“I don’t want to grieve the Lord. He has been too good to me.” I remember a preacher saying those words, but I can’t remember who he was. I closed McDonald’s that night as a senior in High School. I remember my dad’s old forest-green Chrysler New Yorker. No matter how often I drove it, I could smell “old car,” when I sat down. Like an ark it floated down the backroads of Great Falls, Montana, to the back gate of Malmstrom Air Force base, where we lived. We could have put two of every animal species in Montana in its capacious trunk.
On Christian radio, an older preacher, with a crackle in his voice, said, “I don’t want to grieve the Lord.” Though I never knew him, I cannot forget his words. Paul wrote, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit by whom you have been sealed for redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). Can you believe this? Our actions as Christ-followers influence the Almighty himself. Ponder that. We can make God sad.
A prominent basketball coach says, “We only recruit players whom we like to be around. If we wouldn’t enjoy spending time with them, we don’t bring them on the team.” God, too, wanted a different team. He was like the three-year-old You-tube sensation who left time-out at her daycare long enough to tell her caregiver, “If I could get out of time-out, I would surely take a vacation from you and all these kids.” Grieved by the sins of his creation, God wanted to move on from them. It would have been easier to make a new human race than to clean up the existing one. If God felt that way then, I wonder how he feels about our world today.
Just as God’s grief threatens a total eclipse, a ray of light shines through, “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” God’s grace is even greater than his grief over our sin. Paul would later write to the church in Rome, “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more” (Romans 5:20). Bernanos ends his Diary of a Country Priest with the observation: “Grace is everywhere.” There is more grace than types of animals in our world. God gave grace to Noah. God gives grace to us. Grace starts new things in our lives and finishes what it starts. In full view of his mercy and grace, let’s offer ourselves as living sacrifices to him. Don’t grieve God today. He has been way too good to us.
