Above This World

Devotional

Sometimes your whole world gets very small.

It shrinks down to the size of one problem. The diagnosis. The lawsuit. The marriage. The kid who isn't speaking to you. And you can't see past it. It fills the windshield. Every thought bends back toward it. You wake up and it's the first thing there.

Psalm 121 is a song for people with a small world. "I lift up my eyes to the hills." The psalmist is on a road, probably heading up to Jerusalem, and the hills are dangerous. That's where the bandits are. That's where the false gods had their shrines. So "from where does my help come?" isn't a decorative question. It's a real one. And the answer gets his eyes off the hills entirely. "My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth."

Notice the scale. He doesn't say, my help comes from the LORD, who's pretty good with problems like mine. He says, the one who made everything. If God built the mountains, he can handle what's happening in your kitchen.

Paul takes the same move and makes it a command. "Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God." Set your mind there. And I want to be clear about what this isn't. This isn't escapism. Paul isn't telling you to pretend your circumstances aren't real. He's telling you where to put the weight. There's a seated King. The work is done. He's not pacing. And your life, Paul says, "is hidden with Christ in God." Hidden. Tucked inside his security. Whatever happens to your circumstances, that doesn't move.

Then 2 Corinthians 4, and this is the verse that reorders the room. "This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison." Now be careful. Paul isn't saying your affliction is light because it doesn't hurt. Read his life. Beaten. Shipwrecked. Abandoned. He's saying it's light compared to something. He's putting your pain on a scale, and on the other side he's putting eternity, and the scale tips so hard it's not even a comparison.

Here's how you get eyes for that.

Look at the cross from ground level, and all you see is a small world. A hill. A criminal. A Friday afternoon. A mother who can't stop crying. If you'd been there, the problem would've filled the windshield. Defeat. The end. But lift your eyes. That Friday was the hinge of history. The unseen thing happening inside the seen thing was the salvation of the world. And three days later, the seen thing changed too.

That's the pattern. God does his biggest work inside the moments that look smallest and worst. Your affliction is real. It's also not the whole picture. There is something unseen being prepared in it, and Paul says it's heavy with glory.

So "we do not lose heart." Not because the outer self isn't wasting away. It is. But the inner self is being renewed, today, right now, while you read this.

Lift up your eyes. Not to the hills. Past them.

Your help comes from the one who made them.