Jumping Into God’s Palm Is Not Hard Work

10/17/2024

A conversation today:

Falling off a cliff is courageous. But it is absolutely not hard work.

“Jumping off a building is easy. Holding onto the edge is hard.”

No one is saying anything about being perfect. However to say “we must live, as Jesus did 100% (and we with “ever-increasing glory”) on the Z axis1, living by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God real time, breathing heaven’s air, being led by the spirit of Christ Jesus himself and the character of Jesus—rather than forever trying to justify ourselves and find our way on the XY axis—is the Story of Life, the Book of Life.”

Jumping off a 30-story building is not hard work, and no analysis makes much sense at that point. Clinging to the edge of a 300-foot-tall building is hard work. Scaling down the outside, crevice by crevice, of a 300-foot-tall building is incredibly hard and dangerous work. Jumping off into God’s palm is not hard work at all.

“When the Bible speaks of following Jesus, it is proclaiming a discipleship which will liberate mankind from all man-made dogmas, from every burden and oppression, from every anxiety and torture which afflicts the conscience. If they follow Jesus, men escape from the hard yoke of their own laws, and submit to the kindly yoke of Jesus Christ. But does this mean that we ignore the seriousness of his commands? Far from it. We can only achieve perfect liberty and enjoy fellowship with Jesus when his command, his call to absolute discipleship, is appreciated in its entirety. Only the man who follows the command of Jesus single-mindedly, and unresistingly lets his yoke rest upon him, finds his burden easy, and under its gentle pressure receives the power to persevere in the right way. The command of Jesus is hard, unutterably hard, for those who try to resist it. But for those who willingly submit, the yoke is easy, and the burden is light. ‘His commandments are not grievous’ (I John 5:3). The commandment of Jesus is not a sort of spiritual shock treatment. Jesus asks nothing of us without giving us the strength to perform it. His commandment never seeks to destroy life, but to foster, strengthen and heal it.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

What a relief!

“Take delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4

It has likely been said before, but was striking me this morning, and similar to the Bonhoeffer quote, we do get the desires of our heart because our Lord and God are that desire and delight. It isn’t something separate (wealth, peace, prestige, etc.). He is our delight, He is our desire, and therefore, what He asks of us is not a burden but an outflow of our relationship and oneness with Him.

The above passage from Psalm 37 has at times seemed slightly selfish to me, or one that people may use for themselves to think they get earth stuff that they want. But no, it is tied into God is all we need as we abandon this earth and delight only and all in our God.

1In this conversation, the XY-axis versus the Z-axis is being used as an illustration of the difference between eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil vs eating of the Tree of Life. XY-axis living is a “flat” natural living of good vs evil. Z-axis is a supernatural Zoe life in Jesus. Back