Discouragement in Prayer

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And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.

Luke 18:1

 This is the opening of Jesus’ famous parable of the persistent widow and the unrighteous judge. The parable itself is a fascinating piece of teaching by Jesus, but I would like to ask a question that arises before he even gets into the story. Why does Jesus teach a parable specifically to encourage persistence in prayer? The counterintuitive answer is that he gives this teaching because discouragement is the most normal experience in the life of prayer. The Greek word translated “lose heart” here means to be deflated, weary, tired, despairing, in a mood to quit. That describes most Christians sometimes and some Christians all the time. Oddly, what Jesus is basically saying is that prayer, by its very nature in this age, will be at times a very frustrating exercise. Why is it this way? Let me offer at least three possible reasons.

 

First, answers to prayer do not usually come quickly enough to keep our attention. Many divine responses come long after we have given up praying for the thing! Our gnat-like attention spans lose track of the request long before the answer arrives and so we are not impressed. On top of that many of us are closet skeptics anyway, and so are prepared to interpret events as coincidences or accidents unless they happen immediately.

 

Second, answers to prayer rarely present as “miracles.” The Lord isn’t in the entertainment business and much of his work slides under our sensory radar unless we calibrate our awareness to look for him. Also, we expect a certain sort of answer and he often solves the problem in a completely unexpected and unimpressive way. When this happens it doesn’t occur to us that he did the thing, because it wasn’t quite the thing we requested.

 

Third, time itself is a crucial element in all that God does in this fallen era. Speed does not improve God’s work, either in our hearts or in our circumstances. Any cook knows that time in the oven is just as crucial as any other ingredient in the recipe. Especially relational issues are this way; friendships, romances, business partnerships, anything that relies on humans to know and trust each other, will take time—usually more of it than we want to invest. This is why the Psalms are filled with exhortations to wait on the Lord.

 

All three of these issues conspire to discourage us in prayer. So, the Lord says we must not give up. A rule of thumb that I use is that if I am severely tempted to give up praying for something important, that’s the time to specifically stay at it. It’s good to know that being discouraged is a normal part of being a prayer partner in any meaningful aspect of God’s work.

 

So, let us pray …

 

Christian Prayer

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In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

John 16:26-27

New Covenant prayer is arguably the single greatest practical privilege we have as Christians. Jesus is basically telling his friends that soon they will be able to pray the same way he does—directly to God as their Father based on a personal covenant love relationship that cannot fail. This is a distinctly new sort of experience he bestows on his disciples, or he wouldn’t have been as excited about it as he was. He is far more enthused about our potential prayer life than we are (Lk.11:1-13; 18:1-8; Jn.15:16; 16:23-24).  Note four things he says in this passage about Christian prayer:

First, prayer is in his name. That makes it in some mysterious and powerful way an improvement over prayer offered under the Old Covenant. A Christian is metaphysically joined to the authority and identity of Christ, the Messiah, God’s own Son (the name), by simple faith (“believing that I came from God”).  And because we are under his grace and authority we come into the Father’s presence in a relationship to him unknown prior to Christ (Rom.8:14-17; Heb.4:14-16). Before the gospel, before the work of the cross, this was not available. Jesus (shockingly) said that among the OT believers there was nobody greater than John the Baptist (A very radical thought in light of all the great names in the Old Testament!). And yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater (in a better position) than John (Lk.7:28). He must be referring to the work of regeneration and justification that comes in Christ to the simplest Christian, and with that New Covenant work—the right to pray like the Son of God himself. Wow!

Second, we call God “Father” when we talk to him, just like Jesus did. This was not done prior to Christ and was in fact one of the outstanding characteristics of his own prayer life. It is not found in any other religion and not available through any other message than the gospel of Christ. This means that what passes for “prayer” in much of the world, because it is emphatically not in the name of Christ, is not anything like what goes on in the smallest gathering of the most humble Christians. Wow!

Third, the Father hears us directly and personally, just like he heard Jesus. Jesus says that he will not ask the Father on our behalf, but our prayers are heard immediately by God himself. This means, among other things, that we don’t need other angelic or saintly “mediators” to “get God’s ear” for us (1 Tim.2:5; Heb.4:14-16). This does not mean that Christ does not speak to the Father about us. He does (Heb.7:25; 1 Jn.2:1-2). But it does mean that our access to the Father is, like Jesus’ access, instant, constant, secure, personal, and effective through the Holy Spirit (Rom.8:26). Wow!

