Hey everybody, John Mark Comer here. Welcome to the Bridgetown Daily for Monday, January 11th.

I would say how are you, but at least for all of you listening from America, and I know that's not all of you,

but for those of us in our church in Portland on the west coast of America in January 2021,

it was a rough week with the violence in our capital and a level of chaos in our nation and political tit for tat that is just heavy weight on the soul.

My guess is that still days later, a lot of you are feeling scared or angry or just tired and ready for it to all be over, but at the same time thinking,

will it ever be over? Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, David Brooks in his opinion piece a few days ago called last Wednesday, quote,

the day the fever broke in America. I love that word picture because I love to plot the pain of last week onto a narrative of healing and renewal for our nation.

And I have a cautious optimism for the year ahead, but that said, I don't know if he's right or wrong. I don't know if the best is yet to come or the worst.

I don't know if that was the day the fever broke or something else, but I do know that God is with me and I'm not alone and is grateful as I am for my country.

I am receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken and that kingdom is not the United States of America. It is not whatever country you call home. It's not even a democracy.

It is a kingdom that is based around a king that is here and that is coming. On that note, as we live in kind of the acute pain of the now and the not yet and what theologians call the time between,

between Jesus first coming to inaugurate the kingdom and his second coming to usher it in and full. We live and we feel the weight and the pain of a kingdom or an arc case of democracy that can.

And right now as we speak is being shaken on that note, I want to read over you to Corinthians chapter four verse seven to 12. It's our reading for today and it's been in the back of my mind all week long.

Paul writes this to the church in Corinth.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side but not crushed perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned struck down but not destroyed.

We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body for we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus sake so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.

So then death is at work in us but life is at work in you.

Let me just walk you through this line by line verse seven we have this treasure in jars of clay this treasure in context is referring back to what Paul just said in the paragraph before which is all about the ministry that's his language or service is a more American word of preaching the gospel.

He writes in the line before what we preach is not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as servants or ministers for Jesus sake for God who said let light shine out of darkness made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ.

What a line.

We are living in dark times of course the reality as I have Mark sayers in my ear or my history teacher from college all of human history has been dark times if you grew up in America like I did in the 80s and 90s and you were in a west coast city like me or in the middle class and especially if you were white or from the majority culture we grew up in a bubble the last few years feel like chaos to me and like a narrative of decline of Western civilization but they're more like.

Normal or baseline for the human condition down through history and all over the world we have been living in dark times since Genesis chapter three but we have the light of the gospel I love the word picture of light the idea of illumination and a world of ignorance right and with it of hope for the future and joy and the present in peace and love all that light is a metaphor.

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