Free through Jesus

In John 8 verse 36 Jesus says, "So if the Son (Jesus) makes you free, you will be free indeed."

Jesus does not like to see his people weighed down by past failures, dragging them around like heavy chains attached to their legs. When we feel this way, we are to imagine Jesus cutting the chains from our legs remembering that he said he came to set us free. Indeed we are free from our sins when we belong to Jesus. God wants us to rejoice that Jesus has redeemed our failures, forgiving us and leading us along paths of newness. (paraphrase of Sarah Young in Jesus Always)
We can talk with our Lord about our mistakes and be ready to learn from Him a different way to live. "Jesus invites us "to come to him, with our weariness and heavy burdens so we might find in Him true rest and peace." To come to Jesus is to trust Jesus personally, not merely to believe historical facts about Him. It is to know that Jesus did the work of salvation for us and that we do not, nor can we earn salvation by our efforts and works.

Here are some quotes from Run by Ann Patchett which caught my attention and gave me pause to reflect.

"His heart woke him up to remind him that in life there was never a limitless number of nights."

Father Sullivan was in his eighties and living in a nursing home. Nena, a woman from his former parish came to visit him bringing him banana bread and a book of crossword puzzles. She talked to Father about life in their parish and issues in her family. She mentioned how she had developed painful bursitis in her hip and how she had to give up tennis and could no longer manage the stairs in her home. Nena asked Father Sullivan to pray for her and he said of course he would. When she was leaving she stood for a moment beside the priest's bed and he reached up and touched her hip, her left hip exactly where it had been hurting and the hurting stopped. She left amazed. After a week spent without the slightest trace of discomfort she came back to Father Sullivan with her friend, Helen who had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. They didn't mention Nena's recovery. They did bring another loaf of banana bread and a crossword-puzzle book by way of superstition. Nena said in what she hoped was an offhanded manner, "If you could touch her neck and say a prayer for her health, it would mean a lot. Father Sullivan thought nothing of the request. He had been putting his hands on sick people since he was twenty-three years old. He believed in the comfort of human touch. He was sitting up in his chair by the window that day and Helen, who was barely forty with three small girls at home, leaned forward and he touched her neck and closed his eyes and prayed that she would have peace. That was all he had ever asked for. Later Helen would say that she felt something at that moment, a small shock in her throat, and three days later when she went to the doctor the cancer was gone. Well the news of these two healings spread and the hallway to Father Sullivan's room became crowded with people seeking their own healing.
Later in the story Father Sullivan's nephew Teddy comes to ask him to pray for a friend who had been badly hurt in an accident. Father Sullivan responds, "Teddy, I didn't make those women better." Teddy says, "You don't know that." "Of course I know that. Do you think from time to time I just become some sort of unwitting conduit for God? And Teddy after much thought says, "There are things that go on that none of us can understand, that even you can't understand."

So it is that the thoughts and ways of God are beyond us. I have no doubt that we can be unwitting conduits of the love, grace and power of God. God uses people of faith, maybe even people of no faith, to accomplish God's purposes and will. As Father Sullivan reflected on his life and ministry he would say, "Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in my life I have seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. This was the only miracle that mattered to him."

The person of God lives by faith. So shall I seek to live.