The church where I was married to my husband of thirty-three years called a new pastor mere months before our wedding, which had been scheduled for over a year. He required us to attend premarital counseling sessions with him before he performed our ceremony. We met with him over the course of a month, completing the requested compatibility profile questionnaires prior to our final meeting. He barely knew our community and certainly not us or our families, yet he felt compelled to tell us only weeks before our vows that judging from our scores and the fact that we were both firstborn, he did not find us well suited for one another. We should have found another minister then and there. Instead, we determined to prove him wrong.
Paul and I met in that church. I was friends with his younger sisters before I knew him. He and I were the first to arrive to the college and careers Sunday school class each week of the summer after I graduated high school so we talked sometimes half an hour before anyone else showed up. My parents were the teachers and fortunately for me, he is always early. I left for college in the fall and wasn’t home again until Christmas. I wasn’t entirely aware of the bond forming between us until a little before midnight on New Years Eve. My parents hosted a party for our class that was scheduled to last through breakfast and as Paul left with a few others for a church league basketball game, I called from the front porch, “See you when you get back.” He shared with me much later that it seemed I was talking directly to him so he decided to ask me out.
We’ve talked often about how we nearly missed each other. My family moved to the church the summer before my senior year. When I was a freshman in college, he was a senior, pursuing medical school. He was accepted to one school but chose to wait for his acceptance to another the following year. It was during that second semester after our first date that we wrote to each other. It started innocently enough- a thank you note for my dinner and movie. He had called not long before his shift at work ended on the night before I left for school. My mom answered the phone. She knew his voice. He asked if he could speak with me and if he asked me to dinner and a movie, did she think I’d accept? She hurried to pass me the phone- the kind mounted on the kitchen wall and connected by a long coiled cord. She wasn’t sure how to answer his directness.
Neither was I by the end of our second date when he confessed he knew I was the one for him but that since I was younger, it was alright if I needed a little time. His purposeful way has become one of his most endearing features in all of our years together. More than once, he has been my strength, standing in the gap for me, speaking up for and protecting me and our children as God intended a husband to stand. We married when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-four. We have weathered our share of ups and downs in our nearly four decades together and we have seen the hand of God at every turn, drawing us ever toward Himself and always toward each other.
What some would call coincidence or fate, I call Providence. You and I have never been anywhere too far for God to reach. The Psalmist penned, “Is there any place I can go to avoid your Spirit? to be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute— you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!” It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.” (Psalms 139:7-12 MSG
https://bible.com/bible/97/psa.139.7-12.MSG)
“I’m an open book to you; even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking.
You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight.
You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence.
I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too— your reassuring presence, coming and going.
This is too much, too wonderful— I can’t take it all in!”
Psalms 139:1-6 MSG
https://bible.com/bible/97/psa.139.1-6.MSG
Too much indeed. Some cringe at the thought but to me, God’s personal knowledge of me and presence with me is an inestimable gift. He provides in Himself a way for me to be both fully known and fully loved. In Jesus, I am a new creation. He has freed me from the power and penalty of sin. Sin’s penalty He bore on the cross. By His Spirit alive in me, I walk by faith. Surrendering daily to His will, I am no longer controlled by my own desires.
Why would I despise so great a gift?
“So tell me, what benefit ensued from doing those things that you’re now ashamed of?
It left you with nothing but a legacy of shame and death.
But now, as God’s loving servants, you live in joyous freedom from the power of sin.
So consider the benefits you now enjoy—you are brought deeper into the experience of true holiness that ends with eternal life!
For sin’s meager wages is death, but God’s lavish gift is life eternal, found in your union with our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One.”
Romans 6:21-23 TPT
https://bible.com/bible/1849/rom.6.21-23.TPT
“There is salvation in no one else! God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.”
Peter and John were arrested for continuing to preach the resurrection of Jesus. They had everyone’s attention because a certain man, lame from birth, was now walking and leaping and praising God. No one, including the religious leaders could deny the miracle. The man had sat daily begging at the temple gate for nearly forty years. He was a permanent fixture, an expected part of the temple facade, until Peter and John recognized his faith to be healed. The religious leaders had to be careful. They threatened the disciples repeatedly and released them, fearing the reaction of all who had witnessed the miracle, but the followers of the Way would not be silenced so easily!
“When the believers heard their report, they raised their voices in unity and prayed, “Lord Yahweh, you are the Lord of all! You created the universe—the earth, the sky, the sea, and everything that is in them.
And you spoke by the Holy Spirit through your servant David, our forefather, saying: ‘How dare the nations plan a rebellion, ranting and raging against the Lord Most High? Their foolish plots are futile!
Look at how the kings of the earth take their stand, with the rulers scheming and conspiring together against God and his anointed Messiah!’
They did to him all that your purpose and will had determined, according to the destiny you had marked out for him.”
Acts 4:24-26, 28 TPT
https://bible.com/bible/1849/act.4.24-28.TPT
This is where so many people struggle.
“Well then, one might ask, “If God is in complete control, how could he blame us?
For who can resist whatever he wants done?””
Romans 9:19 TPT
https://bible.com/bible/1849/rom.9.19.TPT
God’s sovereignty and human culpability are compatible. God can be God and I can have free will and His purpose can prevail.
“You can make many plans, but the Lord’s purpose will prevail.”
Proverbs 19:21 NLT
https://bible.com/bible/116/pro.19.21.NLT
Read the Bible: Joshua 24, Acts 4, Jeremiah 13, and Matthew 27
Or as Paul put it, “we know that no one receives God’s perfect righteousness as a reward for keeping the law, but only by the faith of Jesus, the Messiah!
His faithfulness has saved us, and we have received God’s perfect righteousness.
Now we know that God accepts no one by the keeping of religious laws!
If we are those who desire to be righteous through our union with the Anointed One, does that mean our Messiah condones sin even though we acknowledge that we are sinners?
How absurd!
My old identity has been co-crucified with Christ and no longer lives.
And now the essence of this new life is no longer mine, for the Anointed One lives his life through me—we live in union as one!
My new life is empowered by the faith of the Son of God who loves me so much that he gave himself for me, dispensing his life into mine!
So that is why I don’t view God’s grace as something peripheral.
For if keeping the law could release God’s righteousness to us, then Christ would have died for nothing.”
Galatians 2:16-17, 20-21 TPT
https://bible.com/bible/1849/gal.2.17.TPT
We will never satisfactorily answer the endless arguments against Christianity either by dismissing them or by antagonizing our opponents. Our only course is to follow the example of our Lord and through lives united with Him, to prove them wrong.
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