June was VBS month at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. We had about 24 kids and a dozen or so volunteers! Their theme was the Rocky Railway: “Jesus Pulls Us Through”.
What an important sentence that we have here; Jesus pulls us through. So let’s break it down shall we? In the English language, when we create sentences we have subjects, objects, verbs, adverbs, and the list goes on (in this sentence we only have those 4).
Right away we see the subject – who the sentence is about – which is Jesus! This is central to our theology. Jesus Christ is the subject of what we believe. We must put Christ as the subject, as the one doing the action, so that we know who we are relying on. The verse for Monday this past week was Phillipians 4:13: “I can do everything through Christ who gives me strength.” Don’t be fooled, this sentence is actually about Christ! It is through Him and Him alone that we can do everything.
The next word that we have in the sentence is “pulls”, a verb. The verb is the action word of the phrase. Notice how the word “pulls” is chosen rather than guides or helps. This is intentional language. Have you ever tried bringing a kid somewhere that they don’t want to go even though you know it is good for them? Kicking and screaming right? So you know that “pull” is the right verb. We resist God whole-heartedly, kicking and screaming at times, and it is truly Christ that pulls us through. We dive deeper and deeper into our sins and hide from the Truth more than we care to admit, but Jesus grabs us by the hand and pulls us along all the while telling us that He knows us, and He has died for us, yet we do not believe it.
Us. This is our object of the phrase. By definition, the object is the thing that the subject is acting upon. This is us in our rightful place. In our relationship with Christ, we are in fact not the actors, but the object. Jesus acts on us in ways we don’t understand or realize. But as our verse from Wednesday says: He gives power to the weak and strength to the powerless (Isaiah 40:29). We are the weak and the powerless. Oh we might look at our socioeconomic standing, the numbers in the bank, or the pounds we lift, but when it gets down to it, we are powerless against our own sin, the devil, and as we continue to see by watching the news: the world. Jesus does not leave us to be the actors in our own lives. He does not wait for us to stand up on our own two feet and make the journey towards Him. Rather, He comes to us to give us faith, hope, and love.
And lastly, “through”, an adverb describing the verb. Put whatever noun (person/place/thing) at the end of this theme sentence and the meaning remains the same. Jesus pulls us through! And how do we know this? Romans 8:11, our verse from Thursday, says, “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you.” It is in this sure and certain hope that we know Jesus pulls us through! There is nothing in heaven or on earth that can separate us from His love.
So where does this leave us? Let us end with the verse from Tuesday, Psalm 31:24: “So be strong and courageous, all you who put your hope in the Lord!”
Let your hope lie in the Lord. Know that wherever you are, regardless of your resistance, Jesus pulls you through!
This is most certainly true.
