He has not forsaken us

One of the deepest emotional pains that one can feel, I believe, is the fear or belief that God is not love, or that one is not loved by God, or that God's grace is not sufficient to cover one's sins, or that God is distant and displeased (they are all permutations of the same feeling, I think). When one has known and seen God, and experienced His love and mercy, He becomes the deepest desire of one's heart; He overwhelms us with the torrents of His love, and we respond with adoration. So at any point after that, if we begin to fear that we have lost that love through some sin we have committed or righteousness we have left undone, the pain of that fear will penetrate to the depths of our heart like a dagger that stabs and a club that crushes.

Unfortunately, the emotional nature of this fear makes it incredibly difficult to counter! Reminding ourselves of the truth of God's love, going back to the cross and remembering the pain He suffered on our behalf, and repeating the assurances of His grace to ourselves time and again are all good things to do, and they can help restore a soul to joy and confidence in Christ - but I think it is also good to cry to God in the midst of our fear, as the author of Psalm 6 does. For an emotional pain there must be an emotion outlet and an emotional healing.

"O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your anger,
Nor chasten me in Your hot displeasure.
Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am weak;
O Lord, heal me, for my bones are troubled.
My soul also is greatly troubled;
But You, O Lord - how long?
Return, O Lord, deliver me!
Oh, save me for Your mercies' sake!
For in death there is no remembrance of You;
In the grave who will give You thanks?" - Psalm 6:1-5

The truth that he knows - God's mercy and deliverance of His people, His righteousness and healing power - is interspersed with what he feels and fears - that God is angry with him, and has forsaken him, and is abandoning him to death; the desperate plea of v3 captures it perfectly: "But You, O Lord - how long?" In his head, he knows that in God is deliverance and salvation; he knows that God will rescue him and not abandon him. But in his heart, he feels that God has already forsaken him - that the pain and the trials have continued longer than he can bear already, and that God is not with him in them. It's a place we've all been in, I think, particularly if a specific trial or struggle (read: external problem or internal sin issue) has lingered with us for any length of time. You said You would sanctify me, Lord! Why do I still struggle and fail so much with this one temptation? And You said You would be with me always and work all things for good, Lord! Why is my life such a wreck of circumstances, then? Why do my endeavors wither and die instead of prospering when I'm trying to follow You?

But there is beauty even in that emotional plea, twisted as it is by the lies the world has spun about the impermanence of love and the impossibility of grace, because he is trying desperately to feel and believe the truth that he knows - and because, at the end, there is hope. Our cries to God do not have to be perfect or sinless for Him to hear us; He hears our weeping and our supplication, no matter how weak and frail and faithless we are, and He will receive our prayers. He has not forsaken us, and He never will; His love has not failed us and His grace will endure through all eternity.

A God of mercy

If it is true that God takes no pleasure in wickedness - that He "hate[s] all workers of iniquity" and "abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man," as Psalm 5:4-6 says - than it is a problem of incredible concern and importance for each and every one of us. I wouldn't say I was bloodthirsty (far from it, in fact!), but when I see the bitterness, hatred, and resentment my heart holds on to and even takes pleasure in, I can't deny that there is wickedness and sin inside me. And the general consensus of the rest of humanity, and the doctrine of Christianity, is that I am not alone in this deep internal sinfulness: for "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Rom. 3:23)

What do we do, then? What is the next step to take, when we see the sin inside us, when the weight of it breaks our hearts and leads us to the edge of despair, because all our efforts cannot eradicate it completely from our lives? I think the same psalm that described the righteous position of a holy God towards wickedness describes equally well the only beneficial next step for us to take:

"But as for me, I will come into Your house in the multitude of Your mercy;
In fear of You I will worship toward Your holy temple." - Psalm 5:7-8

Continuing to try to perfect myself will never succeed; the only option that can bring life, joy, and contentment is to come to God riding the waves of His mercy, carried in the arms of His mercy, lifted on the wings of His mercy: forgiven and reconciled by His mercy. Striving to lift myself to heaven or to give myself worth and value, to earn the respect and adulation of others and even of God, can only lead to the empty and cold triumph of pride that is more failure than victory even in its highest moment; but coming to God with reverence and humility, to lift unto Him the worship and adoration of a heart in love to a God worthy of praise - that is the key to peace and fulfillment, the one thing necessary to find meaning and freedom.