Fourth, the Father hears our prayers because he loves us. Because we love Jesus, the Father loves us like he loves his own son. Consider the fact that God loves you as much as he loves Christ Jesus himself. In fact, he gave his son up to die for us so that he could have us in his family forever (Rom.8:31-32). Most of us simply do not believe this, and because we don’t believe it we feel less confident than we should about our prayers. Wow!

So, Christian prayer is a unique and powerful right. It is not like pagan prayer, Old Covenant prayer, New Age prayer, non-Christian religious prayer, or mystical meditation on the numinous. It is personal, perpetual, open communication with the God of the universe as our Father. Let us pray.

Pastor Rick

Should We Try To Forgive Ourselves?

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A Pastoral Response

Rick Booye, Sr. Pastor, Trail Christian Fellowship

 

Greetings Pastor Rick,

 A few weeks ago you made a statement that got me thinking. Maybe I misunderstood it. You said that we cannot forgive ourselves; we don’t have the power to do that. I get that I can’t forgive my sins like Jesus does, or that I am not able to forgive others sins, that this is Gods job not mine. But I do think I can forgive people for hurts they have caused me, and I can forgive myself for hurts I have caused myself. This type of forgiveness is not the same as what God does obviously. Am I wrong, did I miss-understand what you said? 

 That’s a great question, 

First, about “forgiving ourselves.” We may be just talking semantics here, or I could have miss-stated what I meant. I completely agree with you that we are able (and required in fact) to forgive others for the hurts they have caused us (I assume this means real sins against us, not just hurt feelings, though that too requires grace from us). This is completely biblical. But the idea that I need to forgive myself for the hurts (sins?) I have caused myself is a bit opaque to me. I guess that if all I’m talking about is the “hurts” I have done to me, then the Me that is offended can say “I forgive me.” Maybe that’s a way of getting through our internal stuff. It might be a helpful process. But if the “hurts” are real sins, real crimes in God’s court, then Someone greater than me needs to do the forgiving or it won’t work. The Bible is utterly silent on people “forgiving themselves,” which strikes me as odd in light of the heavy emphasis many Christians place on the concept. I think we mean by that phrase that we should take seriously the fact that the Lord has forgiven us, appropriate it personally and live in the reality of it. If that is our intent then I have no objection to the phrase at all. But I wonder if that is what we mean.

 What I was trying to address in my statement is the fact that many Christians don’t reach a sense of true peace about their forgiven sins, and they suppose that it is because they have not “forgiven themselves.” My suggestion is that that is the wrong way to put it. I would say that they haven’t really trusted the Lord to forgive them in a tangible way. My reason is that the Self is not the agent of forgiveness because the Self doesn’t have the authority to forgive in the first place. Which is in fact precisely why these folks can’t seem to find the peace of God in the situation—they’re seeking the peace from within themselves (a very western and American idea, and utterly absent from the biblical worldview). They seem to attribute more authority (and far more attention) to their own feelings about themselves than they do to what the Lord thinks about them. I suspect this is because in our culture for about the last 100 or so years we have gradually come to believe that what we think about ourselves (or anything else for that matter) is the ultimate arbiter of reality on the subject. But this is not true. What God thinks about us is infinitely more important and making that adjustment in our thinking is crucial to living in the grace of Christ. The Self is not Lord, Christ is Lord. What I’m wanting Christians to realize is that if Christ Jesus forgives them, then they should take is word for it rather than try to do it themselves. When they feel “unforgiven” (as happens often in cases of real sin) what they need to do is continually remind themselves of the gospel, that they are not at the mercy of their conscience but at the mercy of Christ (1 Jn.2:1-2; 3:19-20). And the cross of Christ has really, truly, eternally, completely wiped away their blame for the evil they committed. I think this is part of “taking every thought captive to obedience to Christ” (2 Cor.10:3-5).

 It seems to me that Paul alludes to something like this in 1 Cor.4:3-5. There he says, “…But it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself [un-confessed sin], but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore, do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God.

