Ephesians 4:2 “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.”

I know a man who ran for elected office and won. It changed him. He wasn’t elected to a national office. But even winning a local campaign made him feel important. He had power. The majority had chosen him. It started to go to his head. He didn’t treat people who served or waited on him with the same dignity. They were more like inferiors to command than equals to appreciate.

Another acquaintance of mine started his own business. For a time it was quite successful. He was making a lot of money. He rubbed shoulders with other wealthy people. He wanted to live in a house and drive a car that were worthy of his new status and success. You could tell that he didn’t regard people with less money, or people who hadn’t accomplished so much in their careers, as his equals.

Money, status, and power have a way of changing people–usually not for the better. We start to believe our own propaganda. We forget where we came from. We congratulate ourselves for our ingenuity, praise our own hard work, and take full credit for our success story. We are just a little better than most others, you see.

You or I could be elected President of the United States. We could start the next Apple or Google. But we still wouldn’t have as exceptional and privileged as we are to be believing Christians. Jesus, the Savior of mankind, regards you as his dear brother or sister. The Chairman of the Board of all the Universe recruited you for his team. He made you royalty in his worldwide organization. There is no “up” from your calling as a Christian.

That is no reason to congratulate and praise ourselves, as though we could take full credit for this spiritual success story. Paul urges us to be humble. If we remember where we came from, do we have reason for anything else? We were so lost, our sins were such a mountain of messed up choices and ideas, that only the death of God could save us from ourselves. In Jesus, God did die and save us. But that is no reason for us to get a big head. This calls for humility, because we know where we came from. We know how incredibly generous and forgiving God was to make us what we are today.

This also calls for us to be gentle with other people, not brash and abusive. “Be patient, bearing with one another in love.” It’s true, people do dumb things, even fellow Christians. Sometimes they do something mean. Sometimes they are self-indulgent, unthinking, or show a lack of concern for anybody else. All too often, I have to pay. Their bad behavior costs me. When this happens, like the rest of the world in which I live, I would like to let loose with my mouth and unload on the morons whose problems I now have to try to fix.

But nothing anyone has done to me, no problem anyone has ever created, begins to compare to the trouble my sins caused for my Savior. It took thirty-three years of love and a cross to fix it. Yet far too often, I am still committing the same sins. Jesus has been gentle, and patient, and he bears with me.

The better I know my own place, the more I will treat others with gentleness and patience in return. That’s only fitting in light of the gentleness and patience with which my Lord deals with me.

Ephesians 4:1 “As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”

Perhaps you notice an irony in Paul’s encouragement. His words suggest that your calling to be a believer in Jesus is this high privilege. It is a great gift, one of our dearest and most important possessions. He writes this as a prisoner for the Lord. In other words, it is this same calling that has landed him in jail. Apparently we live in a world that strongly disagrees with Paul’s evaluation of faith in Jesus and membership in his church.

Maybe we are tempted to sympathize with the world’s view here. It’s not that we think Christianity is terrible. We wouldn’t be here if we did. We are free to leave any time we want.

But our values, our priorities, our way of life all suggest we don’t see Christian faith as such a high calling. How do you measure how important something is to someone? You answer questions like, “How much are they willing to spend on it? How much time are they willing to give to it? How much work are they willing to put into it?”

As Christians, we live in New Testament freedom. We haven’t been handed a set of rules, like Old Testament believers. No law says, “If you want to be a Christian, you have to give this much money. You have to spend this much time at church. You have to volunteer for this many activities.” Jesus teaches us that giving, and learning, and serving–like faith–have to come from the heart to be any good.

But if Christian faith means anything to us, why would we want to do less than God’s Old Testament people? Individual circumstances will vary. But the typical Christian today gives 8% less than his Old Testament counterpart. Attendance across most denominations has dropped below 20% per week. In general American Christian churches suffer from a crisis of volunteers. Again, individual circumstances will vary. But the statistics suggest we don’t regard our calling to follow Christ as this high and holy privilege to be valued above all else. On average we spend twice as much money, and fifteen times as much time, on recreation and entertainment as we do on our faith. Are football, Yellowstone, and America’s Got Talent really worth so much?

What makes our Christian calling so valuable that we aspire to live a life worthy of it? To start with, our Maker sacrificed the life of his own Son just to make it possible. How often don’t we hear about the sacrifices our soldiers and veterans have made to secure our freedoms and defend our country? It is something exceptional to live in this country. But the very Son of God sacrificed his life to secure our citizenship in heaven. It is a citizenship, a privilege, that will never end. It continues for all eternity. Our calling as Christians means we live every day as the objects of God’s love, free from the guilt and punishment of all our sins. Our calling as Christians is better than the best health care plan money could buy, because even after we die our Lord promises to these bodies back together, perfectly healed and restored, never to die again.