It is indeed true that God takes no pleasure in wickedness, but it is also true that He is a God of mercy, and because He is a God of mercy we can be a people of hope. We can cry to our God in our trouble, even when our trouble is brought on by our own sin, and we can wait eagerly, watching as for the morning, for His answer to our prayer. Because we have put our trust in Him, we can rejoice in the surety of His faithfulness, and let the burdens and pains of this life and of our sin be carried for us by the God who defends us with strength unassailable.

The power that underlies grace

In Psalm 2, the rule of God - rightful and almighty authority - is contrasted with the rule of man - proud and greedy grasping for power and autonomy. We see the kings and rulers of the earth attempting to free themselves from what they perceive to be the bonds and chains of God over their lives, and God responding with derision because their attempt is so incredibly futile and with wrath because it is idolatrous rebellion and sin. But to be honest, the way the psalm is written has always been confusing to me, because it seems to paint God in a very negative light: as a wrathful God who delights in carrying out judgment on rebellious creatures, who desires to rule with an iron fist as a complete dictator, and before whom we come as cowering, terror-stricken subjects hoping that He will not be angry with us this time.

And this picture is so utterly the opposite of God as He has revealed Himself in the rest of Scripture that for a long time I've skirted around this psalm, bracketing it off in my mind as one of those parts of the Bible and Christianity that I just don't understand yet (which I think is often a healthy and helpful thing to do, because after all we are limited by nature and our understanding is furthermore hampered by sin, and there are a lot of things we don't understand now and may never understand at all in this life.) What I think I'm coming to understand, however, is that the focus of this psalm isn't on God's anger so much as it is on God's rightful and legitimate power and authority - and in our culture, we tend not to dwell much on that power and authority. A God of enduring faithfulness and unending love, without earth-shattering power or the authority of a judge and king, is a comfortable God, a God we can safely ignore when we want to but who will be there for us when we need Him. But the God who created the universe, without whose sustaining power our lives would not last a second, and whose innate holiness defines a moral law we can't even come close to living up to, is not a comfortable God. The God who seeks to reconquer our rebellious hearts with His grace and lovingkindness is also the God who will utterly destroy us in His righteous judgment if we refuse to surrender. And I think, if we lose our understanding of God's power and authority in judgment - if we cease to see God as the rightful and righteous King and Judge - we will also lose our understanding of the depths of His love and the riches of His grace. He is indeed a terrible and powerful God; the whisper of His wrath would utterly destroy us. But we do not need to be afraid or cower before Him without hope, awaiting the inevitable judgment, because He is also a God of love, who extends salvation to His people, and "blessed are all those who put their trust in Him."

Acknowledging need

"It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely we must have a little - however little - native luminosity? Surely we can't be quite creatures?
"For this tangled absurdity of a Need, even a Need-love, which never fully acknowledges its own neediness, Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence. We become 'jolly beggars.' The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his Need. He is not entirely sorry for the fresh Need they have produced. And he is not sorry at all for the innocent Need that is inherent in his creaturely condition. For all the time this illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure, this pretence that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us from being happy. We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet - or one foot - or one toe - on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf. The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom, power and worth, really ours just because God gives them and because we know them to be (in another sense) not 'ours.'" - C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

This is not the way I naturally think, and I don't think it's the way most other people think either.We are ashamed of our Need, even our Need for God; we wish to be independent beings, possessing something utterly our own which we can then give to God and to other people. In fact, we don't want to admit that we are dependent on God, not just because of our sin, but because we are His creatures, the things He has made and whose life He sustains. I love the analogy in the first paragraph above: we want to have some light of our own, to shine bright with the goodness of our own being, instead of simply reflecting the light of God. But since we are His creatures, even if light did shine forth directly from us, it would still be His light that He put within us in the first place.There is nothing we can offer Him that He did not give to us, and because we are fallen we tend to need His help and encouragement even in that act of giving. And that is hard to accept, so I tend to fight it - I try to prove to myself, through continued efforts to be perfect, through the accumulated praises of people around me, through my own self-assessment in every situation, that I am a being who can live without Need and give freely of what is inherently my own to God and others: in other words, that I am a being like God in that I am my own self-sufficient person characterized by Gift-love rather than by Need-love.

