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    10:30 am Worship

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    Friday, May 17, 2024

    Psalm 102: 1-3

    1 Lord, hear my prayer, and let my cry come before you;
    hide not your face from me in the day of my trouble.
    2 Incline your ear to me; when I call, make haste to answer me,
    3 For my days drift away like smoke, and my bones are hot as burning coals.

     

    Paul Tillich, one of the 20th Century’s great theologians, once said we humans “need to see something stronger than death.” He had lived through two world wars, and he knew humans couldn’t solve everything. He had seen millions die in war, hundreds of thousands in revolutions, tens of thousands in persecutions. The only place, he concluded, where we can see something stronger than death is in love.

    “Love overcomes separation and creates participation in which there is more than that which the individuals involved can bring to it. Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. Therefore we love in others, for we do not merely love others, but we love the Love that is in them and which is more than their or our love... It is love, human and divine, which overcomes death in nations and generations and in all the horror of our time... Death is given power over everything finite, especially in our period of history. But death is given no power over love. Love is stronger.” (The New Being [New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955],  173)

    God made each of us, and God knows every atom of our being, every corner of our mind, every quirk of our will. The psalmist captures the completeness of God’s knowledge.

     

    You know when I sit down and when I rise up

    you discern my thoughts from far away

    you search out my path

    and are acquainted with all my ways.

    For it was you who formed my inward parts;

    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

    I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

    Wonderful are your works...

    In your book were written all the days that were formed for me

    when none of them as yet existed... (Ps. 139: 2-3; 13-14; 16)

     

    God looks at us with compassion. He sends his son to bear our infirmities, to carry our diseases. He wants to heal us through and through, not just in body, but in spirit, mind, emotion. He wants us to be able to love completely. Let us, then, turn ourselves over now into his hands and trust and believe and hope with the conviction of those who know God overcomes even death itself through the loving act of his son.

     

    Hymn of the day: Healing River of the Spirit. Online at Rossford UMC - Media. 

     

    Rev. Lawrence Keeler