 The key phrases in this passage for our thoughts here are, “I am not by that acquitted,” and “In fact, I don’t even judge myself.” Paul was criticized by people for being a bad steward of the ministry. His response to this is at least two-fold. First, he says that he is not aware of any unconfessed sin in his life, but that his clear conscience is not what acquits him of guilt. In other words, it is not his sense of being clean that makes him really clean. This is an astounding statement when you think about it. He consults his conscience obviously, but he does not let it stand as the agent of forgiveness or guilt. The second thing he says is that not only did he not care that much what his critics thought—he didn’t care that much for what he himself thought of his work. Instead he only cared what the Lord thinks and he recommends letting all judgment rest there. It seems to me that, based on this statement regarding his faithfulness in ministry, Paul would have thought it strange that on the much more important issue of forgiveness of sins, he should rely on his own ability to forgive himself in order to come to peace.

 I think what happens for many of us is that we unconsciously make a distinction between our theoretical and general “forgiveness of sins” and our daily, oh so specific, sense of shame and guilt. We subscribe theologically to the lofty doctrine of “forgiveness,” but we don’t let it actually penetrate our feelings about the way we have failed today in the myriad small sins we all are aware of. For those daily pangs and heartaches we take the over-the-counter advice of our world and try to “forgive ourselves.” But I’m encouraging Christians to apply the blood of Christ to those small issues as well as to the big ones. Jesus washed the dust off his disciples’ feet even after they had “bathed” in his eternal grace (Jn.13:10).

 Hope this clarifies a bit.

 Grace and peace,

 Pastor Rick

 

Election Thoughts

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By Rick Booye

Well, it’s time to vote again. As I write this my voting packet sits expectantly on the desk next to my laptop. Our nation is about to pick a new (or re-affirm the old) national leader, in addition to numerous other elected officials. And as always happens both parties are sounding the alarm bells, warning everybody that if the opposition is elected the world as we know it will shortly vaporize. And as also always happens, the religious folks (like me for instance) are being courted as the “faith community” with all manner of theo-spin and moralspeak in order to convince us that this particular candidate is really God’s choice or is at least OK with Him. Never mind that one candidate thinks Jesus is Satan’s brother and the other has been accused of being the antichrist. Mixed into all the hoopla is the amalgam of Americanism heavily alloyed with vague deistic implications about our country being “God’s country” and therefore either under his divine blessing or His curse (depending on who you’re reading).  Some Christians despair and decide not to vote at all.  But that is the biggest blunder of all!

Why should Christians vote when they can’t find a candidate they agree with?  Two reasons: First, because we owe it to the Lord and to our country to let our voice be heard. Even though it is frustrating to see good candidates get beaten in the elections (as often happens), we must nevertheless continue to seek to elect good candidates. To throw up our hands and walk off the court is to cede the society to forces that will hurt the moral structure of the country and the progress of the gospel. Second, because we’re always voting (in terms of candidates) for the lesser of two evils. There is no perfect leader and there never has been. Jesus isn’t on the ticket. As Theologian Wayne Grudem has pointed out, we’re not voting for a pastor, we’re voting for a president. America is not a church. That means that we should not avoid voting simply because we realize (what a shock!) that the candidates are actually sinners like us.

OK, then, how should a Christian vote under such circumstances?  Here are the basic parameters I recommend:

Vote for candidates (and laws) that have cultural and moral values that are closest to the biblical worldview. We are not voting for a candidate’s technical theology, but for their platform—especially on moral issues. In our culture watershed biblical moral issues include respect for human life, especially the most defenseless form of human life—the unborn. They also include the nature of sexuality, gender and marriage, care for the poor, and justice for the disadvantaged. The Bible clearly says that these issues are sacred. That means they belong to God and we will answer to Him for how we handle them. The various platforms have positions on all of these.  Even a casual observer can see where the parties line up on most of these issues.

Vote for candidates that will do the least damage to the gospel. This overlaps significantly with point number one. The gospel of Christ has a moral (not moralistic) component. If a candidate vetoes, opposes, shuts down or otherwise conditions religious freedom and the right to preach the gospel and teach the Bible, they should be off our list.

