Desperate Joy

  One of the most beautiful stories in all of literature is the parable Jesus told of the Prodigal Son.  As the story goes, a man had two sons and one day the younger decides that he has had enough of living under his dad's roof.  He demands his inheritance from his father, which he gladly gives him, and then he wanders the world, living a life of pleasure.  Before too long the money evaporates and with it his friends and the good times.  The young man ends up feeding swine, which you can imagine how a Jew might feel about that, and he was so hungry that he was considering eating the slop he was giving to the pigs.  At that rock bottom moment, he came to his senses and said to himself, "The slaves in my father's house wear nicer clothes and eat better food than I am right now.  I'm going to go back home and beg my father to make me a slave!" He returns home to find his father anxiously waiting for him, and as soon as he saw him in the distance, he ra...

  God's love is the only love that can bring the dead back to life.  It reaches down into the darkest, dirtiest depths and pulls out the most wretched of us and makes us into kings and queens.  God's love finds us in our tombs and moves us into paradise.  He reaches out to us when we are nothing more than broken vessels of clay and makes us into vessels of honor suitable to serve in his palace. Last time we began to look at Ezekiel 16 where we find a beautiful parable in which God describes in vivid imagery his relationship with Israel.   God's intention is for our bodies and sexuality to be a symbol of his eternal covenantal love that he has with Israel and the church (see Ephesians 5).   As we look at Ezekiel, we are finding what this means in practical ways.   We looked at verses 3-6 in the last post, this time we will examine verses 6-10. Ezekiel 16:6-10 "6. And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee...

  We live in a disposable culture. We buy things, use them up and then throw them away. We demand immediate gratification. We get bored and want to be entertained. We lose interest in our gadgets and buy new ones. Buy, consume, throw away and repeat. That is the American way, it seems. It is unfortunate that too many of us carry this same attitude into our relationships. We become bored with one spouse and want to trade them in for the newer model. In Matthew 19 we find some of the clearest teaching on marriage that came from Jesus, "4. And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, 5.   And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? 6.   Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." (Matthew 19:4-6) We looked at this passage in the last b...