I’m Raised Up in Christ
By Jessica Brodie
“And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” Ephesians 2:6
Have you ever been stuck in a difficult situation when along comes exactly the help you need?
There I was, on a giant tube in the middle of the lake, gripping the handles for dear life as we zipped across the water pulled by a speeding pontoon boat. “This is the best!” my stepson screeched in glee as we bumped along the surface, water spraying in my eyes and mouth. All I could do was hang on white-knuckled and breathe.
Then whoosh! With a tremendous zing, a wave washed me clean off the tube. I surfaced like a wet rat, sputtering water and bobbing like a buoy in my lifejacket.
Surely they saw me fall, I told my worried inner self. They had—in moments, the pontoon circled back to pick us up and haul us onboard. All was well.
But there have been times when I’ve “fallen off the tube” in the center of the lake—that is, the lake of life, with all sorts of unknown and possibly deadly terrors lurking beneath the surface. In those scary and almost paralyzing seasons, there was no rescue in sight. Divorce. Poverty. Spiritual wilderness. Sometimes everything turned out fine. Sometimes my prayers were answered. Sometimes not.
Yet there, stuck in the middle of the proverbial water, someone’s always been with me: Jesus Christ. Even when I didn’t know He was there, He remained.
In today’s verse, the apostle Paul reminded the early church of their dead state prior to Christ—stranded in the water and drowning from the weight of their sins. But because of God’s mercy, they’d received a “lifejacket” in Christ.
We all get stuck in the middle sometimes. Often, we reach a happy resolution. Sometimes, hardship follows. We might feel alone, and we might worry about the outcome.
But rest assured: In Jesus, we always have rescue, whether on this side of eternity or the next.
Jessica Brodie is an award-winning journalist and a member of the Wholly Loved Ministry team. She’s also an author who currently serves as the editor of the South Carolina United Methodist Advocate, the oldest newspaper in Methodism. She is the author of More Like Jesus: A Devotional Journey (2018) and editor of Stories of Racial Awakening: Narratives on Changed Hearts and Lives of South Carolina United Methodists (2018), both from her newspaper’s Advocate Press. She also writes contemporary women’s fiction, represented by Bob Hostetler of The Steve Laube Agency. Her novel The Memory Garden won the American Christian Fiction Writers’ 2018 Genesis Contest. She has a faith blog at JessicaBrodie.com.
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Originally published Thursday, 07 December 2023.
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