The Meyer Minute

The Meyer Minute for January 29, 2019

Yesterday five police officers were shot in Houston. When terrible shootings happen, and sadly they’ve become all too common, people in places high and low encourage us to pray, and we do, praying for those devastated by the violence and praying for peace. After deadly shootings in San Bernardino several years ago, the headline in the New York Daily News blared, “God isn’t fixing this.”

Of course, God isn’t fixing this! God is saying, See how your life goes, America, if you don’t live in true fear of Me. Read what Paul said about the worldly wise people of his day: “Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks for him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools…. Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind…” and then follows a catalog of sins that plague our lives still today (Romans 1:21, 22, 28-32).

Do you think gun control is the solution? Or the opposite, every citizen armed? Both solutions are superficial because they presume humanity is OK, that we can fix this, ignoring that these horrific crimes are symptoms of a problem between us and God. God has a fix, but as long as we imagine we can fix evil on our own, God will keep giving us over to our self-willed ways. Everything will stay imprisoned under sin (Galatians 3:22) until more and more Americans shudder in fear before the Creator and Judge. That’s the start of repentance, not just sorrow but sorrow spoken to God. Then God speaks His fix, and we are changed for life.

“If people desert God, God must desert people. The only way He could avoid this ‘divine necessity’ (if we dare call it that) was to place our sins on His own dear Son and desert Him in our place” (Francis Rossow, “Preaching the Creative Gospel Creatively,” 31). There’s God’s fix, and you and I need to be in it.

“Stir up Your power, O Lord, and come, that by Your protection we may be rescued from the threatening perils of our sins.”

 

 

 

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The Meyer Minute for January 28, 2019

Jesus “looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5). When I wake up, it takes time and a cup of coffee to get my mind focused. This morning my thoughts eventually settled on “hardness of heart.” Jesus experienced it and so do we.

Yesterday marked the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Vanessa Gera of the Associated Press writes, “Recent surveys show that knowledge of the atrocities during World War II is declining generally.” A study in Canada “found that 52 percent of millennials in Canada cannot name even one concentration camp or ghetto and 62 percent of millennials did not know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.” “One in twenty adults in Britain do not believe the Holocaust took place.” Ms. Gera says studies in the United States have similar findings. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, A6).

There’s something deeper here than not knowing history; it’s denying what’s before your eyes. Eyewitnesses and photos show atrocities, but you can deny what you see. Denying what you see – this is important – is about far more than historical events. It is also about our religious attitudes.

After the resurrection, “the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted” (Matthew 28:16-17). That wasn’t the first time Jesus encountered hardness of heart. He encountered it regularly in the scribes and Pharisees. When “he looked around at them with anger,” Jesus was grieved because the Pharisees preferred their religious legalisms to His compassion for all. He encountered hardness of heart so much so that He seems to have thrown up His hands in frustration. “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn” (Matthew 11:17).

We are supposed to live by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), but it’s also quite biblical that what we sees drives us to see our need for a Savior and to trust God’s promises in Jesus (Galatians 3:24; 2 Corinthians 1:20, 24). “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that ‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven’” (Mark 4:11-12). Dear God, let not my heart be hard!