keep longing

My eyes long for your salvation

and for the fulfillment of your righteous promise.

Psalm 119:123

All my life I have longed for the completion of my salvation. That doesn’t mean I’ve longed for death. It DOES mean I have longed for an end to struggles with sin and the evils suffered in a broken world. And only God, through the gospel of Jesus Christ, is my salvation. This isn’t pessimism. It is the ultimate realistic, optimistic, confident hope!

I’ve only know a broken world of tragedy, wickedness, and death. Every human on earth must conclude the same. This is true personally. Even as a child, I watched loved ones suffer, people make wrong choices, and some people I knew eventually died. This is a sadness that is a result of sin’s curse on humanity. And it is unavoidable. But there is also within each of us a kind of nagging nudge that confronts us with the thought that all this tragedy and death isn’t the way it SHOULD be. And that uncomfortable realization can become a seed of faith, when watered by belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ, to trust the God Who saves!

This world is currently messed up in every kind of way. And the answers it offers just make it worse. Science and technology aren’t the answer. They complicate the problem. Science might bring healing medicine in one hand, and brutal instruments of warfare in the other. The same goes for politics. In one hand democracies look promising, while authoritarian governments crush freedom. And even democratic principles, left unchecked and then twisted by sinful expressions, create cultural chaos where sins are unrestrained and are now considered freedoms any human should get to express. My conclusion: No human devised solution to the madness of personal depravity fulfills the need for eternal salvation. It can’t even temporarily save. Instead human efforts amplify depravity.

And so I keep longing… daily. I long now while watching Europe looking at war again in the 21st century after such awful 20th century conflicts. This world has been at war somewhere all my life. I long now with truth under siege in the rise of chaotic social media where anybody can say anything and it is believed. I long now with Western culture embracing personal depravity as personal freedom. I long for God to fulfill His righteous promise. I long for the gospel to go forward in an increasingly lost world so that some may be saved in Jesus. I long for the nations to repent and turn to Jesus. I long for the appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ! There is no other way to live, even as evil people war and rage against God and one another, I know God will still save, and in His mercies His promises and righteousness will prevail so that one day He will make all things new, holy, and glorious.