October 16th, 20

 FROM DIS-INTEGRATION TO INTEGRITY

Today’s readings are Job 1-2 and Acts 6-7.  We are reading from the New Living Translation.

He’s a man of integrity. That’s what God says about Job.  He’s the finest man in all the earth.  He has an integrated life, a life that makes sense. He is not disintegrated or fragmented.  But how easy it is to be fragmented, chipped away at, torn apart, left in pieces.  Unexplained loss comes into our life when our children are adversely affected, when our body breaks down.  When things on the outside are coming undone, it’s so easy for us to lose heart and abandon THE thing that gives our life integrity and coherence. That “thing” is God. When my own life is falling apart it’s easy to say that God doesn’t make sense.   It’s easy to echo the words of Job’s wife,

“Are you still trying to maintain your integrity? Curse God and die.” (Job 2:9 NLT)

But that’s not what Job does.  Job maintains his integrity.  He maintains a life centered around, and anchored in, his faith in God.  He believes that God IS, and God is GOOD.  Even when his life is fragmenting he believes in God’s goodness.  His Center holds.  He maintains his integrity –  integrated not disintegrated.  He is integrating the good and the bad circumstances in his life, by faith, into the promise of God’s good heart for him.  So he endures.  He sits and waits for God.  He trusts that God will somehow prove himself faithful.  

We’re going to see that Job looked, in faith, to Someone that was to come.  Someone far greater than Job would come into the world and absorb all the loss.  He too, would be pulled apart.  This world would shred him to pieces – disintegrated in front of the world’s very eyes, on the cross. But Jesus would maintain his integrity.  The Center would hold for him.  His life would be pulled apart, but it would also be reintegrated through the power of the resurrection.

He suffered so that we might have a way to be put back together again when life pulls us apart.  We live in a world that is disintegrating, being pulled apart, and where evil is present.  But the One who is far greater than Job, has given us a way, through the power of the resurrection, to live lives of integrity – to have our lives put back together again.  

He absorbed the punishment and death, and was raised up to new life.  Now He offers that new life to the rest of us who are sitting in the ashes of our own lives – in desperate need of Him.  Job’s going to see it and we can see that today, too.  We can trust him, that He is good, and that He is making a way for us to have integrity and be made whole.

May you know and experience the wholeness and integrity that the resurrection life, alone, brings.  This is offered to us through the One who is far greater than Job – our champion, Jesus. 

You are loved!