Christian Living

---

Larry Lilly's Letter Thursday February 22, 2007

Sometimes I give in and read some of the goofy fwds that come my way. I know many people who can't think of an original word who spend the days simply communicating vacuous drivel via the Ethernet. Perhaps my old noggin is equally vacuous for wasting time looking at any of such. Yet, in a moment of extreme fatigue I caved in and behold, thunder accompanied with appropriate flashes of lightning and the following tid bit leaped off the page. It is from a child and the scrawl shows his age to be around eight or nine, or if it improves much like that of a well known Internet preacher of sixty five.

"Dear God,

If you give me a genie lamp like Alladin I will give you anything you want except my money or my chess set.

Raphael."

In Spurgeonese, Me thinks the lad is on his way to being a Baptist.

I have made note of the gist of modern 'Christian' literature which insists that we are more than okay if we just give the Lord the part of us that we really don't use anyway. I made light of the fact that I in my holiness have given up snow for Lent. We too often get the giving up something confused with the giving ourselves to the Lord. Paul wrote about a group of Christians who became noted, still are, due to the fact stated in 2 Corinthians 8:5

"And this they did, not as we hoped, but first gave their own selves to the Lord, and unto us by the will of God."

Most of us have not had the hammer if you will put down on the fact of the insistence of Christ that we deny ourselves and take up our cross daily and follow Him. This choice from the lips of Christ is not all that hard to do in the heat of the revival sermon, the pressure of the invitation, or the emotional high of a special meeting. The doing of the heated choice takes on a different slant when we realize that the denial, the lifting up of the cross each day, day after day after day after week after week ad infinitum.

I heard a gifted preacher say "It's not the mountain ahead that creates the problems, but the pebble in your shoe that hinders your progress." He is right. Through the grace of Christ we can carry the cross, we can deny ourselves, but when we let a little bit of our self preservation instinct creep in, we start to chafe under the weight of the cross and then we let another little thing in, and it becomes very important to us and boom, we are in all sorts of torment, due to the grain of sand just where the cross touches. The daily cross will always touch just where the grain of self is hiding.

A friend of mine is doing much better than in year's gone bye, yet he is chafing and that seriously under the daily cross. He doesn't go off on two week drunks anymore. He does drink a few at home, and leaves the extra for his little wife who cannot take the temptation and stays in a drunken stupor. Why, because my friend has told the Lord, 'Save me from hell and I will give you anything, except my few beers, I must have them and to hell with the little addicted wife.'

The 'excepts' of our cross bearing life seem cute when read from the pen of a child, they are not cute in the real world. Only God knows the brutal pain that weak folks suffer due to the selfishness of supposedly stronger ones who will not get off the 'excepts.'

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2007 Use with credit

---

PLEASE ENCOURAGE AUTHOR BELOW LEAVE COMMENT ON ARTICLE