Dear Church Family,
I trust you are doing well during this time of virus and now enforced isolation. Please call your Shepherding Elder as he will gladly talk and pray with you. The Deacons also stand ready to help as best they can. The church has been considered ‘essential’ by the county, so Elaine and I will be maintaining ‘normal’ hours in the church office.
We waste our (‘Covid-19’) if we seek comfort from our odds rather than from God.
John Piper takes this concept head on with this thought, “The design of God in our (‘Covid-19’) is not train us in the rationalistic, human calculation of odds. The world gets comfort from their odds. Not Christians.” Just to be clear the ‘odds’ to which Piper refers are what Vegas offers to bettors. Are you willing to trust your life to the roll of a pair of dice? Not likely, though people do it all the time. Even now, many think that the ‘chance’ of getting the virus is low and the odds are even less that it will be fatal. Why rely on chance (which is only a mathematical probability) when there is someone much surer who has a great record on which to rely.
Of course, that is “the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our comforts, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” per 2 Cor. 1:3-4. Odds are theoretical, while God is real. Sadly without God, many have only odds to trust. By faith in Christ we can sing with David who wrote Psalm 27, “The Lord is my light and my salvation- whom shall I fear. The Lord is the stronghold of my life – of whom shall I be afraid?”
We waste our (‘Covid-19’) if we refuse to think about death.
One of the reasons funerals are a blessing is that they force us to think about death. For this reason, I begin every funeral with Ecclesiastes 7:2, “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.” Only a deluded person thinks they will not die. One of my tasks as a pastor is to prepare you to die. More than a few of you have been surprised when I have stated that you are not really ready to live until you are ready to die.
This does not mean I want you at home in isolation and think only about dying. Instead, give praise to God that by faith in Christ you are ready to die because Jesus has conquered sin and death for you. Now you can live with the resolve that Paul writes about at the close of Romans 8, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
With His love,
Pastor Gillikin