How to Make Everything Easy Today

May 2, 2012

Staples talking <em>easy button</em> - complete with batteries I’ve seen that button up in the store, that ‘easy’ button. And it’s funny and clever ’cause all of us know that this life is anything but easy. Jason and I talk about it-how this season can feel like war some days, how we’re always ‘on duty,’ never really feeling like we can rest.

Jesus promised it, that those who follow Him are taking a narrow and hard road. And so the treacherous climbs and the back breaking burdens shouldn’t surprise me.

There are attitudes to adjust and mud stains to scrub and veggies to chop. I still can’t decide on reading curriculum for next year and I just don’t know if the kids should do this or participate in that. We should have them over for dinner and probably that family too. I meant to call her and didn’t I tell her I’d send her an email to see how she was? Did I ever send that thank you note? We pray for Afghanistan and the sights turn the day upside down…how does Dick and Jane matter when 99% of the eyes in Afghanistan never read Christ’s saving words?

I lean over to make beds, I tug hard and murmur it…

Everything is just so hard.

But I remember the story about another bed. Those four friends looking for a way to get their friends’ bed in front of Jesus. It must have been hard-carrying him through the crowds, pushing their way toward the home and still seeing no way to Jesus. But when it was hard, they looked up instead of down and finally found their way to Christ.

And when they finally get that bed before Jesus, He surprises us all and says, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ And everyone laughs. ’How could he do that? Who could do such a hard thing?’

He answers:

“Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?” Matthew 9:5

The friends had done the hard work of getting their friend to Jesus and they expected him to do the hard work of healing him. But Jesus calls that ‘easy.’ Physical healing is the easy part. It’s healing the inside that’s tough.

I remember this…that finding a way to be reconciled to a holy God–this is the part of life that’s so hard. And yet, this is the one part that’s finished, completed, taken care of. Jesus has done it…’the great business of life is a settled business, the great debt is a paid debt, the great disease is a healed disease, and the great works a finished work.’ (J.C. Ryle)

So shouldn’t the rest of life feel easier? These piles of work, these demanding children, these friends in need, these burdens of disease, disaster…aren’t these the easy part of Christ’s work?

I don’t own an easy button, but perhaps I should find one. Perhaps I’ll make my own and put it up there on the fridge with the pictures of missionaries serving in hard places, the picture of us six smiling during a hard season, the letters that the kids are working hard to learn and put together. Perhaps I’ll remember it-that when I work hard to find my way to Christ, I find He’s completed all the hard work already. Once I hear Him say I’m forgiven, the rest is easy.