What God Is Up To

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Jesus says that as our Good Shepherd, he is leading us.  What an encouraging thought.  Jesus is leading you, and he is leading me.  He is shepherding us.  I can feel something in my heart loosening even now as I consider this.  Okay, I don’t have to make life happen on my own.  Now, if Christ takes it upon himself to lead, then our part is to follow.  And you’ll find that it helps a great deal in your following if you know what God is up to. . . .

Whatever else is going on, we can know this:  God is always up to our transformation. . . .

God has something in mind.  He is deeply and personally committed to restoring humanity.  Restoring you.  He had a specific man or woman in mind when he made you.  By bringing you back to himself through the work of Jesus Christ, he has established relationship with you.  And now, what he is up to is restoring you. . . .

Oh, the joy, the utter relief it would be to be transformed.  That in itself would be more happiness than most of us ever experience.  And — as if that were not enough — it would free us to live the life God has for us to live.

My friends, this is what God’s up to.  This is where our Shepherd is headed.  Whatever else is going on in our lives, this is going on.  He is committed to our transformation.  So, if this is what God’s up to, wouldn’t it make sense that we be more intentional in partnering with him in our transformation?

— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 19-21

A Conversational Walk with God

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An intimate, conversational walk with God is available.  Is normal, even.  Or, at least, is meant to be normal.  I’m well aware that a majority of people do not enjoy that . . . yet.  But it is certainly what God desires and what he offers.  My assumption is based on the nature of God and the nature of man made in his image.  We are communicators.  My assumption is also based on the nature of relationship — it requires communication.  It is based on the long record of God speaking to his people of various ranks in all sorts of situations.  And finally, it is based on the teachings of Jesus, who tells us that we hear his voice.

— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 17-18

Our Purpose

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Intimacy with God is the purpose of our lives.  It’s why God created us.  Not simply to believe in him, though that is a good beginning.  Not only to obey him, though that is a higher life still.  God created us for intimate fellowship with himself, and in doing so he established the goal of our existence — to know him, love him, and live our lives in an intimate relationship with him.  Jesus says that eternal life is to know God (John 17:3).  Not just “know about” like you know about the ozone layer or Ulysses S. Grant.  He means know as two people know each other, know as Jesus knows the Father — intimately.

— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 12

God’s Heart

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God means His children to look to Him for the fulfillment of their human needs.  The great, pulsing Father-Mother-Lover-Savior heart of God holds all that the human heart — even the single human heart — can desire.

— Margaret Clarkson, So You’re Single, p. 125

Promised Power

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It was the Place of Hope.  It was the place where, after His resurrection and just before His ascension, He would speak to His disciples one last time.  On that occasion, with the authority of a man who had just conquered death, Jesus would say, “Soon you will receive power, power to be My witnesses.”

He would promise them not the power to avoid trouble, but the power to live the only life worth living.  He would promise them the same power that was keeping Him on course while His own worst nightmare came true.  He knew these words would strike a chord, that they would thrill His disciples and fill them with hope.

“Soon you will have that power,” Jesus would say.  “You will be able to remain faithful to Me no matter what happens in your life.  If your spouse leaves you, you will be empowered to reveal My character.  If your son is in jail, you will be able to go on loving him.  That is your hope till I return.  Never lose it!”

— Larry Crabb, Shattered Dreams:  God’s Unexpected Pathway to Joy, p. 42

God Is Love.

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God does not just happen to love, nor is it true that he chooses to be love to certain individuals, as if he could just as easily have chosen not to love them.  Rather, it is impossible for God to be God and to act in an unloving way towards anyone.  If God is love, then all God’s actions must be compatible with his love.  This means that his holiness is loving, his justice is loving, and his wrath is loving. . . .  Consequently, any account of hell must see hell as a manifestation of divine love and mercy even if it is a severe side of that mercy. . . .  How could God be love if he draws a line at death and says, “Beyond this point I will look for the lost sheep no more; and even if they try to return, I shall turn them away.”  It seems to me that such a God would not be behaving in a loving way.  In conclusion, I suggest that the problem is not that the universalist sentimentalizes God’s love and forgets his wrath but, rather, that the traditional theologians underestimate God’s love and unhelpfully disconnect it from his justice.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 104

Love Your Neighbor

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Has the man no hand that you might grasp, no eyes into which yours might gaze far deeper than your vaunted intellect can follow?  Is there not, I ask, anything in him to love?  Who said you were to be of one opinion?  It is the Lord who asks you to be of one heart.  Does the Lord love the man?  Can the Lord love where there is nothing to love?  Are you wiser than he, inasmuch as you perceive impossibility where he has failed to discover it?

— George MacDonald, Your Life in Christ, p. 206

A Conversational Walk with God

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I’ll tip my hand to one assumption I am making.  I assume that an intimate, conversational walk with God is available, and is meant to be normal.  I’ll push that a step further.  I assume that if you don’t find that kind of relationship with God, your spiritual life will be stunted.  And that will handicap the rest of your life.  We can’t find life without God, and we can’t find God if we don’t know how to walk intimately with him.

— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 7

The Will to Walk

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Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless.  He cannot ravish.  He can only woo.  For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve.  He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning.  He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation.  But He never allows this state of affairs to last long.  Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives.  He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.  It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.  Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. . . .   He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice.  He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with their stumbles.

— Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis, quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, p. 136

Until He Finds It

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This God’s love is a redemptive love; a patient, kind love that never gives up (I Corinthians 13).  This Father is a shepherd who, as Jesus taught, does not give up seeking his beloved, wayward sheep, but looks for it until he finds it (Luke 15:4).  His covenant with creation will not allow him to abandon it to its own darkness, but commits him to redeeming it in its entirety.

The love of God in the New Testament, as in the Old, is perfectly compatible with divine wrath and punishment (Heb 12:7-11).  However, such punishment is always a means to an end, and such wrath is never the last word.  The last word is always grace.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 103