Reading from Good Friday, March 25, 2005
Imagine for a minute, every sickness or disease you have ever experienced in your hands in a shapeless mass. You take your hands and start pressing this disgusting mass into a smaller more manageable shape. Then you press harder till it’s the size of a baseball getting harder by the minute. Then you push and push until its smaller than a golf ball, smaller than a racquetball, hard as steel, cold, without feeling. You look at your compressed sickness, you want to destroy it, you want it to disappear but all you can do is reduce it down to this little ball of malignancy. You drive nails through it but you cant destroy it. You hammer it but the hammer just bounces off. You try to burn it but it seems to only mock you in its cold dark stare of pain. It remains no matter what you do.
Now imagine in a desperate attempt to rid yourself of your misery and suffering once and for all, you join forces with many others who have their own pain-shaped object. Together, you wrap your agony in leather strips attached to a whip and look for an object on which to lash out your anger and frustration. Then you see Him, waiting for you, silent, with His back to you. His hands are bound so He cant strike back. This is your opportunity to let it all go. Vent it all on this willing back. You strike him, then strike him again. Still your pain remains. In a flurry of leather and blood, you loose your fury against him, against the pain. You aren’t sure how long you’ve been going at it until exhausted you finally drop the whip to your side. You glance down at the leather strips. The hard objects have disappeared. Your pain is gone. You’re well. You feel great. You look down at the now disfigured back and you notice a familiar glimmer inside the wounds. There, imbedded in his body, is your pain, your sickness, your disease. Gone, taken forever by another, never to return. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows and by His wounds we are healed.
Thank you, Jesus, for bearing our pain and suffering, our sickness and disease, while we were yet sinners. You absorbed our agony to free us from its destructive force. In You, and only You, I can truly know freedom from the effects of sickness and disease in my life. Thank you. Amen.
copyright 2005 Tim Smith
You Should Be in the Music Ministry
humorous song by Tim Smith
Surely He Has Borne our Griefs
Reading from Good Friday, March 25, 2005
The Cello Story
Read the incredible story of Tim's cello and God's provision.
The Eternal One
An original reading that accompanies the song, 'It is Finished'.