Vote for candidates that can win. When it comes down to it, we need to face the fact that sometimes we must simply try to un-elect  certain leaders, even if it means electing  leaders that are far from ideal. Many conservative voters are so doctrinaire that they won’t vote for a political candidate unless the candidate agrees with everything the voter thinks is most important. They then waste their Christian vote on a candidate that can’t win (I’m talking about the final vote, not the primaries) and effectively hand the election to the opposition by default. This is a mistake. Politics is not perfect and if we are going to have an effect on our government (and we should) we must take in stride that fact and cast our lot in with others we may not agree with on some things.

No doubt more could be said. But it seems to me that as we Christians pray for our country, we should vote with these things in mind.

Believing is Seeing

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by Rick Booye

 In the gospel seeing is a form of deep, intuitive perception, not simply physical viewing of material things.  Physical or material sight occurs when our eyes catch a small portion of the light spectrum, transfer it through the optic nerve, which takes it to the visual cortex in our brain, which then processes the information and instantly gives us a physical image. This happens so fast and so automatically that we completely take it for granted (unless we lose the ability to see, of course).  But in the Bible seeing is a metaphor for perceiving things that we cannot actually take in with our eyes (2 Cor.4:16-18; Heb.11:6).  Material sight is not always an advantage to us in this regard.  In fact, physical sight can get in the way of spiritual insight.  This is what happened when Eve “saw the fruit.”  The problem wasn’t that she physically viewed it.  The problem was that she interpreted what she saw not by what God told her but by what the serpent told her.  So her visual perception, interpreted by the wrong voice, produced a disastrous mental impression.  Adam did no better.  Paul tells us that Adam did not believe that the fruit would benefit him (1 Tim.2:14), yet he ate it anyway. Why?  He too was looking, but not at the fruit.  He was looking at the beautiful creature handing it to him. She had already eaten and Adam did not want to be separated from her, so he ate as well.  The result was not insight, but horror.

Part of the new perception we receive in Christ involves letting our ears inform our eyes.  We listen to God’s Word (in Christ, by the Spirit, through Scripture), which interprets what our other senses perceive.  Jesus often said, “He who has ears, let him hear.” (Matt.11:15).  God’s word enters the spirit of a person through the ears.  That sort of hearing becomes a way of interpreting reality.  We are familiar with the phrase, “seeing is believing.”  But for a Christian there is a sense in which believing is seeing.  This is why Paul describes our life as one of faith rather than sight (2 Cor.5:7).

Interestingly, if a person’s optic nerve is severed, so that their brain doesn’t receive the visual stimuli it normally would, their visual cortex re-directs its neurons to process auditory or tactile input.  So that over time the brain processes sound and touch with the same acuity that it would have processed sight if it were available.  The result is a tremendously heightened sense of hearing and feeling (to read Braille for instance).  Is it possible for the Lord to train our intuitive interpretation of reality in such a way that we think of life like he does and respond to it the way he would if he were living our life?  Is that what we might call walking in the Spirit?  It would seem so.

In our old life we had a congenital spiritual blindness to the things of God, coupled with an obsession with the visible world.  With the new life of the Spirit came a new sense, a sort of “hearing” that processes God’s word in our spirit, altering our intuitions so that we perceive new purposes and develop new character.  We do not become less material, but we do become more Spiritual (capitalized here to indicate the Holy Spirit’s presence).  We begin to sense spiritual, moral, and relational dimensions that somehow we missed before.  This new ability grows as we practice walking with God.  But we practice hearing this way, usually, only when something in our life forces us to close our eyes to the world around.  That something is almost always unforeseen, undeserved, unfair pain and trauma (Jas.1:1-4).  So pain and grief, what Jesus called tribulation in this age (Jn.16:33), is (oddly) a good friend of faith in the same way that the weights in the gym are good friends of my muscles.

