Whoa vs Woe

Do you tell everyone you meet what Jesus has done for you?  No, me neither. 

Do you wait for that just-right-moment before bringing it up?  Well, of course. 

And how often does that just-right-moment come up?  Well, I mean, if you’re going to get technical…

For if I [merely] preach the Gospel, that gives me no reason to boast, for I feel compelled of necessity to do it. Woe is me if I do not preach the glad tidings (the Gospel).                                                                                                                                               1 Corinthians 9:16 (AMP)

What I get from this verse is that we should be compelled to weave the Gospel throughout our normal, everyday conversations, and that we should be doing it in a normal, everyday way.

I struggle with this one a lot.  I want to be able to throw in a praise or two for Jesus, but it just sounds so pious and snooty.  Like “you don’t got what I got.”  Even to other professing Christians, it’s the same thing.  Like “I know you got it, but I got it better.”

That’s what it sounds like in my ears.  It’s not what I’m thinking.  I want to come across as genuine.  I want to be genuine.

Do you know what regret is?  Yeah, me too.  The I shoulda, coulda, woulda thoughts that go round and round in my head. 

In the above passage, Paul says “Woe is me.”  Woe, although it’s pronounced like the overused “whoa,” does not have a positive meaning to it.  It’s a negative, such as sadness and misery.  And regret.

I wonder if Paul ever had regrets as he waited out his sentence in the Roman prisons.  I wonder if he ever laid awake at night and thought, “Gee, I wish I had today to do over again.  I wasted so many opportunities to talk about the Good News.”

It’s certainly a subject that I should be losing sleep over.  Anybody with me on this?

But the Good News that Paul speaks of is truly good, because we get another chance to get it right.  Every day is a new day, time to try it again, to practice what God wants us to do.

If anyone has reason to regret, it’s God Himself, for creating these wimpy, self-centered creatures.  But He doesn’t regret because He cannot.  It’s not His nature.  He sees us every single second of our lives and He rejoices in us. 

Good News?  Wow!  We may want to amend that to read GREAT News!

Photo Courtesy of Cindy West McGregor

 

A Chance

This was first posted on my blog

Miscellaneous Ramblings

 on May 8, 2012

 

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!

Psalm 34:8

 

"Oh, taste…" Well, I don't need anyone to tell me twice.  I'm right in there, tasting away. 

We have to eat, right?  If you have gained a few (or a lot) of pounds by eating too much, then you've got a whole nuther set of problems.

I had gastric-bypass surgery in 2004 and lost 90 pounds.  I can't eat the same things I used to eat.  I can't tolerate much sugar, so I'm constantly checking the labels to see how many sugar grams there are.  It's absolutely astounding how much sugar can be in one granola bar!  I don't know, maybe I was addicted to sugar before my surgery.  I couldn't eat very much of anything for months afterward, certainly not sugary stuff, so that forced abstinence may have broken the sugar addiction.  I'm just speculating here.

One thing that's kind of funny about it is that I don't crave sugar.  I don't miss it at all.  If something sugary looks good to me, I'm just hungry and a little food that I can tolerate will take care of that.  

When I eat, I have to pick and choose what I can eat.  If I don't choose wisely, I can end up very physically sick.  It's so bad, I'd have to feel better to die!  Sometimes pain is the best motivator we've got.

So I look over my options of what will work.  I try to eat slowly and chew every bite very well.  I have to remember that if things don't go down right, they will rebel at some point in my body. 

Because I have only so much space to fill, I reach for the stuff I like best first.  I'll see how things are going and then add something else if I feel I can handle it.  All this took years of practice and hit-or-miss methods of getting what my body needs to function.

So, yeah, I know something about tasting.  But how do you "taste" the Lord?  Our need for Him is even more basic than our need for food.  And yet we look all around Him for things to satisfy us in any way we can.

When we want to know what something tastes like, we take a small bite or spoonful to get a sample of the whole.  We can usually tell by the sample how good or bad the whole will be.

What if we "sampled" God's goodness by giving Him a chance to show us how good He is?  What if we took a sample of His goodness and meditated on it and thought about it.  I'm not particularly thinking of scripture here.  I'm talking about asking the Lord to give you a sample of His goodness and then watch what He does.  And then from His holy "sample," we will know how good the Whole really is.