Out of all the people in the world, the Lord came and found you. He called you to know Jesus, his sacrifice, and his gifts. He planted the seed of faith in your heart. He claimed you as a child and family member, and he is proud to have you as his own. Paul understood that such a calling was worth risking prison, even death, to have. So did the other apostles. Now he urges us to understand its value, and live a life worthy of our calling.

1 Kings 17:22-24 “The Lord heard Elijah’s cry, and the boy’s life returned to him, and he lived. Elijah picked up the child and carried him down from the room into the house. He gave him to his mother and said, ‘Look, your son is alive!’ Then the woman said to Elijah, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord from your mouth is the truth.’”

There are two resurrections in these brief sentences. There is the obvious resurrection of the boy’s body to life. Then there is the resurrection of his mother’s faith, her renewed trust in the God Elijah served, whose word Elijah spoke.

The second resurrection may well be the greater of the two. A little boy can die, and God is still the God of mercy, if only we will see what he is doing. We have had a cancer diagnosis at my house, a little boy who might not have lived so long. Before we knew which way our fight with cancer was going to go, and what the outcome of the treatments was going to be, I thought about, “How do you explain this? What would you even preach at a funeral?”

Then I stumbled upon the opening words of Isaiah chapter 57: “The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil. Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death.” Spared from future evil, entering peace, finding rest–these are all expressions of God’s mercy, even if they are applied to a little boy who is barely ten years old.

Maybe Elijah could have preached this to the poor widow, and she would have understood. Her son was truly home, safe from sin and evil, forever kept in heaven until the day she joined him there. But that is not the path God’s mercy took that day. She had already buried one man dear to her heart. The Lord chose to give her little boy back to her in his mercy. She did not have to finish her earthly journey alone. Her faith revived. She knew God’s word was true, because that is the power of God’s mercy on human hearts.

God’s mercy is never absent in our lives. But we don’t always choose to see it. We pray little, timid prayers, not big, bold prayers like Elijah prayed, because we don’t fully grasp the extent of God’s love and grace. We sometimes fight the very circumstances the Lord is using to stretch our faith, or bring us blessing, because at the time it is hard, or it hurts.

But God is big in mercy, so he gives us more than we ask, and he does not deny us the crosses or burdens that serve our souls. The first thing we need to remember is that he is love, even in the worst of times, even in the face of death. Then we will recognize his mercy, and know its power on our hearts.

1 Kings 17:19-21 “‘Give me your son,’ Elijah replied. He took him from her arms, carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his bed. Then he cried out to the Lord, ‘O Lord my God, have you brought tragedy also upon this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?’ Then he stretched himself out on the boy three times and cried to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this boy’s life return to him!’”

Elijah knew the God he preached and worshiped. He knew that he was a God of mercy. And that inspired in the prophet a bold prayer for help. It is bold because he acknowledges the Lord’s hand in the situation, his responsibility for what has happened so far: “Have you brought tragedy…?”

Sometimes people don’t want to acknowledge God’s role in the painful things we suffer, as though the Lord were only a passive observer with his hands tied to prevent him from doing anything about it. Elijah prays to the God he knows to be in control of all things, including the death of this little boy. If the Lord isn’t in control, then what is the use of praying to him?

We may not understand why his running of our world calls for catastrophic hurricanes, deadly wildfires, crushing inflation, or fighting in Ukraine that could turn into World War III. We may not understand why illness, injury, or death has to touch our lives when it does. But let’s not think that our Lord has been asleep at the wheel. He is not helpless to keep these things from happening. That would be far worse than suffering our tragedies in the first place. Elijah can admit God’s role and still pray for help because he still has faith in God’s mercy.

Elijah’s prayer is a bold prayer because he dares to disagree with the circumstances as the Lord has currently worked them out. His question, his word choices, suggest that it is not good for the widow to suffer this tragedy and for her son to die. There is some hint of that in all our prayers for help, isn’t there–some note of “I object” to things as they currently stand, “I disagree” with the way the Lord has been directing current affairs? Where do we get the gall to question the Almighty on the way he is running our world and offer him our opinion?

Truth is, the Lord has revealed that he is a God of grace and mercy, hasn’t he? Over and over again in the Old Testament he described himself as the “gracious and compassionate God.” In doing so he has practically invited us to come and speak our mind when current circumstances don’t seem compatible with his claims of compassion. We believe he really is merciful, and that inspires our prayers.