Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.”
NL Daily Devotion for Friday, July 29, 2022
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
I don’t know about you, but I certainly can’t claim to be righteous. Not for lack of trying, of course. I have my moments where I think I know everything about everything and if the universe just followed my orders, all would be utopia. It’s good for me to come up against some stark, spiritual reality sometimes. God is righteous. God, in the embodied person of Jesus, is righteous. And Jesus’s love for us was (and is) so incomprehensibly enormous that he chose to experience the most painful and humiliating sort of death possible in order to clear Sin and Death out of the way for our (the unrighteous’) rebirth in the spirit.
In other words, I was never gonna earn salvation through my own merits, so God handed it to me, fully aware of my deficiencies and in spite of them. How humbling is that?
How do I interpret Jesus’ act on the cross? What leads me to that interpretation?