OVERFLOWING LIFE

“But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”  (Titus 3:4-7)

We fence God in by the boundaries of our experience. "How much do Daddy and Mommy love you?" we ask a three-year-old; and the child stretches baby arms to their limit while answering happily, "This much!"  Yes, indeed -- and vastly more.  But a child's capacity to perceive and to describe is limited by the length of his arms and the measure of his experience.

So it is with our expectations when we acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives.  After all, we have so little basis for comparison.  Our secular culture promises extravagant possibilities from miracle drugs, or from investments, or from the lottery genie that may drive to our address.  We evaluate such problems cautiously, as we should; and then we recognize, with pain, that we need much more than that, and we want much more.  Something deep within insists that life ought to hold more.  But we rarely realize that the "much more," the overflowing life we desire, awaits us in Jesus Christ.  We think He is a membership to be joined, a cause to which we enlist, a doctrine to which we will subscribe.  We are slow to understand that He is a King in whom all of life finds a new center and a new circumference, new time and new eternity.

-- J. Ellsworth Kalas in “New Testament Stories from the Back Side”


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