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Possessing Our Posessions

by Terry Barlow
12/23/14
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   The House of Jacob shall possess their possessions ," said the prophet Obadiah. Sounds almost like a contradiction in terms. How can you go on to possess what you already possess? By actually experiencing it firsthand. By appropriating it into our lives in a practical way.

 This can be well illustrated by our experience with our new smart phone, which is continually outsmarting us. There are so many of its functions that we are not yet utilizing. As a consequence we are laboriously contending with a host of tasks on a daily basis which the smart phone, given the chance, could make surprisingly easy for us, and will one day. We own the phone, but have not yet personally owned or laid claim to all of its many features and facets.

  It felt like such a disaster the day our first smart phone clattered to the pavement outside our home and refused to work ever again. But the new one that replaced it came with so many luxurious options and "bells and whistles" at no extra cost, that it exposed its predecessor for the dinosaur that it was! So the so-called disaster turned out to be providential after all.

 Thus it is too with all that was won for us by Jesus Christ's finished work on the cross some 2000 years ago. Though it happened long ago and seemed a disaster to the disciples at the time, we are only now beginning to catch up to it in the sense of starting to understand and tap into all of its treasure and significance. The new covenant, sealed with the blood of the death of Jesus,  so superabundantly replaces and fulfills the old (in which innocent, unblemished animals had to bleed and die) that, though we grow progressively in our grasp of it, it will probably always seem like we are just skimming the surface of the immensity of what has been accomplished for us!

 As it is with the physical human body, so it is with the human spirit even when illuminated by the Holy Sprit, our reach will exceed our grasp.....