Daily Lesson for April 4, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson is from Psalm 107:

10 Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death,

prisoners in affliction and in irons,

11 for they had rebelled against the words of God,

and spurned the counsel of the Most High.

12 So he bowed their hearts down with hard labor;

they fell down, with none to help.

13 Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,

and he delivered them from their distress.

14 He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst their bonds apart.

Saint Augustine once said that sin was its own punishment. He spoke of what he knew; for Saint Augustine was not always a saint.

Though Augustine had been raised by his very devout mother, he chose to live a reckless and rebellious youth. It was a life characterized by both intellectual and sexual hedonism which he would later describe as a "hell of lust." His choices led him to a place of great emotional and spiritual misery. In a slight twist on an old saying, Augustine unmade his bed, and his punishment was that he had to lay chained in the misery of it. Sin was indeed its own punishment; for his choices had brought him to a place the psalmist describes as one of "darkness and the shadow of death."

It is living - or should I say dying - in that place that drives so many of us back to God. We make choices that are destructive and ruinous, and yet it is the fallout of our choices that finally gets us to the point of surrender. Like the prodigal son, it is the pain of our own lives that gets us to wake up to the mess we've made and decide to turn back home.

We get to that Dr. Phil moment when something inside or someone outside asks us, "And how's that working for you?" and we realize it's not working very well at all. We realize that we are prisoners of our own sin and in need of redemption. That's the moment when we cry out to God for help and rescue - when we realize the way we're working it doesn't work.

Julian of Norwich had a wonderful way of describing all this. "First the fall, then the redemption - and both are the grace of God," she said. That is so true. Without the fall - hard and painful and humiliating as it is - we would never have even realized we were living in darkness and death, and never have cried out for light and life.