But of course this is not true! So the fight becomes a lesson in failure and discouragement, or in self-righteousness and pride, depending on how the battles of the moment are progressing. In either case, there is no true delight, freedom, or consciousness of value. How could there be, when I am trying to live outside the constraints of reality? As Lewis wrote above, the false belief that we are self-sufficient, independent beings is what bars us from experiencing happiness. It imprisons us in continual striving for inherent personal perfection, in lies (believed in the heart if not spoken), in competition even with those we love the most, in the desperate fortress of pride faced with defeat. Having proclaimed to ourselves that we are Need-less - without Need of any sort, and particularly without that Need of God that infiltrates our whole being - we begin to feel that we are needless - meaningless beings without any greater purpose or worth. The One whom we need even to be truly ourselves is the same One who has made us able to meet the needs of people around us, given us a purpose and a meaning for our lives, and thus bestowed upon us greater worth than we could have ever made for ourselves. The One before whom we are utterly powerless, and upon whom we are dependent for life itself, gives to us His power, that we might live by His strength and do greater things that we could ever have imagined for ourselves. And the One who is a fountain of joy and love, apart from whom we are dark and hate-filled little creatures, will, if we will let Him, cause that fountain to spring up in glory within our very hearts, giving to us that which we could never earn or make for ourselves, but in the act of giving making it truly ours in Him.

The fear of man

I think, as people, we have an innate desire for approval (love, respect, appreciation, etc.) and a complementary fear of condemnation (or of rejection, inadequacy, being ignored, etc.). While the fear is most likely a result of our fallen state, born out of feelings of shame and guilt that would have been completely unknown to Adam and Eve before they disobeyed God, I think the desire of which it is the negative manifestation may be a good and natural part of how we are created. Most of the virtues that apply to our daily interactions with others - things like love, compassion, gentleness, submission, encouragement, and so on - involve giving some positive form of acceptance, approval, love, or respect to others, and if we weren't made so as to desire and appreciate those things, giving them to others wouldn't be as important!

However, like all the other good things in us, this desire can also be twisted by sin. We can begin to want some sort of applause or recognition for ourselves, or we can become competitive in our desire - wanting more approval or love than anyone else. In short, we begin to make the gratification of this desire the source of our security and identity. And it was never meant to fill that role! Our desire for the approval and love of other people was always intended to come second to our desire to love and obey God, but ever since Adam chose to seek the approval and love of his wife when it came in conflict with his love and obedience to God, we have struggled putting the two in the right order. But when we are able to do so, we find that when God is first and our hearts are resting in and seeking Him more than the approval of other people, there is peace, security, and a new energy to positively impact other people instead of always seeking to take from them the praise or respect we needed to satisfy that other desire. Proverbs, as usual, says it the most succinctly:

"The fear of man brings a snare,
But whoever trusts in the Lord shall be secure." - Proverbs 29:25

Freely suffering

Mentally, I'm still on Good Friday. I realized something this year, on Good Friday, about what Jesus endured for us, that I think had never really struck me before: that the suffering He faced, He walked through of His own volition. He says as much to His disciples: "do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide me with more than twelve legions of angels?" (Mt. 26:53). It is one thing to endure sufferings when one is forced into them and has no way of escape, but must simply persevere; it is another thing altogether to continue to embrace those sufferings when it is completely within one's power to avoid them - and that is precisely what Christ did.

(Tangentially, I think that the value of fasting may lie in this very truth - that Christ walked through every moment of His sufferings intentionally and deliberately - because in fasting we also choose to take up suffering and embrace it, even though at any time we could choose to step out of our suffering back into bodily comfort and pleasure. So in fasting our understanding of Christ's suffering for us can grow experientially, not just intellectually, even though the suffering is comparatively so small. The spiritual and physical discipline may also help us to be able to endure greater sufferings in the future, ones that we have not chosen and cannot escape, but I can't speak to that personally.)

Anyway, the fact that Jesus did indeed walk through that suffering freely - compelled only by His love for us and for His Father - demonstrates the incredible depth and greatness of that love. The verse that has lingered in my mind all through Holy Week is the one with which the apostle John begins his telling of the great story, as the disciples gather together to celebrate the Passover with Jesus for the last time:

"Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end." - John 13:1 (emphasis added)

 His love truly is the love that does not fail. Even when faced with the cross, it did not fail, and He loved us to the end. And that, I think, is the most wonderful foundation on which to build the rest of my life: on the love of Jesus, that will never let me down, and which led Him to die that I might know God, and in knowing God find life.