 Is it possible to physically see what appear to be random, tragic, even cruel, circumstances in our lives and trust that God is at work despite what things look like?  Should we believe that all things (especially the bad things) work out for the good of those who love the Lord and who are called according to his purpose (Rom.8:28)?  Should we continue to wait on the Lord this way long after others have given up?  Not only is it possible—it is absolutely crucial. The Lord Jesus lived this way and taught his friends to do the same (Jn.16:31-33).  In fact, every unforeseen and terrifying circumstance that presents itself to us is precisely an opportunity to think within the gospel and “see” the invisible (See 2 Cor.4:16-5:7; Rom.8:18-25).  It is an opportunity to trust that the Lord is doing something excellent that could be done in no other way than for us to endure the present, and yet quite temporary, darkness.  Does this make us grieve less or feel “happy” all the time?  No, we may still cry ourselves to sleep and wonder about our future in this age.  He loves us through our grief.  But it does give us a perspective on our trauma that enables us to navigate it in faith by what Paul calls the “eyes of the heart” (Eph.1:18-21). 

So, believing what the Lord says is a sort of “seeing” that goes beyond material sight and teaches us to live by Spiritual insight rooted in the cross and God’s love for us (Rom.8:31-39).  Believing the gospel and living in what the Lord says is seeing clearly for the first time.

Despondency

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By Rick Booye

 But I said, “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing. Yet what is due me is in the LORD’s hand, and my reward is with my God.”

Isaiah 49:4

 Life in this age can feel utterly devoid of purpose, hopeless, grievous, and empty.  There are times when all the color drains out, all the taste withers, all the joy dissipates, leaving us wondering why God has ordained that we continue to use up oxygen.  In this verse, nestled in the second of Isaiah’s famous Suffering Servant Songs, we hear the heart of the Lord Jesus himself prophetically expressing the despondency that touches us all sooner or later. He feels like a failure.  What a completely and universally human emotion!  The words “no purpose,” “vain,” and “for nothing” in the original clearly describe the sense of hopeless uselessness that descends on the human soul in times of desert and darkness.  

 It shocks us to see a prediction that the ultimately victorious Lord Jesus should experience such low moods as this.  Yet, it’s true.  On more than one occasion in his earthly life the Lord expressed grief and frustration in the face of the overwhelming devastation of sin and death.  And in the garden on his last night he is so torn up by the prospect of what lies ahead that he sweats blood.  He asks his closest friends plaintively, “will you not watch with me one hour?” By the following afternoon he is crying out “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me!”  This sharing of human misery under sin is why the author of Hebrews reminds us that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” (Heb.4:15).  Apparently despair is not a sin.

 But despair was not the last word at the cross, and it is not the last word here. Despondency is no sin, but neither is it a permanent condition.  Jesus did cry out to God in desolation, but the last thing he said was, “It is finished.”  Something deeper than his feeling of despondency was happening and he trusted God in that.  In the second half of  our Isaiah verse he reveals what keeps him from utter and final darkness and points him toward hope—his faith in the Father’s goodness, favor, and fairness toward him despite his human feelings of failure and rejection.  He counters his internal sense of failure with this true statement: “What is due to me is in the Lord’s hand, and my reward is with my God.” (See also Paul’s attitude in 1 Cor.4:1-5).  That means he trusts the validation that God brings by grace rather than the self-sourced confidence we so often crave.  This knowledge does not make his despondency disappear instantly, but it gives a perspective that makes it bearable.  This is true and honest faith.

 The bottom line here is this:  Feelings of grief, darkness, hopelessness, emptiness and futility often coexist in the heart of a believer with the deeper truth of God’s free and complete validation, grace and goodness.  In other words, faith in the Lord and his plan (Rom.8:28) lives side by side in our hearts with depression and despondency brought on by the hardness of this age and even by our own terrible choices.  We don’t need to be “happy” all the time to be faithful.  We can trust God completely and be thoroughly bummed out—simultaneously.  This is better news than it sounds at first.  How so?

 The fact is that he loves you, Christian friend, whether you’re depressed or not.  He does not source his love and grace toward his people in their attractiveness, their hard work, their ability to obey, their “stiff upper lip,” or their cheerful attitude.  The source of his love is his love itself (God is the eternal source of his own life at every level), permanently and graciously bestowed on depressed sinners who throw themselves on his mercy at the cross.  Oddly, one of the best ways out of despondency is to embrace it, to admit it and let it be, while at the same time letting God’s word continue to remind you that he loves you anyway and will do what is good and right for you forever by shear personal grace no matter how you feel at the moment.  The despondency we Christians may experience is real, but it is temporary.  The “happiness” that the world synthesizes in various ways to anesthetize itself is also real, but it too is temporary.  If I must choose, I’d rather be a depressed Christian than a happy pagan.

