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Rise

Noah found favor with the LORD.

Genesis 6:8

Today's Reading

The LORD observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. So the LORD was sorry he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart. And the LORD said, “I will wipe this human race I have created from the face of the earth. Yes, and I will destroy every living thing—all the people, the large animals, the small animals that scurry along the ground, and even the birds of the sky. I am sorry I ever made them.” But Noah found favor with the LORD.

Genesis 6:5-8

In the midst of Advent, with the swags of cedar on porches and the lights twisted up streetlights, the headlines still spray across the face of the earth. They tear us open, and the world floods with pain.

God feels with us.

“His heart was filled with pain” (Genesis 6:6, NIV).

God has a heart . . . and it hurts. It hurts with what hurts us. His heart hurts not just with a few drops of ache, not just with a slow drip of sadness—the whole expanse of His heart fills, swells, weighs dark with this storm of pain.

And God whispers close to us in a hurting world. A mother whose heart is bound to her child’s? That doesn’t compare to how your Father’s heart is bound to you (Isaiah 49:15).

How did we ever find ourselves with the gift of finding favor with God?

God, who hung the stars—He has taken a thread of His heart and tied it to yours. And He didn’t need to, but God tied His heart to yours so when you feel pain, He fills with pain.

“The tears of God are the meaning of history,” writes American philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff.a When sin effectively ended our time with God in the Garden, God could have effectively ended all time in the world.

But history and time still unfold—gifts—because God chooses tears.

The Flood was the flood of God’s grief, and the essence of time is the tears of God.

Time only continues on in this impossibly suffering world because God Himself is willing to keep suffering the impossible with us.

While other creeds endeavor to get us out of the world and into heaven, in Christianity, heaven comes down and Christ comes into this world to get us. To suffer with us. We find favor—only because Christ feels pain.

Christ comes like an ark, like a cradle over floods. And we read the headlines and wonder, If there’s a God who really cares, He’d look at this world and His heart would break.

And God looks to the Cross, that real Tree, and says, “My heart did.”

On that Cross, they speared His side and pierced straight into His heart, filled with pain, and it was the water and blood of His broken heart that gushed right out, a flood of love.

It’s the quantum physics of God: one broken heart always breaks God’s in two.

God’s heart breaks. Breaks in two—to let us into the ark of His love.

Every flood of stress is an invitation to get into the ark of our Savior.

Every flood of trouble remakes the topography of our souls—making us better or bitter.

Every trouble is a flood, and we can either rise up or sink down. And getting our days all into the ark of Christ always lets us still rise.

Grace—it, too, has floods of its own. . . .

The way heaven comes down so we can rise.

Unwrapping More of His Love in the World

Do one thing today just to please God.

Strange, this familiar Father of prodigals

whose love, too much for one lifetime,

wills that we shall share the

feast of forgiveness and joy

in the epilogue of eternity.

Strange, this daily advent of

EMMANUEL

J. F. WILSON

A Moment for Reflection

When have you felt flooded, overwhelmed by the waters rising around you?

In what ways has God been an ark in the midst of your own floods?

How does it feel to picture the tears of God, to know that He suffers alongside you?

a Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987), 90.

From the Book:

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The Greatest Gift
By Ann Voskamp
Tyndale
$7.99

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