Pastor's Corner

for Sunday January 16th
I was recently watching “Eat Pray Love” a movie based on the memoirs of American author Elizabeth Gilbert, who traveled the world to “find herself”. In the movie she concludes that “God is in me and I in Him.” This God is too small. This god may be OK if I’m shut up in some Buddhist monastery and don’t have deal with the real world. How does this concept of God help you when someone mindlessly kills six people and wounds 14 others? What do you do when a jealous husband walks up and shoots his wife’s lover and then himself? What do you do when a 12 year girl is abducted by a 28 year man? When things get tough and life becomes too big for us, the God “that is in me and I’m in Him” is too small to give us any hope. No, we need a sovereign God; an infinite God to hang on to. Only the God who created everything we see (and everything we can’t see), is big enough to give us the assurance that He truly IS in control! When our world overwhelms us with its cruelty and lack of moral standards we need to know that there is a God who is perfectly good and compassionate; who hates evil and therefore will intervene and do something about what’s going on in this world. This God can be frightening, but at the same time we are comforted because we sense that we are not helplessly caught up in some giant machine but that there is a God who is bigger than it all and controls it all. I still can’t make sense of tragedies like this shooting in Arizona but I take great comfort in the knowledge that God, who is sovereign over all things,
Pastor Don.