General News
30 November, 2025
In good faith
IN GOOD FAITH: Luke 22:5-19 How irritating it is when you’re busy doing something important, and there’s a sudden interruption. The whole story of God’s people is one interruption after another.
As often as God’s people interrupted His plans by chasing after idols, He interrupted them to bring them back to Him.
He sent the prophets; He sent His Son.
He sent Martin Luther and others like him to restore and reform the church. To this day He sends pastors to preach the Word and administer the Sacraments.
The Lord interrupts our own lives by continuously sending us opportunities to be ‘fishers of men.’
But these are all minor interruptions. Jesus said that the time is coming when ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven’ (Lk. 21:10, 11), and ‘ … On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea.
People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken’ (Lk. 21:25, 26). This will be the interruption to end all interruptions!
The time when the world itself and everything in it is interrupted, so to speak.
We don’t think of the end of days often.
But when Jesus draws our attention to it like this, He doesn’t want us to become pessimists or anxious.
He simply wants us to remember that the world is temporary. And the more we consider how temporary the world is, the more clear for us becomes the truth of Christ: That no matter what the devil, the world or our sinful selves may throw at us, ‘Not a hair of your head will perish’ (Lk. 21:18).
In the midst of all the unpleasant goings-on of life, the fact remains that our heavenly Father is a God of love, who will allow nothing in all creation to separate us from Him – not even the multitude of interruptions we face, great or small, that strain our relationships with others and cause us so much grief.
That’s why Jesus also said ‘‘Stand firm, and you will win life’ (Lk. 21:18). Faith in Christ is like a pair of binoculars, because it opens our eyes to see things we otherwise can’t: that the world is temporary, but the ‘life of the world to come’ is eternal, and to realise that by the blood of Christ, that life is ours already.
Without God’s love expressed for us in the death and resurrection of Christ for the forgiveness of sins, then all we could see would be the ceaseless interruptions of the world –sadness, sickness, misery, conflict and strife.
But in Christ our eyes are opened to the unending, uninterrupted world that goes beyond anything we can every imagine or experience during our lives on earth!