God’s own
Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, was subjected to the heinous, and we are warned by
the Lord, himself, that we will suffer the same persecution of soul — no servant
is greater or more privileged than their master.
But through the
trials of life that will swallow our souls whole, we do have the divine and
magnificent empathy of the Lord; an identification of his suffering in ours.
God’s disciples are
not theology students or missions graduates or people with a head full of
jargon. God’s disciples are those who have experienced something of their Lord.
Their suffering has some impression of their Lord’s suffering.
His Identification With
Ours; Ours With His
Another word for
empathy is identification. Our Lord identifies with us in our trials, just as
we, for perhaps the first time, more truly identify with him.
He suffered so much,
and, like very many traditions of sacrifice, we cannot fathom the enormity or
the range of the pain our Lord endured — for each one of his.
The Lord will not
allow us to be cast into the fire of our own incineration without due cause or true
hope or good destiny. God will sponge up every concept of ours that our
suffering is waste, and he will drench us with his very own perfections of
blessing.
It is for this that
he came into the world; to show the world how it should relate.
When we come around
to the idea of relating with our world in the mode of brotherly and sisterly
love — even to the point of sacrifice — then he has won the day for us.
Finally we are who
we are!
We were created to
be perfect, as the heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). It is God’s
intention that we be made perfect through the things we suffer. Only after
having passed through the fire, having become our very own burnt offering
so-to-speak, have we endured what is necessary for sinful humanity to endure in
order to identify with our crushed and risen Lord.
No servant deserves
better than their master. Our privilege is that we are not treated worse than
Jesus, for Jesus set the gold standard for suffering, and nobody can attain to
it. Yet, every martyr has died the same death. And every disciple is destined
to be tried and tested.
***
Our Lord identifies
with us in our trials, just as we, maybe for the first time, more truly
identify with him. This is no insignificant fact. Feel his identification of
empathy.
© 2015 S. J. Wickham.
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