Christ Also Suffered

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“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.” – 1 Peter 3:18

I’m a very empathetic person. That’s probably why the promises about the new heaven and new earth in Revelation 21 are so central to how I understand the gospel. I need to know that God cares about the hurts and needs of the world. For me, that’s also why it’s so important to know that Jesus suffered in his life. God is not withdrawn and ignorant of our struggles and pain—he lived among us and endured it all himself. Jesus doesn’t only sympathize with our weaknesses, like Hebrews 4:15 says, but he also empathizes with our suffering.

Recently I listened to the audiobook of Joni Eareckson Tada’s memoir, Joni. If you aren’t familiar with her story, Joni had a diving accident when she was 17-years-old that left her paralyzed from the shoulders down. The memoir chronicles the early years of her life after the accident: the emotional and medical rollercoaster, her struggles with faith, the fame brought on by her artwork. Joni has experienced tremendous suffering—pain, loneliness, disappointment, doubt, depression—and yet, she’s managed to find a calling and make an impact in the world in the midst of all that suffering.

As I listened to some of the descriptions of her experiences and struggles early in the book, I found myself thinking, This is so awful—what Jesus went through could never compare to this. He was on the cross for 6 hours, but she’s enduring this every waking moment, for years! How could God ever understand the suffering of someone like her?

But then, I came to this passage, which has helped me understand the cross in a new way. Reflecting on Psalm 41:3, “The Lord will sustain him upon his sickbed,” Joni writes,

I discovered that the Lord Jesus Christ could indeed empathize with my situation. On the cross for those agonizing, horrible hours, waiting for death, He was immobilized, helpless, paralyzed.

Jesus did know what it was like not to be able to move—not to be able to scratch your nose, shift your weight, wipe your eyes. He was paralyzed on the cross. He could not move His arms or legs. Christ knew exactly how I felt!

I still don’t think Jesus’s experience is anything like a lifetime of paralysis, but I had thought Christ could never understand someone like Joni’s experiences – yet, she didn’t see it that way at all. Jesus may not have endured the length of suffering that many do, but, on the cross, he did endure dimensions of helplessness and indignity that a quadriplegic would know all too well. I never would’ve recognized that myself. It took someone like Joni to show me.

This Friday, I hope you find a way to remember and commemorate Jesus’s suffering and dying “to bring you to God.” And I hope that all of us take time to more fully appreciate just what all Christ endured for us.

“This is love: it is not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins.” (1 John 4:10)

You can listen to this week's devotional here:

Keep Them within Your Heart

“My child, be attentive to my words;
    incline your ear to my sayings.
Do not let them escape from your sight;
    keep them within your heart.” – Proverbs 4:20-21

In Proverbs chapter 4, a father is passing on the advice that his father gave him, and one of the things he's concerned about is what his child’s heart is holding onto (4:4), what they’re keeping within their heart. (As a parent, this sure resonates with me! I worry all the time about what I’m teaching my girls to keep in their hearts, whether it’s habits, feelings, or priorities.) The speaker’s hope—like his father’s before him—is that his child’s heart will absorb and hold fast to words of wisdom, insight, and instruction. In other words, the kinds of words packed into every line in Proverbs.

There are a few proverbs that you may know by heart. “Pride goes before a fall” comes from Proverbs 16:18. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” (whatever you think about that) is based on Proverbs 13:24. For the most part, though, I imagine that most of the book’s wisdom hasn’t quite reached the heart-level yet for a lot of us.

What has? What sorts of things do you know by heart?

The Pledge of Allegiance. The alphabet. The Kit Kat bar song. The Lord’s Prayer.

How did these things get embedded so deeply in your heart and your memory? Sometimes rhythms and tunes play a role, but anything that you absorb on the heart-level also involves repetition. It takes regular, sustained exposure for something to take root down in the deepest parts of you.

Here’s what I want us to think about today: What things am I regularly exposing my heart to? What am I ‘keeping within my heart’ in my usual routines and pastimes?

Have you been filling up each day on the talking points that your favorite political pundits like to repeat?

Do you pack your free moments with a steady diet of sports news and clips?

Are you slowly, steadily memorizing every line from nine seasons of Seinfeld? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

Are you intentionally spending time studying, absorbing, and holding on to words from scripture? Can you say, like the psalmist, “I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you”? (119:11)

You can’t keep something in your heart if you never put it there. And, whether you like them or not, some of the things you keep giving your time and attention to will absolutely take up residence in your heart.

So be deliberate with your heart today. Give it what it needs. Fill it with the things that you hope will shape the person you’re becoming. And pay attention to the other things you may be stuffing it with—the things that won’t help you love God and love your neighbors, won’t cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in your life, and won’t make you look more like Jesus. What kind of change do you need to make?

Take note of how you spend your time. Consider what you regularly consume. Be deliberate with your heart today.

You can listen to this week's devotional right here:

Size and Worth

Photo by Manuel Will on Unsplash

One of the foundations of prayer is the idea that God listens to each of us and cares about each of us. If God weren’t listening, or if God didn’t care, why would we pray? We take that for granted every time we turn to God with our worries, our gratitude, or our questions.

And yet, a lot of people struggle with the idea that God pays attention and cares so much about each one of us. Many faithful Christians, even, find themselves asking the same question the psalmist asked:

When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers—

the moon and the stars you set in place—

what are mere mortals that you should think about them,

human beings that you should care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4)

Yes, Jesus said that your heavenly Father cares about you so much that he knows how many hairs are on your head. (Matthew 10:29-31) But when you consider how big the universe is and how insignificant we seem in the grand scheme of things, some of us still wonder. And the psalmist couldn’t have realized just how far the night sky stretches. I read the other day that, if you shrank the Earth’s entire path around the sun down to the size of a ring on a girl’s finger, then the next closest star to us would be twenty miles away. I don’t think we can really comprehend just how vast the universe is. The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote, thinking about all of our griefs, losses, and struggles, “What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?” It’s not difficult to understand where he was coming from.

But do scope and scale really tell us about God’s concerns and God’s heart?

I love what Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote about all of this in The Meaning of Prayer:

But surely, we ourselves are not accustomed to judge comparative value by size. As children we may have chosen a penny rather than a dime because the penny was larger; but as maturity arrives, that basis of choice is outgrown…A mother’s love for her baby is not a matter of pounds and ounces. When one believes in God at all, the consequence is plain. God must have at least our spiritual insight to perceive the difference between size and worth.

Your size doesn’t determine your worth. The universe is unimaginably vast, and we, in comparison, are miniscule, short-lived things. But, just like we delight in the flash of a lightning bug or the touch of a kiss, God delights in things that are small and fleeting—like you and me. The Lord values us, the dust of the earth, like we value the tiniest pieces of diamond dug out of the ground.

That’s why, in another psalm, the writer can ask, “Does he who fashioned the ear not hear? Does he who formed the eye not see?” (94:9) And he knows the answer. He assumes we know the answer.

Yes, he hears me.

Yes, he sees me.

Yes, he loves me.

So we can pray, affirming all kinds of things at once.

I am small.

I am brief.

I am valuable.

I am his delight.

You can listen to this week's devotional here: