Dear Parents and Friends of CCS,
I hope this edition of Parent News finds you walking closely with the Lord of Glory!
I have been struck this week with the faithfulness of God in shaping my response even when life is not exactly going as I have planned.
The sub-floor of this preferred response is found in 2 Cor. 5:17-18
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come. Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making His appeal through us.
We plead on Christ’s behalf, ‘Be reconciled to God.’ He made the One who knew no sin to become sin for us, so that in Him we may become the righteousness of God.”
Earlier in the chapter Paul had laid out the victory of a life lived in Christ over the death of the body, thereby acknowledging the difficulty of life in the world. And He has provided the way forward for us through the challenges of the world, so that as we live into that reconciliation we can be “sacred agents” on behalf of Christ in this world.
The basis for our victory is His victory over death. It is His Gospel of reconciliation with God that provides the necessary scaffolding for our own other-centered life in the world.
Sometimes we feel a bit hopeless, like there is no way we can figure out the complex questions of our life. And, actually, we are right. Our “old person” (our pre-salvation deadness that lingers in our physical bodies until we are translated to be with Jesus in eternity) can never make life work, at least for very long.
This is probably one reason older people experience depression with such frequency: they have run out of energy trying to force life to work, and they’re exhausted and sad at the prospect of their consistent failure to live with Christian victory in the questions that remain unanswered.
This is not true of everyone of course, but it does tend to haunt people who are thoughtful and serious about big life questions like “Why am I alive?” and “Is there a God?”
As the Scripture tells us again and again, the truth about who God is and what He has done for us indeed sets us free.
And that freedom from our inherited slavery to sin positions us to sustainably serve others even in a confusing, disorienting, postmodern and post-Christian landscape.
So let us affirm anew our intention, our commitment to surrender every single area of our lives to Jesus, to the fullest extent we possibly can.
This means every nook and cranny of our lives, the things we hold back from the Spirit’s gaze, the ugliest parts of our stories. Not morbidly finding issues that aren’t really there, but simply being honest with ourselves about all the false idols we have relied on to make our lives work.
Jesus is waiting with patient love and mercy, for us to acknowledge what we already know to be true: life on our own terms or centered on our own needs and desires, in the end is bankrupt, drawing on an account that literally has no funds.
May God richly bless our efforts to stop making efforts apart from His leading and power—and may Jesus be glorified in His/our victory.
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As we practice this with intentionality, we will find the bleakness that has become so familiar to us will recede into the background. As Jesus is lifted up, He will call people to Himself.
And that is well worth celebrating.
Now may God the Father, His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit who proceeds from them, receive all of the glory as we continue to move step by step toward becoming a truly extraordinary school, for the greater glory of God.
For CCS and the Kingdom,
Tom