In chess, when an opponent has cornered your king, to the point there is
no possible move without being taken by another piece, it is checkmate. You have lost the game, and the
acknowledgement of your loss is laying-down your king. It is this picture that enters my mind
whenever I think of Jesus’ followers placing the body of Jesus in Joseph of
Arimathea’s tomb…KING DOWN! This describes the message of a popular hymn in
many churches, Victory in Jesus:[1]
I heard an old, old story, how a Savior came from glory,
how he gave his life on Calvary to save a wretch like me;
I heard about his groaning, of his precious blood’s atoning,
then I repented of my sins and won the victory.
When you begin to parse the words from the hymn, groaning, blood, sins,
wretch, and envision Jesus’ last moments on Golgotha’s hill, there doesn’t seem
to be much “victory” in it. It reminds
me of Homer Rothrock, a member of a church I once served. Homer was suffering from a gastro-intestinal
block. He was in the hospital, in great
pain, waiting on the doctors to decide whether to operate. As
I stood next to my friend I asked him how it was going. He looked at me with weary eyes and
said: I’ll tell ya,
preacher; there ain’t much romance in it!
Thinking about Homer’s statement has always brought a smile for the way he
could maintain a sense of humor, even in the tough times. It also drives me to the issue of human pain
in life, and how going through a rough patch makes us put aside the mundane, in
favor of the grand.
Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis pushed us towards the grand and noble when
he wrote: Christianity, if
false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing
it cannot be is moderately important.
“Moderate” is the lukewarm word of Jesus’ message to the
church of Laodicea, that group of believers who were once white-hot for Jesus,
and had cooled-off, like lava from a vocanic erruption that loses its’ heat,
losing its’ ability to move, and eventually forming into a heap of hardened
slag…a small hill of moderate uselessness.
For a church, that is an epitaph of shame…once vital, we
cooled off and stopped where we were comfortable.
For You Today
Wall Street
marketing ideas would not include suffering, bleeding, and dying as a great
invitation to belong to anything. Yet,
this is precisely what Jesus said led to his victory, and sitting on Heaven’s
throne. And He invites everyone to join
him.
So, are you ready
to join King Down? Or stay with the Indifferent Slow Down Slag?
There
are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library. To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some
of these:
Game Over and After the Disaster and It’s Just a Job and Open Door Policy
[1] Images: via Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
[1] Eugene Bartlett ©1939
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