Coming Clean

Forgiveness, God, Obedience 0

The people do not earn their place in God’s covenant by obedience; rather, their obedience enables them to experience life with God.  The sacrificial system is given not because God is keeping some divine bank account of blood money, which needs regular deposits to ward off divine judgment.  Rather, it provides a way for the people to “come clean” whenever they break the covenant by disobeying God.  Instead of punitive reprisal, they experience gracious restoration of the relationship.  This is why the Law becomes such a source of joy, as we see in their celebrations and in the praise of the psalmists in the prayer book of the people.

— Richard J. Foster, Life with God, p. 88-89

Forgiveness Mirrors God.

Forgiveness, God 0

Yet even when offenders are unrepentant, we can and should forgive.  There are better ways to protect ourselves than the refusal to forgive.  And when it comes to reminding offenders that they’ve committed the offense, we do that precisely by forgiving.  Recall that to forgive is to blame.  We do condemn when we forgive.  We do it gently and lovingly, but we still do it.

There’s no question that it is more difficult to forgive when offenders refuse to repent.  Their lack of repentance is, in a sense, a continuation of their offense in a different form.  But the forgiveness is unconditional….  It’s predicated on nothing perpetrators do or fail to do.  Forgiveness is not a reaction to something else.  It is the beginning of something new….

Forgiving the unrepentant is not an optional extra in the Christian way of life; it’s the heart of the thing.  Why?  Because God is such a forgiver and Christ forgave in such a way.  And you know what?  We also bear the burden of forgiveness because when we are forgivers we are restored to our full human splendor.  We were created to mirror God.  Anything less is really Judas’ kiss on our own cheek, a betrayal of ourselves by ourselves.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 208-209

A Universalist Vision of the Church

God, Inspiration 0

In the church one finds people from every tribe and tongue joined in one body.  One day it will not simply be people called out from every tribe and nation who love the Lord but the totality of every tribe and nation.  Our calling is to act as a prophetic sign to the nations representing the destiny of all humanity.  When people look at the church, God wants them to see a vision of what redeemed humanity can be — what it will be. . . .  The church is called to be a reconciled humanity that in Christ has transcended all the barriers that fracture human communities.  Paul brings out the socio-ethical implications very clearly in his concern that divisions between Jew and Gentile must be transcended in Christ.  They are united in Christ.  It is a very high calling and both a major challenge and inspiration to our practices.  It is a calling rooted in the realized eschatology of the New Testament — the churches experience this reconciliation now as a sign of the fullness in the age to come, when all humanity will be summed up in Christ and reconciled to God and each other.  Sadly, we model this reconciliation in very imperfect ways in our churches, and this is both a major failure on our part and an evidence that the fullness is yet to come, even for the church….

The vision also connects with the theology and practice of worship.  The dream that inspires the universalist is one in which the whole of creation — all creatures great and small — join together in a symphony of worship to their creator.  The day when every knee will bow and every tongue will worship is what we long for.  To the universalist, the worship of the church in the present age is an eschatological act — a foretaste of the age to come.  When we meet together to worship God we are anticipating the day when all creation will love him.  So Christian worship is an act of hope and a prophetic sign on the part of those who live by the power of the coming age even in the midst of this present darkness….

Christian universalists share with non-universalists many of their motivations for gospel proclamation:  to obey Christ’s command, to save people from the coming wrath, to bring them into living fellowship with the triune God and his church.  However, Christian universalists are perhaps more likely to be additionally inspired by a more unusual reason — the vision that in proclaiming the gospel one is playing a part in God’s glorious purpose of reconciling the whole of creation (Col 1:20) and summing all things up in Christ (Eph 1:10).  Working with the Spirit in bringing about this glorious destiny is a strong motive for evangelism and mission in its broader sense also.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 167-168

Joyful Acceptance

God, Joy, Trials 0

Let’s make the decision to joyfully accept all situations — the lines, the traffic jams, the downed computers, and the rest — as opportunities to include God in our lives, in that moment, and then wait for the change in perception that will assuredly come.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 14-15

Desire as Tyrant

God, Healing, Letting Go 0

When the deepest desire we feel within our hearts is for something other than God, a spirit of entitlement develops.  We see ourselves as needing something we don’t have and we believe we should have.  Justice is on our side.  So we think.  Prayer becomes demand when desire becomes our tyrant.

Soon we’re caught in the addictive cycle.  Whatever brings satisfaction relieves pain for the moment, then creates deeper emptiness that, in turn, more rudely clamors for relief.  We lose our power to choose.  The will becomes a slave to whatever god makes us feel better.  We die as persons while Satan chuckles.

— Larry Crabb, Shattered Dreams, p. 86

Forgiving and Excusing

Forgiveness, God 0

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different.  I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.  But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing.  Forgiveness says, “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.”  But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it; you weren’t really to blame.”  If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive.  In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites….

A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in it [forgiveness], from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour.  But that would not be forgiveness at all.  Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it.  That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.

— C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, edited by Patricia S. Klein, p. 263-264

Care and Protection

Compassion, Forgiveness, God, Healing 0

But a person with a shattered life . . . doesn’t first need Christ to forgive her or to forgive through her.  Before anything else, she needs Christ to cradle her, to nurse her with the milk of divine love, to hold her in his arms like an inestimable gem, to sing her songs of gentle care and firm protection, and to restore her to herself as a beloved and treasured being.

And that’s what Christ does.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 206

Hidden Joys

God, Joy 0

God rejoices.  Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness.  No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found.  What I am called to is to enter into that joy.  It is God’s joy, not the joy that the world offers.  It is the joy that comes from seeing a child walk home amid all the destruction, devastation, and anguish of the world. . . .

I am not accustomed to rejoicing in things that are small, hidden, and scarcely noticed by the people around me.  I am generally ready and prepared to receive bad news, to read about wars, violence, and crimes, and to witness conflict and disarray.  I always expect my visitors to talk about their problems and pain, their setbacks and disappointments, their depressions and their anguish.  Somehow I have become accustomed to living with sadness, and so have lost the eyes to see the joy and the ears to hear the gladness that belongs to God and which is to be found in the hidden corners of the world.

Henri J. M. Nouwen — The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 114-115

Suspect God.

God, Life 0

If I told anybody what I sensed might be happening here, they’d laugh.

So let them laugh.  Finding God in the ordinary is a way of seeing the world.  It’s a willingness to suspect God when no other fingerprints match.  When we encounter the sublime, terrible, inexplicable, we can stop silent in our tracks and whisper the words of Jacob as he awoke from his ladder dream:  “Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it.”   Or we can shrug it off as a weird coincidence.

— David Anderson, Breakfast Epiphanies, p. 153