STUBBORN OUNCES
You say the little efforts that I make
Will do no good;
They never will prevail
To tip the hovering scale
Where justice hangs in balance.
I don’t think
I ever thought they would.
But I am prejudiced beyond debate
In favour of my right to choose which side
Shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.
Bonaro Overtsreet
When we self-confessed sinners [self-confessed because God
has opened our eyes] oppose “the world” [1 John 2:15-17] and its powerful
allies and attempt to set prisoners free we’re not making a futile, pointless gesture and
much less are we appealing to the goodness of a “world” that enslaves and
crushes, a “world” that is the Glorious God’s enemy.
We align ourselves with God—clay pots,
fragile and
vulnerable, with no claim to moral superiority—and offer ourselves as
God’s
instruments to promote and bring to fulfillment God’s glorious
enterprise in
Jesus Christ. It's in people like us that God invests the gospel
treasure that an impoverished and oppressed humanity needs so
desperately. That's all the NT elect have to offer—a Message, good news. Nothing else!
Not medical advances or social reforms or scientific breakthroughs
however fine they might be. We offer nothing but the wisdom and power
and righteousness of God embodied in the Lord Jesus and we do it in the
humiliation of preaching [1 Corinthians 1:18, 21-25].
That can’t be a blunder and it can’t
be an act of blind
stupidity for God himself would have it that way. The now glorified Lord
Jesus chooses again the way of humiliation as he did in his pre-exalted
ministry.
Our eyes are fixed on God’s self-disclosure in and as
Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ who is himself the justification for
the very existence of humans! Who is himself the embodiment of God’s
eternal war against all that enslaves and narrows and robs and humiliates.
Our stubborn ounces are thrown onto his scale and because
of Him we’ll discover one day that they weighed as much as worlds!
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com.
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