|
Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent
March 14, 2025
Reading: Hebrews 4:12-13:
Indeed, the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
Rendering an account of yourself – or at least your productivity – has become a popular demand lately, at least in some sectors of the U.S. labor force. And the demand comes with shocking immediacy. Justification must be submitted, in quantifiable form, via email, as soon as the request is made. For some employees, they no longer have histories or faces; they are merely the background noise that gets in the way of work that may or may not be accomplished more efficiently by other means. Whether this demand for their accounting for themselves is good policy is becoming a much-debated question; regardless, it has certainly raised fears.
Rendering an account of yourself is inevitably a fearsome task. It puts us on the spot. No matter how confident or assured we may feel internally, this opens us to the scrutiny of others. And there’s no telling what their judgment might be. They have different eyes. They may have far different values. And differences noted tend to be registered as short-comings, which put us at fault. And if this is true amongst ourselves, how much more unnerving must it be to contemplate being judged by God, when everything about us – everything – will be “laid bare.”
Even those who aren’t religious can imagine the dread of this. One merely has to increase exponentially the fear we can feel before one another. But is this appropriate to God? Does God judge as we do, only infinitely more severely? Our impulse is to say yes, because we simply don’t know of any other way to judge or to demand an accounting. But I’m not at all sure that God’s judgment is in any way like ours.
The testimony of the Gospels is that Jesus is the overturning of the very judgment we fear. It’s not the case that God will judge us negatively and Jesus will then step in to deliver us from the condemnation we deserve. What God makes known in Jesus is that his judgment is his grace. God’s judgment is his forgiveness and reconciliation. God’s judgment is God’s decision not to judge by the standards we know – which seems impossible to us. But this is precisely where the Word of God cuts most deeply, and for our benefit. For it severs judgment from condemnation, and in so doing, it removes all fear from the prospect of standing before God. And the account we must give is, then, not the measure of what we have done; nor will we be confronted by whether our actions have made the grade. The only account that will matter is whether we have been thankful – which we will realize when God greets us face to face.
Prayer
Heavenly Father:
Hold not our sins up against us,
but hold us up against our sins,
so that the thought of Thee when it wakens in our soul,
should not remind us of what we have committed,
but of what Thou hast forgiven,
not of how we went astray,
but of how Thou didst save us.
Amen.
Kierkegaard
| 
