Deutero Q

A friend of mine who is a missionary to Mexico tells a story of a poor family for whom he and fellow mission workers built a house one summer. As the mission workers labored under the hot sun, the family—in this case, a woman and her four children—was powerfully touched by seeing God’s love in action.

On the final day, as the house neared completion, the woman told her oldest son to go get the crucifix hanging on a wall in their old home. She also told him to bring a pair of pliers. Then, in front of my missionary friend, she used the pliers to pull the corpus from the cross, as she said with much emotion in her voice, “¡Aquí no hay Cristo muerto!” (“Here there is no dead Christ!”)

The woman went on to testify how she had seen Christ in the lives of the mission team members who had built her house. She discovered that the Lord was more than a “dead Christ.” He was very much alive in the lives of His people, and she wanted to know the living Lord better.

Praise be to God for Christ’s atoning sacrifice for sinners and for His bodily resurrection from the dead. And praise be to God that the crucified and risen One is, for Christians, “Christ in [us], the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27).