Our Old Adam does not like the cross. Nevertheless, God gives each person a cross to bear because of the Word. It may be a Chicanery or Babtist conversion in the family, a spouse who takes the opposite position, or another problem. Several Church Growth leaders are now facing an old Jewish curse - "May you marry a pious woman and then lose your faith."
We would like to see nothing but love, happiness, prosperity, and the esteem of the world from adhering to the Word, but instead we find hatred, rejection, loss of income, and shunning as a reward.
St. Therese, the Little Flower, told God in her confusion, "This is why You have so few friends - you treat them so badly!"
Paul Gerhardt and John Bunyan saw things differently, because they had saving faith. Gerhardt's hymns and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress are filled with spiritual wisdom about the cross. Lutherans are telling me that they are reading the Deutschlander book on the cross.
The political solution is to say, "If it's bad for me at this moment, I won't do it - If it's good for me at the moment - I will." Thus the blind lead the blind into a pit. Many momentary calamities are blessings, but we never see the blessings develop if we want to invent our own, and manage the world better than God can.
How can we admire Lutheran clergy who were thrown into dungeons and threatened with death for being faithful, if we worry about missing a meal or a committee assignment?
