Obedience on the hardest days
For some saints, in some seasons, the spiritual darkness can rest so thick and last so long that standard patterns of obedience begin to feel futile. We’ve read and prayed and fought temptation for weeks or months or maybe years. But now, perhaps, we wonder what’s the point. Why read when little changes? Why pray when God seems silent? Why obey in the lonely dark when no one seems to see or care? The days have been sunless for so long; why live as if the sky will soon turn bright? Not all of God’s people have known such seasons. But for those who have, or will, God has not left us friendless. Here in the dark, a brother walks before us, his day far blacker than ours, his obedience a torch on the road ahead. His story occurs on Good Friday, dark Friday, and dead Friday. For some time, he had let his hope take flight, daring to believe he had seen, in Jesus, his own Messiah’s face. But then Friday came, and he watched that face drain into grey; he saw his Lord hang limp upon the cross. A...