The Painful Reality of Sin

God, Life 0

If we think of hell as the state in which God allows the painful reality of sin to hit home, then we can understand both the terrible imagery used in Scripture to portray such a fate and the urgent warning to avoid the wide road that leads in that direction.  It also removes the objection that God is being presented as a cosmic torturer hurting people until they agree to follow him.  God does not torture anybody — he simply withdraws his protection that allows people to live under the illusions that sin is not necessarily harmful to a truly human life.  The natural (though none the less God-ordained) consequences of sin take their course, and it becomes harder and harder to fool oneself into believing the seductive lies of sin anymore.  In this way hell is educative and points us towards our need for divine mercy.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 136

Pain

God, Inspiration, Joy, Letting Go, Life, Trials 0

And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disrupt our lives so that we release our grasping of life here and now.  Usually through pain.  God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even more fully to him.  He thwarts us in our attempts to make life work so that our efforts fail, and we must face the fact that we don’t really look to God for life.  Our first reaction is usually to get angry with him, which only serves to make the point.  Don’t you hear people say, “Why did God let this happen?” far more than you hear them say, “Why aren’t I more fully given over to God?”

We see God as a means to an end rather than the end itself.  God as the assistant to our life versus God as our life.  We don’t see the process of our life as coming to the place where we are fully his and he is our all.  And so we are surprised by the course of events.

It’s not that God doesn’t want us to be happy.  He does.  It’s just that he knows that until we are holy, we cannot really be happy. . . .

We are so committed to arranging for a happy little life that God has to thwart us to bring us back to himself. . . .

Now, I am not suggesting that God causes all the pain in our lives. . . .  But pain does come, and what will we do with it?  What does it reveal?  What might God be up to?  How might he redeem our pain?  those are questions worth asking.

Don’t waste your pain.

— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 87-88

Never Abandoned

Core Value, God, Life 0

I don’t know how it matters; I only know that it does, that when we suffer, God suffers, and he will never abandon the smallest fragment of his creation. . . .  He will not give up on me, not now, not after my mortal death.  He will not give up on any of us, until we have become what he meant us to be.

— Madeleine L’Engle, A Severed Wasp, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 158

Sacred Romance

God, Joy, Life, Love 0

Indeed, if we will listen, a Sacred Romance calls to us through our heart every moment of our lives.  It whispers to us on the wind, invites us through the laughter of good friends, reaches out to us through the touch of someone we love.  We’ve heard it in our favorite music, sensed it at the birth of our first child, been drawn to it while watching the shimmer of a sunset on the ocean.  The Romance is even present in times of great personal suffering:  the illness of a child, the loss of a marriage, the death of a friend.  Something calls to us through experiences like these and rouses an inconsolable longing deep within our heart, wakening in us a yearning for intimacy, beauty, and adventure.

— John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 6-7

God’s Timetable

God, Life, Trials 0

Did you realize that time could possibly be the stander’s greatest obstacle?  Charlyne could report, “Bob delivered hurricane supplies across the state today,” and be correct.  What she did not tell you was that it was a six-hour trip.  I encountered heavy traffic, post-hurricane congestion, rude drivers, and so much more.  The Bible is exactly like that.  We are told of an event, and assume it happened all at once, when in truth decades passed.  May we each learn that God’s timetable is far different from our timetable.

— Robert E. Steinkamp, The Prodigal’s Pen, p. 170

Returning Home

Forgiveness, God, Healing, Love 0

Although claiming my true identity as a child of God, I still live as though the God to whom I am returning demands an explanation.  I still think about his love as conditional and about home as a place I am not yet fully sure of.  While walking home, I keep entertaining doubts about whether I will be truly welcome when I get there.  As I look at my spiritual journey, my long and fatiguing trip home, I see how full it is of guilt about the past and worries about the future.  I realize my failures and know that I have lost the dignity of my sonship, but I am not yet able to fully believe that where my failings are great, “grace is always greater.”  Still clinging to my sense of worthlessness, I project for myself a place far below that which belongs to the son.  Belief in total, absolute forgiveness does not come readily. . . .

One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness.  There is something in us humans that keeps us clinging to our sins and prevents us from letting God erase our past and offer us a completely new beginning.  Sometimes it even seems as though I want to prove to God that my darkness is too great to overcome.  While God wants to restore me to the full dignity of sonship, I keep insisting that I will settle for being a hired servant.  But do I truly want to be restored to the full responsibility of the son?  Do I truly want to be so totally forgiven that a completely new way of living becomes possible?  Do I trust myself and such a radical reclamation?  Do I want to break away from my deep-rooted rebellion against God and surrender myself so absolutely to God’s love that a new person can emerge?  Receiving forgiveness requires a total willingness to let God be God and do all the healing, restoring, and renewing.  As long as I want to do even part of that myself, I end up with partial solutions, such as becoming a hired servant.  As a hired servant, I can still keep my distance, still revolt, reject, strike, run away, or complain about my pay.  As the beloved son, I have to claim my full dignity and begin preparing myself to become the father.

— Henri J. M. Nowen, The Return of the Prodigal Son:  A Story of Homecoming, p. 52-53

The Forgiving Father

Forgiveness, God 0

We are so familiar with the Parable of the Prodigal Son that we forget part of the message, and that is the response of the elder brother.  As I read and reread Scripture it seems evident that God is far more loving than we are, and for more forgiving.  We do not want God to forgive our enemies, but Scripture teaches us that all God wants is for us to repent, to say, “I’m sorry, Father.  Forgive me,” as the Prodigal Son does when he comes to himself and recognizes the extent of his folly and wrongdoing.  And the father rejoices in his return.

Then there’s the elder brother.  We don’t like to recognize ourselves in the elder brother who goes off and sulks because the father, so delighted at the return of the younger brother, prepares a great feast.  Punishment?  A party!  Because the younger brother has learned the lesson he has, in a sense, already punished himself.  But, like the elder brother, we’re apt to think the father much too lenient.

— Madeleine L’Engle, And It Was Good, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 144-145

No Unforgivable People

Forgiveness, God 0

There are no unforgivable people.

Should we forgive even those who refuse to repent?  Consider once again God’s forgiveness, which serves as a model for ours.  There are people who think that in relation to God, repentance comes before forgiveness.  But that can’t be right.  God doesn’t angrily refuse forgiveness until we show ourselves worthy of it by repentance.  Instead, God loves us and forgives us before we repent.  Indeed, before we even sinned, Jesus Christ died for our sins.  God’s forgiveness is not reactive — dependent on our repentance.  It’s original, preceded and conditioned by absolutely nothing on our part.  We can do nothing to become worthy of it for the same reason we can do nothing to earn any of God’s gifts.  Before we do anything, before we even exist, God’s giving and God’s forgiving are already there, free of charge.  God doesn’t give and forgive conditionally.  God’s giving and forgiving are as unconditional as the sun’s rays and as indiscriminate as raindrops.  One died for all.  Absolutely no one is excluded.

Why should we forgive unconditionally and indiscriminately?  We don’t do it simply because a law demands we do so.  We forgive because God has already forgiven.  For us to hold any offender captive to sin by refusing to forgive is to reject the reality of God’s forgiving grace.  Because Christ died for all, we are called to forgive everyone who offends us, without distinctions and without conditions.  That hard work of indiscriminate forgiveness is what those who’ve been made in the likeness of the forgiving God should do.  And . . . that hard work of forgiveness is what those who’ve “put on Christ” are able to do.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 179-180