Wednesday, December 1, 2021
Difficult questions
Difficult questions give rise to useful answers. Challenging problems compel valuable solutions.

What difficult questions have you been unwilling to ask? What challenging problems have you been avoiding?

In doing so, how much of life’s richness are you denying to yourself and to others? What joys, what achievements, what connections, what beautiful vistas are you failing to experience?

Maybe this week you could work up the nerve to dive into a problem that’s been vexing your life. Perhaps you could dare to ask one of those difficult questions and then work on an honest and useful answer.

Take the time, make the effort, and discover it’s not as bad as you feared it would be. Indeed, you’re likely to find it’s much more valuable than you hoped it would be.

Let go of your fear surrounding what’s difficult, challenging, inconvenient, uncomfortable. Open yourself to powerful possibilities that can raise your life to a whole new level.

Romans 8:35-39
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:

They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.

None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.