Reading… and Thinking

For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline. Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord or of me His prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel according to the power of God, who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity, but now has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.

– 2 Timothy 1:7-10 (NASB)

Did you catch that last phrase? Look at it again: it says that Jesus Christ abolished death!

Can you imagine? Can anything so fantastic, so seemingly impossible, actually have happened? And if it did happen, doesn’t that have enormous implications?

The resurrection of Jesus is the central fact of Christianity – but more than that, it’s the central fact of all human existence. Jesus did, in fact, abolish death. He brought immortality to light – that is, to visible reality. And that changed everything! If you believe that this happened, then your viewpoint toward everything else is drastically different from the viewpoint of those who don’t believe it.

Go back and look at the rest of this passage. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then meekness and non-retaliation (which Jesus taught) are utter foolishness. The Christian who is living what Jesus taught is then the most pitiful person on earth.

BUT, if Jesus did in fact rise from the dead, then his followers are linked to the power that raised him, the very power of the universe! And that power is a force of…what? The apostle says: love, and discipline. (Other versions have “self-discipline”, or “self-control”.)

It is love, not timidity, that causes us to "turn the other cheek", to not retaliate, to do and say what is best for the other person even if they are abusing us. Even to accept persecution if that should come. We can only do this because we’re coming from a position of strength. It is a grasp of the power evident in the resurrection of Jesus, a power that we are connected to, that enables this kind of meekness. Being connected to this power is ample reason to feel no shame, no matter what anyone says to us or does to us.

Our natural urge is to retaliate against attacks, to defend ourselves, to talk tough so we don’t appear weak. Restraining these natural urges requires a deliberate exercise of self-discipline. Without love for the other person, we won’t do it. Without appreciation for the power of the resurrection, we can’t do it.

It takes a mature mind, and a confident faith, to appreciate that it is strength, not weakness, to be meek. It takes genuine love to accept abuse rather than respond in kind. The world can’t understand this, because it does not understand the might of the one who abolished death.

The question I have to ask myself is: How well do I understand it?