Every Knee Shall Bow

God, Universalism 0

“The Lord is the propitiation, not only for our sins, that is of the faithful, but also for the whole world (I John 2:2); therefore he truly saves all, converting some by punishments, and others by gaining their free will, so that he has the high honor that unto him every knee should bow, angels, men and the souls of those who died before his advent.”

— Clement of Alexandria, quoted in Universalism, the Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church During Its First Five Hundred Years: With Authorities and Extracts, by John Wesley Hanson, p. 121

A Sense of Direction

Faith, God, Guidance 0

So often faith comes down to having a sense of direction. Faith requires believing that we are headed in the right direction for our lives. When we feel lost and abandoned, when we feel that God is not beside us, we are always mistaken. God is with us every moment, in every circumstance, in all places. We may lose touch with God, but God never loses touch with us. God is the Great Creator. We are the beloved creative children, never out of sight and out of mind, watched over and cared for at every instant. All that is required is for us to one more time avail ourselves of God. “Lord, I believe; help my disbelief,” we must again pray. We must claim that God is with us always. We must seek to touch God and to allow God to touch us right where we are.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 66

God’s Orchestration

Faith, God, Growth, Guidance, Waiting 0

“Thy will be done, God,” we pray, “but in the meanwhile, let me try this.” It is difficult to allow the timing of God, the moving of other gears into play. We forget that God is orchestrating a much larger whole, and we tend to think of and want God’s will for us to be an instantaneous release from all that troubles us. We want our spiritual life to be a product, not a process. We want to be finished, solved, soothed — and sometimes it is our discomfort that is drawing us toward God.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 60-61

Giving

Faith, God, Gratitude, Trust 0

The act of giving best reminds me of my place on earth. All of us live here by the goodness and grace of God — like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, Jesus said. Those creations do not worry about future security and safety; neither should we. Giving offers me a way to express my faith and confidence that God will care for me just as God cares for the sparrow and lily.

— Philip Yancey, Grace Notes, p. 359

God Can Handle It.

God, Prayer, Trials 0

One bold message from the book of Job is that you can say anything to God. Throw at God your grief, your anger, your doubt, your bitterness, your betrayal, your disappointment — God can absorb them all. As often as not, spiritual giants of the Bible are shown contending with God. They prefer to go away limping, like Jacob, rather than to shut God out. In this respect, the Bible prefigures a tenet of modern psychology: you can’t really deny your feelings or make them disappear, so you might as well express them. God can deal with every human response save one. God cannot abide the response I fall back on instinctively: an attempt to ignore God or act as though God does not exist. That response never once occurred to Job.

— Philip Yancey, Grace Notes, p. 348

Tests of Faith

Faith, God, Trials 0

Often when we face a test of faith, it is because God’s will may run counter to our wishes. We want what we want, and we are unable to take the longer view that God’s will entails — for that matter, we may be unable to see the longer view. This is when we are being asked to demonstrate blind faith, that is, a faith in a larger benevolence, even though we ourselves are unable to see the higher wisdom at hand.

“God, I believe; help my disbelief” is the prayer for times of blind faith. We are asking for the grace to go along with the joke, and the joke may seem to us to have a very harsh punchline. We are asking, often, to accept an untimely death or the shattering of a cherished dream. We are asking for the courage to believe, in the face of our own human disappointment, that a silver lining might just exist and that if we stay faithful we might eventually come to see it. So much of what happens to us seems in cozy retrospect to have been designed for our best good. So little of what happens to us feels that way at the time.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 59