Judgment in Favor of the Accused

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By Rick Booye

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.  2 Cor.5:10

 Question:  How and why does Christ evaluate us after we die?  Does this mean all my thoughts, words, and deeds will be brought back to me in the Lord’s presence? I thought that being saved by grace meant never having any sort of evaluation of how I lived in this age.  Didn’t God “forget my sin”?

 Well … God did not “forget” our sins in quite the way we often take that phrase (He does not have Alzheimer’s.).  The gospel includes news that is actually better than that.  What he means by “not remembering” our sins (which we re-interpret as “forgetting”, see Heb.8:12; 10:17) is that he does not count them against us.  Christ’s personal and sovereign grace saves us by releasing us from the guilt and condemnation of our sin based on his taking the blame for us at the cross (Rom.8:1-2).  On the other hand, that grace is transforming and empowering.  Through it, the Spirit enables us to serve him and his kingdom with a full expectation of reward (1 Cor.3:10-15; 2 Cor.5:21; Eph.2:8-10).  Furthermore, 2 Cor.5:10 tells us that the Lord will evaluate all we have done in this life, both the good and the bad, for the purpose of rewarding us.  This must mean that he will evaluate us within the grace that he has supplied abundantly through the cross (2 Cor.5:11-21; Eph.2:1-11; Rom.5:1-11).  So yes, the Lord will reveal our thoughts, words, and deeds to us (our “exit interview” for this age so to speak) so that we will see how great is the grace of God that has saved us through the cross of Christ. The Lord has the ability to examine a forgiven life for fruit, even after he has removed all the guilt and condemnation from it.  If this were not true, there would be no basis for reward in the next age, which is a concept that he clearly wants us to grasp as we serve him in this age (Matt.5:12; 6:4; 1 Cor.3:14; 9:17; Phil.4:14-17; Col.3:24; Heb.10:35; 11:26; 2 Jn.1:8).

 Remember, the key among Christians is not that they cease to ever have a sinful thought, word, or deed (James 3:2 reminds us that we all stumble in many ways), but that they cease to have unrepentant, unconfessed sins.  Genuine, healthy Christians are very aware of their ongoing battle against sin, a battle that sometimes wounds them badly. Yet, even when it wounds them and they fall, they get back up and re-enter the war because they know that the Lord has defeated the ultimate power and condemnation of sin on their behalf.  They move forward in their lives, doing constant battle against the surrounding culture’s influence toward skepticism and lust (the “world,” 1 Jn.2:15-17), their own internal propensity to sin (the “flesh,” Gal.5:16-25), and the malign influence of the enemy (the devil, 1 Pet.5:8; 1 Jn.5:18-19; Cor.10:3-5).  They take sin seriously, but rest in what Christ has done for them instead of what they themselves have accomplished in their personal victories and defeats (Gal.3:13).  They do all this not with terror or foreboding, but with a serious and sober joy that comes from confidence in the Lord, his cross and resurrection, and his corresponding promise to regenerate the universe (Phil.2:12-13; Rev.20-22).  In other words, they press through this dark age (Gal.1:3) by keeping their eyes on the Lord and his good future (Phil.3:12).

 That same ultimate evaluation will occur for all humans of all time.  However, in the case of the unrepentant and unbelieving they will bear the final judgment for their own evil (Rev.20:11-15).  This is because they never asked for God’s forgiveness. They never repented or admitted they needed grace, either because they thought their own goodness apart from God’s grace was sufficient (moralism and Pharisaism) or because they refused to think of his presence and coming judgment at all and so lived in idolatry and rebellion against him (Rom.1:18-32).  Either way, they stand in judgment at the end. 

 So the gospel, the good news of who Jesus Christ is and what he has done, includes a final judgment of the righteous and the unrighteous (Jn.5:25-29).  This is sobering, but not terrifying for Christians.  And sobriety is a good thing in a drunken world, a blessing God has given us to keep us on the right side of the road that leads to life.