Lessons from Lazarus

“…and Jesus called to him, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ and the dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.  Jesus said to them, ‘Take off his grave clothes and let him go’  (john 11:43-44)

Everything changes when we move from death to life and whether we realize it or not,our movement into the light is tainted by the stink of death.  Yes, we are a new creation when we accept Jesus as our Savior but we move forward into our new Christian life, like Lazarus, still wearing our grave clothes.  We continue to stink from the habits of the flesh that have corrupted us for years.

Just as we are called to make a decision, so too were the witnesses to this miracle who were not unaffected.  John tells us that “many put their faith in Him” but some of them “went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done“.  When faced with the life and death call of Christ on your life, how do you respond?  Do you put your faith in the life-giving One or do you choose the things of this fallen world?

The religious leaders of the day responded as we so often do…with self-preservation in mind.  After calling a meeting of the Sanhedrin, they exclaimed “what are we accomplishing?  Here is this man performing many miraculous signs.  If we let him go on like this, the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation”

God told us in the beginning that he would place before us life and death…blessing and cursing and he urged us to choose life.  He knows the utter depths of our hearts and allows us all to make a choice…each day – between life and death…between His good path and the one of destruction…between one of selflessness or one of radical self-absorbtion.

A path has been placed before you today – which do you choose?

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

…Robert Frost