A Thought For The Week Of October 2, 2017

"We thought we would have to serve out our death sentences right then and there. As a result, we realized that we could no longer rely on ourselves and that we must trust solely in God, who possesses the power to raise the dead." (2 Corinthians 1:9, The Voice) Why rely on God? It sounds like a simple enough question for a person of faith to answer, but of course a person of faith is just a person, and like all people, those of faith are subject to doubt and temptation and one of the greatest of all temptations is to create our own gods - and even to start to see ourselves as gods (although we may not actually say that.) We want to be self-reliant; we want to believe that we can handle pretty much anything that life might throw at us and that we don't need any help - not even from God. We want to be independent, rather than to ackowledge our ultimate dependence on God. And, yes, people of faith are as guilty of any of those things as anyone else. So, what's the answer? What snaps us back into reality? As uncomfortable as it may seem - I think it's probably death; or, at least, it's our realization of our own mortality. Once we've faced that reality we're knocked off our pedestals, so to speak. Acknowledging and facing the reality of eventual death is the great equalizer of the human family - we're all going to die and there isn't a blessed thing that any of us can do about that. None of us are any better than anyone else in that regard. Certainly, none of us are gods. So we depend on God whether we want to or not. Why? Because, in the end, God is the only one who can defeat death. Not us. God demonstrated that by the resurrection of Jesus. We cannot rely on ourselves if we're being honest, because we cannot defeat death - the one thing that has power over everyone. Only God can do that. And, as Paul writes, "... we ... rely not on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead." God overcomes all the things that we cannot overcome - even death itself.