Why Write…?
Those of you who have read anything I have posted recently, or have had the unfotunate priviledge of talking to me or hearing me speak recently, may have noticed a consistent theme arising: that of grief, mourning and suffering. More specifically how these are acts and responses of worship and devotion that are beautifully true to our Father. Furthermore that they are not accidents of fate, a sign of divine displeasure (neccesarily) or of divine neglect, but rather the purposeful use of sons and daughters by a loving merciful father. For as the Father sent Jesus, so he sends us: blood and all.
My reasons for writing are twofold.
Firstly: I write because this is what God is teaching me; what he is impressing upon my own heart. Whether for the reason that I should help show others these glorious truths or that I should embody them myself I am still uncertain. Though I suspect both to be the case.
Secondly: I write because I am convinced that an incomplete, diluted theology of lament and suffering will leave us with an incomplete, diluted conception of God’s purposes for the church.
I have been for some time thinking about the next instalment in the series, which will be on the subject of ‘Joy, Suffering and Lament.’ I have been thinking about how we can fuse and hold in tension the truths of heart-breaking mourning and inexpressable joy. How the examples of suffering, the exhortation to weeing and the command to rejoicing in all things intertwine.
Hopefully a post will be coming soon. But until then I will leave you with what God has impressed upon me. Oh that we would be a generation characterised by unspeakable devotion to the Risen Lamb, that we would be those who do not love our lives so much as to shrink from death but who overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word our testimony, in word and action.
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