Announcement
Join us for "drive thru communion" this Sunday! We will worship together via Zoom at 5 pm. During our worship service, I (Soren) will let you know where I will be from 6-7 pm, and we will serve communion at that location. Jesus is with you spiritually, he remembers you, as you remember him in the bread and the wine, even now.
Readings
Old Testament: Job 23:1-12
Psalm 139
Gospel: John 12:20-26
Devotional
I wonder if you had an experience that so many seem to have had at some point during your youth. You are in a public place invested in whatever endeavor occupied your young mind. All of a sudden, you look up, and, to your horror, your parents are nowhere in sight. As you scrambled to try to find them, your sense of desperation and panic only gets worse. Granted, young kids aren’t the most capable of rational thought, especially in panicked situations, and it is highly unlikely that your parents completely forgot, never to return, but the fear in the moment is overwhelming. It isn’t just that your parents seemed to have forgotten you, but they seemed to have forgotten you when you needed them most. In your sense of despair, they are nowhere to be found. “Will they ever remember me?” you think to yourself.
In so many words, Job is asking the same question of God. “Will He remember me?” Job has lost almost everything he has, and his friends are of little help. Rather than simply being a loving presence suffering alongside Job, they try to offer airtight explanations and theological elucidation. But Job is less concerned with why things have happened as he is with the pressing question of what will happen. Will God remember me?
Does it strike you as odd that this honest confession is in our God-inspired Scripture? It should. Because it means that faithfulness it not synonymous with a certainty of having all of the answers of your trust in God worked out. There is room within faithfulness to confess to God your inadequate understanding of His will. However, Job’s questions don’t lead him away from following God, as ours tend to do. It can be easy to look elsewhere for comfort when it feels like God is distant, but Job does the opposite. His reasoning is just as astounding as his original confession. “When He has tried me, I shall come out as gold. My foot has held fast to his steps; I have kept his way and have not turned aside.” The pursuit of trust in the midst of uncertainty is the catalyst whereby Job’s faith is elevated. If we strove to make that our pandemic prayer, is it possible that God could do the same for us? That in the fire of these present trials, we could come out on the other side with a “golden” faith? God’s Word sure gives us reason to believe so.
Hymn
Nothing But the Blood
Prayer
O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people;
Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who
calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with
you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever
and ever. Amen.