Him to be killed by us and for our sins, and whenever a single one of us develops a relationship with Him He throws a big party in heaven just because that one, tiny person is saved, even though He doesn’t need to. We have no effect on Him, He could’ve just given up on us stubborn humans before the flood, but He loves us so much that He made a way for us sinful, tiny, particles to have eternal life with Him, by having His Son pay the price of our sin, so we don’t have to.

Most of us know that Jesus died on the cross for us, but He didn’t simply die for our sins, He was tortured for our sins. He was beaten, mocked, and flogged severely with whips that had four to ten lashes with balls on the end, and attached to those balls were spikes; it is also possible that those spikes had barbs on them. Those lashes cut Him severely. The spikes dug into His tissue and muscles, some of His internal organs were exposed by the time they were done with Him. He received nothing to ease the pain, and every time his body tried to pass out they woke him up. This went on for hours before they actually hung Him on the cross. When they did hang Him on the cross, they made Him carry that extremely heavy cross up a hill, where they nailed Him to the cross (and those nails were not little finishing nails, they were short steaks). On the top of the cross they hung a sign which read in three different languages “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews.”   To hold the cross upright, they pulled the top up by rope, and the bottom would drop into a hole, the force of it would have jerked Him and so the nails tore even more of the flesh in His wrists and feet. God turned his back on his own son. Then, they stabbed Him with a spear. The sinners on either side of him endured less torture.

When Jesus died, the temple curtain was torn in two, and there was an earthquake. Many bodies of holy people were raised to life, and many people saw them afterwards. Some of the people that saw this shouted: “Surely He was the Son of God!” Three days later Jesus Himself rose from the dead.

God did all of this for us, even though we are so tiny and we have no effect on Him, He simply loves us. That is a God kind of Love.

Marley and His Message to Scrooge by R.C. Sproul

It's far too easy to become jaded by all the commercialism and crowds during the Christmas Season. Several years ago, a friend shared this brief article with us and it has helped each year to re-focus our hearts onto the true gift of the holiday.

I sincerely hope you find this very special message enlightening for both your mind and spirit. And, in sending this post, I am wishing you a truly Blessed and Joy-Filled Christmas season!

Marley and His Message to Scrooge

by R.C. Sproul
 

Bah! Humbug!” These two words are instantly associated with Charles Dickens’ immortal fictional anti-hero, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge was the prototype of the Grinch who stole Christmas, the paradigm of all men cynical.

We all recognize that Ebenezer Scrooge was a mean person - stingy, insensitive, selfish, and unkind. What we often miss in our understanding of his character is that he was preeminently profane. “Bah! Humbug!” was his Victorian use of profanity.

Not that any modern editor would feel the need to delete Scrooge’s expletives. His language is not the standard currency of cursing. But it was profane in that Scrooge demeaned what was holy. He trampled on the sanctity of Christmas. He despised the sacred. He was cynical toward the sublime.
Christmas is a holiday, indeed the world’s most joyous holiday. It is called a “holiday” because the day is holy. It is a day when businesses close, when families gather, when churches are filled, and when soldiers put down their guns for a 24-hour truce. It is a day that differs from every other day.
Every generation has its abundance of Scrooges. The church is full of them. We hear endless complaints of commercialism. We are constantly told to put Christ back into Christmas. We hear that the tradition of Santa Claus is a sacrilege. We listen to those acquainted with history murmur that Christmas isn’t biblical. The Church invented Christmas to compete with the ancient Roman festival honoring the bull-god Mithras, the nay-sayers complain. Christmas? A mere capitulation to paganism.

And so we rain on Jesus’ parade and assume an Olympian detachment from the joyous holiday. All this carping is but a modern dose of Scroogeism, our own sanctimonious profanation of the holy.
Sure, Christmas is a time of commerce. The department stores are decorated to the hilt, the ad pages of the newspapers swell in size, and we tick off the number of shopping days left until Christmas. But why all the commerce? The high degree of commerce at Christmas is driven by one thing: the buying of gifts for others. To present our friends and families with gifts is not an ugly, ignoble vice. It incarnates the amorphous “spirit of Christmas.” The tradition rests ultimately on the supreme gift God has given the world. God so loved the world, the Bible says, that He gave His only begotten Son. The giving of gifts is a marvelous response to the receiving of such a gift. For one day a year at least, we taste the sweetness inherent in the truth that it is more blessed to give than to receive.

What about putting Christ back into Christmas? It is simply not necessary. Christ has never left Christmas. “Jingle Bells” will never replace “Silent Night.” Our holiday once known as Thanksgiving is rapidly becoming known simply as “Turkey Day.” But Christmas is still called Christmas. It is not called “Gift Day.” Christ is still in Christmas, and for one brief season the secular world broadcasts the message of Christ over every radio station and television channel in the land. Never does the church get as much free air time as during the Christmas season.

Not only music but the visual arts are present in abundance, bearing testimony to the historic significance of the birth of Jesus. Christmas displays all remind the world of the sacred Incarnation.
Doesn’t Santa Claus paganize or at least trivialize Christmas? He’s a myth, and his very mythology casts a shadow over the sober historical reality of Jesus. Not at all. Myths are not necessarily bad or harmful. Every society creates myths. They are a peculiar art form invented usually to convey a message that is deemed important by the people. When a myth is passed off as real history, that is fraud. But when it serves a different purpose it can be healthy and virtuous. Kris Kringle is a mythical hero, not a villain. He is pure fiction — but a fiction used to illustrate a glorious truth.

What about the historical origins of Christmas as a substitute for a pagan festival? I can only say, good for the early Christians who had the wisdom to flee from Mithras and direct their zeal to the celebration of the birth of Christ. Who associates Christmas today with Mithras? No one calls it “Mithrasmas.”

We celebrate Christmas because we cannot eradicate from our consciousness our profound awareness of the difference between the sacred and the profane. Man, in the generic sense, has an incurable propensity for marking sacred space and sacred time. When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, the ground that was previously common suddenly became uncommon. It was now holy ground - sacred space. When Jacob awoke from his midnight vision of the presence of God, he anointed with oil the rock upon which he had rested his head. It was sacred space.

When God touches earth, the place is holy. When God appears in history, the time is holy. There was never a more holy place than the city of Bethlehem, where the Word became flesh. There was never a more holy time than Christmas morning when Emmanuel was born. Christmas is a holiday. It is the holiest of holy days. We must heed the warning of Jacob Marley: “Don’t be a Scrooge” at Christmas.