Fire in the Hole

“Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave.  It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.  Jesus said, Take ye away the stone.”

John 11:38,39

The raising of Lazarus from the dead was one of the most notable miracles that Jesus did, but the greater importance of this miracle was not about Lazarus, but that it set in motion the events that would lead to Jesus’ crucifixion. 

As Christians, we have a tendency to seek after the good things that we hope God will do for us.  God is good, we acknowledge, and so therefore God is supposed to do good things for us.  But underlying the theme of victory throughout the Bible is the message that victory comes through brokenness to God.

Many think that since Jesus suffered, we don’t have to.  The victory was won on the Cross, and it was a finished work.  All we have to do is follow along in His wake and we will receive the blessings.  Unfortunately, that is a result of only a cursory skimming over the Scriptures without realizing that God has called us to that same crucified walk so that He can work that same victory in us.

Brokenness is the process by which God empties the you out of you.  He breaks the resistance of our will and our ways out of us so that we will come to a final place of surrender.  Only when He has a clean and transparent, empty vessel that is so broken of our own ways, will He have in His hands something that is as yielded as soft putty where He can they fashion a vessel in His own likeness.  Only then, can He fill us with His glory so that, as transparent glass, empty and fashioned in His likeness, people no longer see us, they see the glory of the Almighty God in us and can be drawn to Him.

There is an old saying that God requires a price from us that flesh does not want to pay.  We can choose to settle into a comfortable rut to escape the price of a deep subjection that He places before us – that is our choice – but if we ever expect to rise to a place in God where He can use us in any great and mighty way, we have to face the path of the Cross and all that goes along with that rough road to the Calvary in our own lives.

Abraham faced it when asked to sacrifice his only son, Jacob faced it on his long 20 year road to go back to Bethel, Joseph faced it in a forgotten cell in a dismal Egyptian prison, and Moses faced it on the backside of a desert taking care of someone else’s flocks.  There is a path set before each of us that none us relish facing because all we can see at this end is the suffering that we will have to go through to get to the other end.  But Jacob would never have become Israel, Joseph would never have become a ruler of Egypt, Moses would never have delivered the children of Israel, and Jesus Christ would never have broken the power of sin if they hadn’t gone down that road.

Jesus knew when He raised Lazarus from the dead that it would lead to His death on the Cross, but He chose that path willingly because He could see past the suffering and saw our faces.  He was made perfect through suffering. 

When all Hell assails us, as the song goes, the flesh always fails us.  But when we allow God to lead us through the struggles we have before us, and trust that God has a plan for our lives, that he will walk with us through those valleys.  No matter how dark they are, no matter how hard they seem, no matter how deep they go, no matter how unfair they seem, no matter how much pain is there, we follow the footsteps of those who have gone on before us and who paved the way so that we could be brought to Salvation.  

And leading the way are the footprints of the feet of Jesus, the captain of our salvation, who tasted death for every man that we might have life.