Lives lived inside out

Here we are at the start of another year. Are you hopeful or fearful? Probably a mixture of both. As a Christian, I believe it is God’s common grace and mercy which has preserved each of us so far. I use the adjective ‘common’ here in the sense that it is something shared equally by all alike.

Jesus said that God’s wide distribution of his goodness is given to all people and is evident in that he causes his sun to shine and rain to fall on bad people and good people alike. Some who are personally having a hard time of it may dispute this view. Nevertheless, isn’t God’s general grace and mercy evident in the fact that for most of the time, most people know the provision of sufficient food, clothing, shelter and health? After all, it is because this is the normal way of life that we feel aggrieved when these blessings come under threat or are lost.

But life is more than caring for our outward bodies and the environment in which we live. We each have an inner life which is expressed by our outer life. The natural tendency is for us to concentrate on the outward because that’s what other people see of us and we see of them. Jesus, however, likens our lives to a cup: ‘clean out the inside of the cup and the outside will be clean also’, he says.

When Jesus fed the multitudes, set people free from what bound them and healed the sick, he was demonstrating the generosity of God as referred to above. These were all outward signs of what he can do for us inwardly; he can clean the inside of the cup so to speak. He says that he will feed our souls, set us free to live in a new way, give us a renewed mindset and bring us home to God.

Unlike the common blessings of life, these inward, or spiritual, blessings from Jesus don’t come automatically but, like the sunshine and the rain, they are freely given. To receive what Jesus has for us, whether we think of ourselves as a good or bad person, means turning ourselves over to him with a child-like attitude of trust.