To my Son, my Brother

Fifteen years ago, and brief ones at that, I rocked you to sleep on the recliner and sang to you. Now you are too grown for me to hold you on my lap, but you are not too grown for me to hold you up in prayer to your Creator. During those fifteen years, your mother and I prayed for you, prayed that God would move in your life, that He would draw you to Him, that He would work in your heart through the Holy Spirit. There is not much else that brings about the feelings of inadequacy like being a father, and I confess that I struggled to always believe that God hears and answers the prayers we offered to Him through our lives.

But now I see you prepared to receive the seal of baptism and to publicly confess Jesus as your Savior and Lord, and as I rejoice over the positive changes emerging from your life, there is no need to look any further for a solid testimony that God indeed hears and answers prayer. You are now much more than my son; you are also my brother. About the journey with God you have begun, the commitment that you are making unto life or unto death, I wish I could tell you the road will always be smooth and the sun will perpetually smile warmly on your back, but that would be an untruth and would only set you up for disappointment and disillusion. The path you are choosing is the path of suffering, the path of brokenness. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about this path: “When God calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

You naturally wonder why God would not give you a path of blessing instead of a path of brokenness when you surrender to Him, the paradox being that the blessing is actually hidden inside the husk of suffering. Second Corinthians 3:18 give us the reason:

God does not take your life, pickle it, and preserve it to be set on a museum shelf, but He transforms it from one degree of glory to another, each one greater than the one before; the purpose being to radiate more and more of the Lord Jesus in your life.

A story found in all four Gospels illuminates this. The day when the disciples were faced with 5,000 hungry men plus equally hungry women and children, a little boy offered his five loaves and two fish to the Master. Did Jesus set the food on a ledge so everyone could admire it? Luke tells us He blessed and broke the loaves and fish, and everyone was filled. The message is unmistakable: What we surrender to Jesus He breaks, not to destroy it, but to bless and to multiply His kingdom.

And now that I have told you that you will be facing suffering, and that you will be broken, I also want to make sure you understand the two most important things you will need on your journey if you expect to remain faithful to your commitment.

You will need to take blood with you. That sounds morbid, but let me explain. You know how God created Adam and Eve over six thousand years ago, created them to live in a perfect world where brokenness and suffering were not even in the dictionary.

You know how Adam and Eve disobeyed their Creator by committing treason and handing the dominion they had been given over to the enemy. However, even though they had “fallen so deeply and become so alienated from God that neither they themselves nor their descendants nor angels nor men nor any creature in heaven or earth could reconcile them to God,” as the Dordrecht Confession of Faith says, God’s purpose and desire for them remained unchanged. He still longed for them to live in His presence, to have life instead of death.

It took the shedding of blood to cover their shame and their stain of sin. During the time of Moses this truth became even more clear. Just before the Angel of Death passed through the land of Egypt, God’s chosen could only escape the curse by the blood of a lamb spread on the doorposts and the lintels of their houses.

Back then when the high priest was required to enter the presence of God in the Holy of Holies, he could do so only with blood, the blood of a bull and the blood of a goat, sprinkled on the mercy seat then sprinkled on the ground in front of the mercy seat seven times.

The requirement of blood for you and me remains unchanged. We have been redeemed from our sins and brought into the presence of God by the blood of Jesus, that perfect Lamb. It seems we don’t have so much difficulty believing that our redemption comes through the blood, but for some reason we believe that once we have entered the kingdom of God by the blood, we abide in it by being good people or church members. The fact is, we abide in the presence of God by the same means we entered in the first place: by the blood of the Lamb.

And having entered that celestial city, you will have done so on no merit of your own; but again, it will be by the blood of the Lamb. You need it to commence your journey, you need it to continue your journey, and you need it to complete your journey.

Besides the blood for life, you will also need to take with you an instrument of death, the cross. You will discover, as every pilgrim has, that though you have been redeemed from your sins, there is something within you continually tripping you up, something enticing you to sin, something you can never overcome with iron-like resolution and determined self-will.

The blood cleanses you from the sins you committed, but it does not resolve the issue of sin. No matter how much good the old man attempts to accomplish, it can never be transformed and can never please God. It’s like taking a muddy swine, pressure-washing it, pouring perfume over its back, and hanging a red ribbon around its neck for decoration—it is still a pig.

In order for you and me to be faithful on our journey, in order for us to bear fruit within the kingdom, our flesh must die. We need to be able to say with Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ.” Listen closely now because many people make the fatal mistake of trying to crucify themselves. Can a man commit suicide by crucifixion? Just so, crucifying our own flesh is an impossibility.

The Bible talks about the crucifixion of our flesh as having been accomplished in the past when Jesus was crucified on Calvary. Just as the beauty of a trillium flower becomes reality to you by the faculty of sight, just as the sweet scent of honeysuckle becomes reality to you by the faculty of smell, and just as the song of the wood thrush becomes reality to you by the faculty of hearing, so the death of your flesh becomes reality to you by the faculty of faith, reckoning the old man on the cross with Christ. Yes, you will need to choose that death daily, says Paul, but your initial crucifixion is a historical event.

And so, my son, my brother, as God works in your life from one degree of glory to another, be constantly settled under the blood of the Lamb, always reckon by faith your flesh on the cross, and He will use you in great ways to strengthen and to build His kingdom.

—From your dad, your brother