Devotional Thought for our days:

⁵  God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children. ⁶  And because we are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, prompting us to call out, “Abba, Father.” ⁷  Now you are no longer a slave but God’s own child. And since you are his child, God has made you his heir.  Galatians 4:5-7 (NLT)

¹⁴  Let us, then, hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we have a great High Priest who has gone into the very presence of God—Jesus, the Son of God. ¹⁵  Our High Priest is not one who cannot feel sympathy for our weaknesses. On the contrary, we have a High Priest who was tempted in every way that we are but did not sin. ¹⁶  Let us have confidence, then, and approach God’s throne, where there is grace. There we will receive mercy and find grace to help us just when we need it. Hebrews 4:14-16 (TEV)

80      If you are a good son of God, in the same way that a little child needs to be assured of the presence of his parents when he gets up in the morning or goes to bed at night, your first and last thought each day will be for Him.

Luther saw in this the very essence of Christian theology. God reached down not halfway to meet us in our vileness but all the way down, to the foul dregs of our broken humanity. And this holy and loving God dared to touch our lifeless and rotting essence and in doing so underscored that this is the truth about us. In fact, we are not sick and in need of healing. We are dead and in need of resurrecting. We are not dusty and in need of a good dusting; we are fatally befouled with death and fatally toxic filth and require total redemption. If we do not recognize that we need eternal life from the hand of God, we remain in our sins and are eternally dead. So because God respects us, he can reach us only if we are honest about our condition. So it fit well with Luther’s thinking that if God were to bestow upon him— the unworthy sinner Luther— such a divine blessing, it must needs be done as he sat grunting in the “cloaca.”

It is not what we think of as a holy place, yet it was.

A man who suffered incredibly from guilt and shame, whose anxiety nearly paralyzed him, when it wasn’t driving him mad. 

And he finally had that aha moment while sitting on a toilet. During a particularly hard bowel movement. 

Seriously? Yeah, seriously.  

In a way, it is the perfect parallel physically to what needs to happen to us spiritually.  We might call it thus, “The Kingdom of God is like a good laxative!  We need to get rid of all the crap in our lives, the sin which binds us up!  We try to eliminate the sin’s stench by trying to legitimize our behavior, to justify or excuse it.  We do all things these, and all they do is cause us pain, and grief, and more foul air.  And when God comes to us, all that crap is eliminated. 

We need God to meet us there! And that is what Luther realized God would do, a God who loves His children so much that He will meet us even there. A God who would answer the cry of a child in pain,  a God who would be there for us, no matter what we are dealing with in life.  A God who knows the crap we’ve been messing around in, and loves us enough to set aside the stench and do what needed to be done.

As we realize this, how it changes us!  How it reforms us and the way that we look at life!  How it draws us to Him, to adore Him,, to love Him, to worship Him, even as we run to Him with confidence, assured that he can take care for the crap we cannot deal with by our own reason or strength.

This is our God, cry out to Him in confidence!  Lord have mercy on me! 

And assured of His love and grace, know the relief, the peace that His presence brings!  AMEN!

Escriva, Josemaria. The Forge (Kindle Locations 498-500). Scepter Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Metaxas, Eric. Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (p. 97). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.