Back to the Future

 March 25, 2022

How often I’ve listened to Christians speak of the “attacks of Satan” upon them. We face a difficulty, a temptation, or an obstacle, perhaps an illness, financial instability, a strained or failed relationship, even death, and we interpret it as an attack from the enemy. It is tempting at such times to feel as if we have been singled out for special wrath.

In his book, “Praying Circles Around the Lives of Your Children,” Mark Batterson references Lisa Bevere, who in her book “Girls With Swords,” compares the enemy’s attacks to the Terminator movie in which the heroine is living a rather ordinary life until a robotic assassin from the future tries to kill her. She doesn’t know why this is happening until it is explained to her that in the future, an artificial intelligence network will initiate a nuclear war designed to wipe out all mankind. Her yet-to-be-born son will rally an army of survivors to lead a resistance movement. This movement is on the verge of victory, so the Terminator has been sent back in time to kill her before her son is born.

Bevere muses: “The attacks on your life have much more to do with who you might be in the future than who you have been in the past.” Batterson adds that they may have to do with what God plans to do through your children or grandchildren than they do about you.

It’s a powerful thought. Much of what we think is about us isn’t about us at all. You may labor in obscurity, imagining yourself a failure, but God is using you as the incubator for what he intends to do long after you have been laid in the ground. In my reading of Ephesians 3 this morning, I came across this little gem: “I ask that you do not lose heart at my tribulations for you, which is your glory.” (V.13)

In the next verse, Paul launches into his prayer for the Ephesian Christians. Linda has prayed this prayer over our grandchildren for over twenty years. I will quote it as she prays it.

“I pray that Christ may dwell more and more in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots grow down deep into the soil of his marvelous love so you may know and understand how wide, how long, how deep and how high God’s love for you really is, though you will never fully know or understand it, but someday you will be filled up with God himself.”

You can read it for yourself in Ephesians 3:14-21. What I hadn’t noticed before was the context of this prayer. Paul is languishing in a filthy Roman prison. He could be feeling sorry for himself, cursing Rome, railing against God, but instead he says to his readers, “I don’t want you to get discouraged because of me.” His suffering wasn’t about himself, but was for them. “For your glory,” is how he put it. 

Our steadfastness and faithfulness in the trials and difficulties of life aren’t merely the devil’s attacks upon us; they are components of God’s plan to bless someone else. He wants to be able to point at us and say, “Do you see him/her? THAT’s what I’m after. Follow his example. Listen to her words.” And it just may be that those times you stumbled and God picked you up were his way of keeping you on the right path for the sake of a child yet unborn who is to be the teacher, the pastor, the physician, or the statesman who will be instrumental in transforming the lives of multitudes. 

It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s about Jesus.