Hope deferred makes the heart sick

 Imagine the scene: The Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. standing there, looking at into the eyes of the oppressed, downtrodden, those who have mourned, those who were broken, in despair, in search of hope – the mass staring back up to the one they were praying would give them a new dream…

Dr King knew that the dream of America is not and could never be, bound up in the hopes of man as such hopes are fleeting. Hope that heals is hope that is permanent - tattooed on the heart (or hand) so as never to be forgotten. So, when the Rev. Martin Luther King stood before the watching world to proclaim the end of legal discrimination against all people, he did so as one who had seen God’s righteousness enacted at the Cross, and was therefore hungry for righteousness in his own day. And because this reality of righteousness can come only from God Himself, Dr King, in his speech, cried out to the Lord with the words of the prophet Isaiah, proclaiming the coming of the Lords day.

The voice of one crying in the wilderness [saying:] Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. For every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together (Isaiah 40.3-5)

Dr King knew what the church must know, what the world must come to know: that our hunger and thirst for righteousness are only satisfied by and in Christ. This hunger must be our hope here and now – it must propel us to live out Jesus’ insane love. As Proverbs 13.12 states, Hope deferred makes the heart sick, But desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

If our hope is not in Christ because our hunger and thirst are for the savory tastes of society as opposed to the Savior of society, it is certain our hearts will be made sick. 

Lunatic, Liar or Lord?

Jesus. Some people claim he's a great teacher while others think he is nothing more than a great prophet. Some dismiss him as a liar or even a lunatic, (a madman), and yet a countless number hail him as Savior and Lord. The great C.S. Lewis once remarked:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (Mere Christianity, 56)

Whatever people think of him, nobody can deny that he stands at the very crux of human history. As Talk-Show host Larry King answered when asked who he would most like to have interviewed from across history, "Jesus Christ—I would like to ask Him if He was indeed virgin born, because the answer to that question would define history." Larry King was absolutely right as in his answer, he identifies the hinge upon which all history turns. The call placed on each one of us today is to identify the claims for the deity of Christ so to then understand the foundation of the faith found in Christ through the Holy Spirit.

Life beckons us to investigate the claims of Christ for in doing so we come to realize what it means to be a player in God's drama - that is, to be a participant in this thing called life. ‘God does not play the world drama all on his own; he makes room for humanity to join in,’ and this joining in is made possible through the performance of Christ. And from His performance, humanity is given insight into our own personhood as Christ is, according to Hans Urs von Balthasar, "the center of the world, he is the key to the interpretation not only of creation, but of God Himself. . . . God wills to maintain his relation to the world only with Jesus Christ as the centre of that relationship, the content and fulfilment of the eternal Covenant." (Theology of History, 20-22)

What are you doing to gain the meaning of life? Who do you say Jesus Christ is?