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Listen to Devotion

[God will] give relief to you who are troubled.
2 Thessalonians 1:7

Relief

Relief is big business. Walk up and down the aisles of your local pharmacy and read the labels. Relief from back pain. Relief from knee pain. Cold and flu relief. Relief from a toothache. Itch relief. Psoriasis relief. Earache relief. Headache relief. Sunburn relief. Foot pain relief. Relief from overworked muscles. All these types of relief are wonderful blessings from a gracious God.

But in our Bible reading today, the apostle Paul speaks to us about a kind of relief that’s on an entirely different plane. It is the relief that the Lord promises to give to us on the Last Day, the day of judgment. As our Savior-God watches over us, he never forgets that every moment of every day you, and I are laboring under the weight of living in a sinful, fallen creation. Day by day, we do battle. We battle Satan—both his temptations and his accusations. We battle temptations and distractions from the world. And we do battle with our own sinful selves.

All this he sees. All this he understands. And to encourage us to keep fighting the good fight of the faith, he promises to bring us sweet relief on the Last Day—a relief from all the troubles of this world, a relief beyond description.

Author J.R. Tolkien was a Christian, and he once remarked that there are Christian themes in his great work, The Lord of the Rings. In a closing scene to the 2003 film based on Tolkien’s book, we see two individuals. The first is Frodo, a person who has just finished an exhausting, perilous journey to help defeat a great evil. As Frodo awakens from a long, deep sleep, he sees Gandalf, an old, dear friend he’d thought was long dead. Frodo and Gandalf look at each other, smile, and begin to laugh. And laugh. And laugh some more. The laughter is not only of joy and reunion. It is the laughter of indescribable relief.

Such relief is what awaits us. And it’s the kind of relief that will never end.

Prayer:

Lord Jesus, because of you, a great, eternal relief awaits me. Move me never to forget this. Amen.

 

Daily Devotions is brought to you by WELS.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. ™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Listen to Devotion

“But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays.”
Malachi 4:2

Healing

How many wounds do you carry? As you read or listen to this devotion, perhaps you can feel the physical ache of an old injury. Perhaps there’s a serious accident in your past that your body has never fully recovered from. Perhaps the discomfort from an old physical hurt continues to vex you.

And then there are the other wounds, the wounds not of the body. “Some old wounds never truly heal and bleed again at the slightest word,” says the author J.R.R. Martin. “The wounds that never heal can only be mourned alone,” says writer James Frey. And Rose Kennedy once said, “In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers [certain wounds] with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”

Let’s acknowledge this reality. You and I live in a broken world; a world broken by sin—yours and mine. Because we do, the likelihood for serious wounds is overwhelming—wounds we receive from others, wounds we inflict on others, wounds we inflict on ourselves. Some of those wounds may heal slowly. Other of these wounds may heal at a pace that seems glacial. Still others may grow scar tissue that remains tender, ready to “bleed again at the slightest word.”

Jesus knows this. On our behalf, he entered this broken world. He became one of us. He knows all about such wounds. As the prophet Isaiah wrote, it was Jesus who was “wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.” For this reason, the Son of God understands how such wounds feel.

But because Christ Jesus bore our sins in our place, he does far more than sympathize with the pain of our wounds. He brings healing. Whole, entire, absolute, complete healing. He brings that healing balm to us now through the gospel in Word and sacrament. And one day you and I will experience that healing from old wounds in full, when there will be “no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain.”

On that day, you and I will bask in the healing warmth of the sun of righteousness. The old will be gone. The new will have come.

Prayer:

Lord Jesus, you have secured my complete healing from my old wounds. Thank you. Amen.

 

Daily Devotions is brought to you by WELS.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. ™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.