Daily Lesson for September 9, 2016 Part 2

A Part 2 on today's Daily Lesson:

Today's Daily a lesson comes from John chapter 11 verses 43 and 44:

43 When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” 44 The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

As I said in my earlier post, a person came to see me who though a Christian is still bound with problems of addiction and substance abuse and is, quite frankly, wondering if their Christian experience of salvation was meaningful or real or somehow inadequate.

What the Lazarus story teaches us is that salvation -- the act of being saved from the existential death we call sin -- is very often a process. It does not always happen all at once and we must not impress upon people the demand that it do so.

The Christian understanding is that the death that is in humanity has been swallowed up in the life that is Christ. There is more life in Christ than there is dean in us. As Jesus says in today's Lesson, he is "the resurrection and the life".  Wherever Christ is there is resurrection and life -- even in death.  This is he meaning of true life. Death has lost its sting -- which is to say it's terror over our lives.

And yet though the disease of sin and death may be healed in and of itself, their consequences are seldom undone all at once. It takes time -- sometimes years, sometimes a lifetime -- to be made well. What the Bible refers to as our grave clothes -- the burdens of shame, guilt, anxiety, subconscious disease -- we still wear. The process of living into the fullness of life involves our stripping away and being unbound by these garments of death.

For those still somewhere in between, like my visitor, the word for you is to keep hope. God is not done yet. You still have things to take off and put. But the good news is that the disease itself has been cured. Your sins are forgiven. Death has been swallowed up by life. Accept these things and accept where yourself. For God has accepted you.

"Unbind him, let him go," Jesus said.  And it happened. My encouragement is to wait for it to happen.

Or, as they say in AA, "it works if you work it."