Donald Trump dodged death last Saturday.
But I still wonder if he wants to live.
I don’t write that with any partisan cynicism or sentimentality toward Trump or his opponent. I also don’t write it to promote any political or patriotic priority.
I only wonder — and hope — because Trump has told reporters that last Saturday’s attempted assassination changed him.
Perhaps, then, it broke him too, like another famous ruler who once dodged death — not by an assassin’s bullet, but by stoning.
And because God broke this man, he repented, and because he repented, he could truly live.
As he summarized in Psalm 51: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me …
“Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and uphold me by Your generous Spirit,” King David also wrote after the prophet Nathan exposed his adultery with Bathsheba. “Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, and sinners shall be converted to You …”
First, David gave God the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart, and then he gave Him a heart ready to offer the “sacrifices of righteousness.”
And as the Son of David said centuries later, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
I don’t know if Jesus intended His followers to organize these blessings into a sequence, with one leading to the other, but at least Jesus didn’t want the poor in spirit and those who mourn to seek Him simply to dodge death.
He wants them to hunger and thirst for the righteousness that saturates the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.
He wants them to live, not just in some “Hallelujah by and by,” but today and everyday as they bring about His kingdom come on earth through love, holiness, joy, praise, purity, power, and hope.
He wants disciples who “love much,” like the woman in Luke 7, who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, wiped them with the hair of her head, kissed them, and anointed His head with oil.
“Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much,” Jesus said.
Jesus didn’t imply that God only saves those who love Him enough. Instead, He said, the woman “loved much” because of the blessing of brokenness. She didn’t try to deny her depravity or the depths of God’s mercy.
Paul, too, didn’t try to minimize or euphemize his sin, and he didn’t minimize or euphemize sin when he called those in the Corinthian church to repent.
His words hurt, he acknowledged, but he didn’t hurt just to hurt.
If those people wanted to live abundantly, Paul knew, they needed to sacrifice the pleasures of sin; they needed to sacrifice their pride and self-righteousness; they needed to sacrifice their worldly priorities; they needed to sacrifice their justifications, their vain attempts to live their truths, their lust to “be as gods.”
And still today, people must sacrifice all this to live abundantly. Yet when they sacrifice all — when their repentance inspires diligence, indignation, reverence, vehement desire, and zeal, as Paul notes in 2 Corinthians 7 — they’ll gain infinitely more.
They’ll gain eternal life — living, breathing present power and joy and love that redeems passions, priorities, and pursuits.
“Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ, and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection,” Paul told the Philippians.
And because Paul knew this power, he could assure Timothy near the end of his life that he didn’t just dodge death.
He defied it.
He lived.
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