- Today: Read devotional below
- Tomorrow through Friday: Come back for break-out lessons based on today’s devotional plus a guided journaling prompt
Epaphras* sat at an ink-stained desk painting Chinese characters onto paper. Words about Jesus. Heaps of paper stacked like wheat press against an enamel percolator, an overturned wash basin and a neatly folded towel.
Detritus of a life squeezed into a small footprint. In 1987, Epaphras assigned himself a “life sentence” and retired to a small house just outside the prison where he spent many years as an inmate for the crime of being a Christian.
But by 1987, times were changing. The Chinese government released many religious prisoners and the court, wanting to release Epaphras, changed his legal document from “unrepentant” of being a Christian to “repentant.”
Refusing to leave under the false claim of denying Christ, Epaphras moved no farther than a house just outside the prison gate. If prison would not keep him in the name of Jesus, he would keep prison.
He fasted five days a week so prison and court officials would know he had not repented, even until death. Despite his bird-like limbs and hollow cheeks, his voice was bold, his eyes were bright.
A wide smile broke over his face as he described his attitude about being persecuted for Christ:
“Didn’t the Lord tell me from the beginning to give up everything and carry the cross to follow Him? This is the Lord’s way. I am following Him on the same path. Why should I be upset? Why should I complain?” Epaphras waved his bamboo fan faster as his voice rose higher. “This is my biggest blessing!”
You know Epaphras. So do I. He’s the disciple who laid hands on Jesus’s command – “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” – laid hands on its girth, hoisted it high, and laid the beam on his shoulder. The he followed Jesus.
The path of seeking led Epaphras to prison, to hunger, and to joy.
My path leads me to Target. Specifically, to the home goods aisles where I run my hands over velvet throw pillows, peacock blue lap blankets, and woven baskets to hold the novels I’ll read in front of a roaring fire.
If I seek God, I think, He will give me these things. If I love Him with all of my heart, then He’ll add a house of my own to put them in. With a sun room flooded with light where I can procrastinate on my writing. If, then.
Sounds like a happy formula, doesn’t it? Sounds like garbage, doesn’t it? Because deep in our souls we know that if we’re seeking God to gain His benefits, then we’re not seeking Him at all. We’ve cast aside the gold to embrace the dross.
Yet it’s so easy to be comforted by a prescription, a formula, a plan. Our chaotic lives crave order. Our fragile futures beg for a guarantee. With so many unanswered questions, so many elusive decisions, we seek a sure thing. But the only sure thing we have is Jesus.
Epaphras knows something we don’t. Oh, we used to know it, but at a forgotten place along the path, we set it aside.
The joy of seeking.
The passionate pursuit of the cross implies burden and hardship, but when did we forget that the path of the cross led to the resurrection? The joy of seeking is that God is not hiding. He wants our whole heart.
Before we ever lifted our eyes to heaven, God sought us first.
Jesus said “the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”
Luke 19:10 NKJV
The God who seeks us invites us to seek Him.
If we want to rediscover the joy of seeking, we must discard a lie. The lie is that if we have God’s benefits, then we have God.
But God knows – as every parent has learned – that when we get our toy, our doll, our dream job, then we’ll run away to play with it. We get “all these things” but lose the joy of just being with Jesus.
An If/Then formula is a burden. When we take our desires and drop them in the space between us and God, we make them into expectations. Burdens. And expectations can disappoint.
A few years ago, I went through the most anxious, difficult period of my life. My body caused me pain, pain I didn’t understand. I cried out to God for healing. Silence. I tried again: If You will heal me, then I know You are near. If You relieve my pain, then I know You love me. Silence. Why, I asked, doesn’t God care about my pain?
But that was the wrong question. Here’s a better one: What does God care about more?
God cares about relationship. Throw away the burden of expectation, the weight of “all these things”, the load of If/Then lies, and create sweet emptiness in the space between us and God.
Jesus sought and saved the lost so we could be found in relationship with God.
Our daily needs don’t disappear, but they do drop away behind the cross.
He knows our needs before we even ask. In fact, most of Jesus’s miracles surrounded practical needs of healing, food, even life from the dead. But Jesus’s supreme miracle removed the burden of separation between God and us, clearing space to simply know Him.
God knows what we need: Him. Seeking – and finding – God is His greatest gift to us. In seeking God, we find “all these things.”
Brother Epaphras lived for 15 years in self-imposed prison because of his passionate pursuit of Christ. In his last letter home to family, he wrote “I die an unrepentant criminal, just like my Lord Jesus.” Was it worth it?
*I first heard Epaphras’s story years ago at a Bible study and it has stayed with me. Learn more about Epaphras and other remarkable Chinese Christians and the church in China as it has been oppressed – and blossomed – over the past 50 years in the documentary The Cross: Jesus in China. Follow the link or find in on YouTube.
Enjoyed this very much. Keep up the good work. We cannot evaluate God’s work based on our sufferings or lack of suffering.