The Weight of Glory
On Saturday evening, I received bad news. A member of the congregation was killed in an accident that afternoon, leaving behind his wife and a baby daughter. It has been a hard blow to the family and the church. The funeral is on Wednesday morning, and the text the family has chosen is 2 Corinthians 4:16-18:
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though our outer person is wasting away, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For this light, momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we are looking not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen, because the things which are seen are temporary but the things which are not seen are eternal.
This afternoon, as I was thinking about that passage, I read C. S. Lewis’s sermon “The Weight of Glory,” not to my mind a great sermon, but certainly a wonderful essay. I appreciated his candid acknowledgment that most of the Bible’s descriptions of life beyond death didn’t appeal to him at first and his encouragement to think more about the things in Scripture that don’t seem to appeal to us, since in them lie the things we don’t yet know and the things we need to know. Here’s part of what he writes about the promise of glory:
We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory … becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
More bad news: I’ve received word that Bill and Kim DeJong’s son Jacob isn’t out of the woods yet. After the first lump drained, the doctors found a second lump. I’ll post more when I hear more. It’s good to know that our Father knows our needs before we ask.