“How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of him who brings good news,
who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness,
who publishes salvation,
who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.'”
– Isaiah 52:7

Many of us are naturally shy and fearful about sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. We fear we’ll mess it up. We fear we’ll be rejected. We fear that our mistakes and shortcomings make us hopeless hypocrites.

This verse describes how we really are when we live the command to share the hope we have in Jesus Christ. We are beautiful. We are beautiful messengers of hope and good news. We are beautiful sharers of peace and happiness. We make public the beautiful salvation and redemption available through faith in Jesus Christ.

Sharing Christ is beautiful and we are made beautiful by the act of grace that is sharing Christ! Don’t let fear keep you from the beautiful work to which we are called.

“Woe to him who strives with him who formed him,
a pot among earthen pots!
Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’
or ‘Your work has no handles’?”
– Isaiah 45:9

We have a natural tendency to argue with God about how He chooses to exercise His sovereignty over the universe. We argue about the challenges and limitations He places in our lives which we don’t appreciate. We question the catastrophes that seem to be everywhere these days. In our radical autonomy we make ourselves God and simply deny the reality of what He created and how He created us.

Woe to us when we do! Our modern culture – churched and unchurched – has far too high of an opinion of ourselves and our wisdom and far too low of an opinion of God and His wisdom. God is indeed supreme and sovereign. He is all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good and He sees across time. We can either expend our energy battling against that and trying to enlist others to join in our denial of reality -OR- we can trust in God’s wisdom and goodness, even when we can’t understand it because we are finite and He is infinite.

When we trust in God rather than battle Him, there’s a wonderful peace that comes from simply asking our Creator each day how we can best glorify Him by living within His plan rather than rebelling against it. There is a joy from pursuing an ever-deepening relationship with our Creator rather than wasting our life battling Him.

“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 3:27-28

There is great encouragement and great challenge in the extraordinary truth of these verses! When we put our faith in Christ, we are born again, new creation, one with Christ, and one in Christ. We are adopted as children of God and become one with all our brothers and sisters in Christ of every race, nationality, ethnicity, and social status. This is glorious!!!

The encouragement is that we are equal and we are one in Christ. The external circumstances of our lives are radically unimportant compared to the internal reality of who we are in Jesus Christ. There is no place for racism, xenophobia, or class division in Christ. There is no place for the radical separations and divisions encouraged and embraced by our secular culture. This is the encouragement of this truth.

The challenge of this truth is that we are truly one in Christ. What affects one of us affects all of us and we must care for the pain of any fellow Christian. Thus there should be no injustice or hurt committed against one Christian, one group of Christians, or one race of Christians that we don’t all feel deeply and minister to. There can be no casual dismissing of the deep cries of pain and injustice raised our brothers and sisters of other races. We are one in Christ. Thus we must be concerned with the genuine well-being of all those with whom we are united – black or white, rich or poor, free or persecuted, citizen or immigrant. We are one!

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.” – Galatians 3:13-14

It’s good to periodically reflect on what exactly Christ did for us! As He died for us on the cross, He literally became a curse, cursed by God to suffer in agony and die hanging on the cross. He carried the weight of our sin on that cross and suffered God’s righteous anger for it. Jesus did it to redeem us – to buy our freedom.

On the cross, Jesus bought our freedom from a life of grinding, exhausting, and ultimately futile legalistic rule following that could never restore us to relationship with the Lord. He bought our freedom from the power of sin to control us, dominate our lives, and determine our fate. He bought our freedom from separation from the Living God of the Universe. He bought our freedom from death.

Through faith in Jesus Christ, God’s long-promised blessing of all tribes and tongues throughout the Earth becomes reality and all who put their faith in Christ are united with Him and filled with the Holy Spirit.

“The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.”
– Isaiah 40:8

As humans, we intensely feel the moment we’re in. We feel its crushing weight, its fears and anxieties, its passions, pleasures, and pains, its highs and its lows. We intensely feel the burden of recent weeks, months, and years.

Scripture reminds us that all these things are temporary. Our greatest achievements and also the horrors of the present will fade away. The empires we build and the indignities we suffer will one day be no more. Pandemics and politics will all pass away.

The Word of God isn’t temporary. The glorious truths of Scripture stand unchanging no matter what changes around us. God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit transcend time. God is sovereign over all things. God’s grace, mercy, love, patience, faithfulness, righteousness, mercy, holiness, and justice have no limits. We too will live forever (whether eternally in God’s presence or eternally separated from God in the Christ-less eternity of Hell). These things are permanent.

We must seek a godly perspective as we’re tempted to be swept up in the passions and crises of the present. The present is important and we must glorify God in the present, but the present is not all there is. Indeed, the present will soon be past. However, God’s Word, God’s truth, and God Himself stand forever. We must invest in forever, represent forever, find our hope in forever, and enjoy the peace that comes from living in the present with a forever perspective!