Today's passage is Matthew 24:29-39.
Jesus says that right after the suffering preceding his return, the sun and moon will lose their light and the stars fall from the sky. Everyone will see Jesus come out of the sky. Angels will gather the faithful. Jesus compares all these signs to the signs of fig trees announcing summer. He says heaven and earth will pass away but not his words. Then he says no one except the Father will know exactly when all this will occur, no more than people knew when the Flood would come.
Today I went to hear Phillip Yancey speak at Ahyeon Church.
One of the things he talked about was the historical movement of the Church from Palestine to Europe to America to Africa and East Asia now.
Yancey thought the reason God moved was that he went where he was wanted. This reminded me of what one of my Sunday School boys said: God is always open to us but we're not always open to God.
That was the case with the people of Noah's day. They didn't want God, they weren't open to God. But he came to Noah. And he came to me too. It took a long time to build the ark, though.
God comes to us in our suffering. I think that's why Pastor Kim keeps telling us that suffering is the blessing. That has been my experience. And, as Jesus says today, I never saw my suffering coming.
I didn't know the day or the hour that my life would fall apart like stars falling out of the sky.
When I got married the first time I was full of happy dreams.
I went back to university.
We had babies.
Everything was going to be wonderful.
But it wasn't.
Life slowly ground down to the kind of poverty I read about in novels.
The daily walk through the house to kill bugs.
The poison traps to kill squirrels that lived in the walls.
The ice on the bedroom ceilings in the winter.
Worn out clothes that could not be replaced because what money we had went to the children.
The optimism that died and the anxiety of wondering how we were going to survive or if we even would.
I lost faith in myself and my dreams.
What nearly destroyed me was the assault on my pride.
Wasn't I better than the uneducated, uncultured, boozing mass of unskilled laborers I had to often work with on weekends and holidays?
Although the answer was NO, I wasn't better, I did not want to face it.
In his mercy, God didn't make me do it at that ime.
In his mercy, He simply called me to faith and began my long transformation.
The sun rose and the stars returned to the sky.
But what was missing in God's call to me was my repentance.
I had the joy of the Lord in me over the undeserved gift of my salvation, but I did not go very far or very deep in my repentance of my past life and of my sins.
I didn't want to go down the dark road of repentance.
No one challenged me to seriously look at myself and my sins until Pastor Kim repeatedly did at Wooridle Church.
To seriously search myself for my sins was an act of self-awareness and self-knowledge I did not want to engage in.
Know thyself, said the great Greek oracle. Good advice.
Without repentance, though, it's useless.
If you see you are an adulterer and do nothing about it, your self-knowledge means nothing.
If you cheerfully admit you spend more time on video games than you do on QT, but do nothing to change that, then there is no repentance and your self-knowledge has no value because it leads nowhere.
For a good portion of my life, I didn't want to know about myself because it would have ruined my fragile self-image of superiority.
So I blinded myself to my sins, my failings and my weaknesses.
That way I could keep the sun, the moon and the stars in the sky.
Eventually the cost was too great and the stars all fell .
One was called my job, another my money, another my wife, another my children.
In the end I sat in a small room looking at an empty sky.
It took God five years to answer my cry for help.
That help was Pastor Kim Yang Jay calling me to repent.
Without repentance I would have no life.
Through my repentance God built me an ark.
Lord, thank you for stooping so low that you could meet me in my sin. Thank you for your grace. Let me not quench your Holy Spirit in me.
Search me, Lord, show me my sins. Give me the courage I need to repent. Give me the strength to repent more deeply. Wash me clean, I pray.
