The Weekly Diner

Dear Readers around the world! God’s Peace be with you!

This week we are preparing to go a youth camp where 250 or so of the youth of our church will be gathered. Please pray that the time together with this important generation of the Lord’s church is blessed by the power of the Holy Spirit!


As summer is more than half way over now in the USA, we soon will be turning our attention to many of the tasks that begin again in earnest in September. The article below lets us know that whatever things we are given as tasks to do on earth, or whatever may befall us in the way of hardships, God can take care of all things! He is concerned even with the little things in our life! May all praise, honor, and glory go to Him for His great Grace!

Please enjoy the article by our guest Pastor Nathan Juntunen


Little Things

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh
for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. (2
Corinthians 4:17)

The choice of the word "light," above, is simply astonishing.
For Paul used it to describe the nature of the Apostles' dire fate of rejection and death for the sake of Christ. How many of us, in the middle of trial, could accept an appraisal of our woe as "light"? Yet, this is precisely what Paul was inspired to believe in regard to his own woes.

Even the severest of trials—beatings, imprisonments, severing of limbs and
family ties, and yes, even death itself— are counted as "little" and "light," indeed, for they are all nothing but momentary. It is only in the eternal Christ where these temporal weights lose their enormous pull and become as the gnat upon the shoulder of the great ox from Aesop's fable who replied to his transient guest, "I neither noticed when you landed, nor will notice when you leave."

The trials of this life, in contrast with our eternal reward, are likewise minimized. The faith of Christ grants a release from the gravity of earthly trial in exchange for a new center of infinite gravity that has come and even now draws us with cords of love. As the Lord draws us toward Himself, it cannot be but that the things of earth will grow "strangely dim."

Among these "dim" things ought to be our appraisal of death. Having been released in Christ from its frightful grasp, we are not longer to treat it with the awful majesty of which it falsely boasts. The emotions we experience in relation to it or any other difficulty are not, however, disqualified; for Paul encourages us with the sympathy of Christ Himself when he pleads with us to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice (Romans 12:15).

Nor do we dismiss Christ's own emotional conflicts: His exasperation with His own generation at their lack of faith, His anger at the money changers who defiled His Father's house, His grief over the lost city of Jerusalem... but... standing over against all this emotional conflict, all this grief, anger and rejection to which Jesus submitted Himself, sharing flesh and blood with us, He bids us, here, to give these things their proper place, assuring us that none of these provocations are ultimate.

Isn't this what is in the heart of the Apostle Paul as he, in another place, calls us to celebrate our possessions in Christ, one of which includes death itself? Therefore let no man glory in men. For all things are yours; Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or
things to come; all are yours; And ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's. (1 Corinthians 3:21-23) Who would celebrate death as his own possession except he over whom death holds no threat or power?

Who would dare make such a strange claim? Those who are Christ's have the daring, even audacity, to belittle the false majesty of death and loss, ruin and chaos. These things
are all, in reality, very little, indeed "light," for the one whose mind is set on things above (Colossians 3:2).

We are convinced of the true littleness of our trials only in Him and by Him who has already both suffered and triumphed over them all—rejection, dread, death, hell... He is risen victorious from the dead and has transferred ownership of all things into the hands of His own who can now confidently join the Apostle's song, O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (1 Corinthians 15:55)


Pastor Nathan Juntunen
Vancouver, Washington