He Regards the Lowly

One of the things that interferes with our relationship with God is our own pride. Pride is what makes us resist or resent God's grace (or our need for that grace) and makes it difficult for us to accept God's love for us - we dislike the necessary admission of our weakness, imperfection and sin that accompanies grace, or we believe that our sin is too great for even His love and forgiveness to cover. Either we exalt ourselves or we make God less, when we walk the path of pride. And because we very much do need God's grace, because His forgiveness is far more than sufficient to cover our sins, and because His love is unfailing and unconditional, our pride puts us out of sync with reality. Eventually, keeping our heads and hearts in a dream world will result in colliding with something in the real world that we didn't see because it didn't exist in our delusions. That is, if we base our lives on perceptions and principles that don't align with reality, the disconnect and the tension will in the end lead us to pain and despair. After all, wherever God is not, despair takes root - and a proud heart has pushed God out.

For we have a great God who works in very different ways than a great king would. A great ruler in this world will usually seek out or allow into his presence those who have some special distinction or merit. A championship sports team, for instance, or the winners of a scholastic competition, or other heads of state or their ambassadors, might be allowed to meet the President. An average soccer mom from the Midwest would most likely be laughed at by the security guards if she tried to visit him at the White House! The greater the power and glory of the ruler, the less likely it is that the poor, normal, lowly people of his country will actually be allowed into his presence. It is an honor, after all, to see and meet someone so highly respected, and it is natural to expect that one ought to earn that kind of honor. And then, afterwards, one has every right to be proud of the achievement that merited the reward. But in the Psalms we read that,

"Though the Lord is on high,
Yet He regards the lowly;
But the proud He knows from afar." - Psalm 138:6

God is far greater than any earthly ruler, and yet He doesn't demand that we earn our way into His presence. He doesn't accept only those who have done great things or have some special distinction or notoriety to capture His attention. In fact, He does almost exactly the opposite! He gives grace to the humble, and lifts up those who do not exalt themselves. When He became a man, He lived among the poor and the oppressed, and rejected those who were mighty in this world. His desire for us is not that we should strive to win His favor by our own merits - first, it is impossible, and second, it centers our minds firmly on ourselves: we must always be thinking about what we are doing and how we are doing and whether or not we are good enough. He wants us to let go of our pride, of our need to earn His approval and make ourselves good enough, so that we can once more sing in tune with reality, and come to know Him deeply and genuinely in humility.

Lingering in beauty

Being a Type-A personality (that is, continually striving for perfection and efficiency), it can be hard for me to do anything slowly without becoming frustrated. Naturally, I don't sit back and enjoy the beauty and peace of a simple moment - I identify a task, complete the task as quickly and as well as I can, enjoy the sense of fulfillment at its completion, and then move on to the next task.

But those simple moments can hide some incredible beauty, and I think it is worthwhile for me to make the effort to slow down and linger in them while they last.

For example, on Friday afternoon I bought a bag of black beans in bulk, and needed to transfer them from the little plastic bag to a glass jar for pantry storage purposes. Now, these little plastic bags they use in the bulk sections of stores are really quite flimsy, and when I've tried to pour beans directly from the bag into a jar in the past beans have gone flying everywhere. Nevertheless, because it feels so much faster, I typically do it that way anyway, and just try to be especially careful. On Friday, however, for some reason, I decided to scoop the beans out and into the jar with my hands. It felt slower, because I could only pick up a certain amount at a time (not a full double handful, lest I risk dropping them) and then had to funnel them delicately into the jar (not too quickly, lest they bounce off the mouth of the jar). But as I let the beans fall from my cupped hands into the jar, I felt the smoothness of their skins and the firm curvature of their shape as they jostled against each other and against my hands. I saw the dull gleam of their black matte exteriors, and the ever-changing shadows between them. I heard the gentle rhythmic rain as they fell onto the glass and then onto each other. And for a moment, my shoulders relaxed and my mind quieted, and the simple beauty of the action filled the room with peace.

So, my goal for this week: to take more time to notice these moments of beauty that God has placed in even the most seemingly trivial aspects of our lives, and not just to notice them but to linger in them, to let their peace seep into my heart. It is true that these moments are purely of this life, completely temporal - but God created this world, and temporality, and He can use it to teach us about eternity and craft us in His image.

The precarious heady happiness of temporality

There are so many wonderful things in this life, to enjoy and to delight in! Yesterday afternoon I was able to go to a bridal shower for a friend from college, to spend time celebrating her and rejoicing in the beautiful relationship God is building in the lives of her and her husband-to-be; in the evening, I was able to visit friends who have just had their third son, and got to spend time enjoying their company, catching up with them, and even holding their not-quite-two-week-old son. Driving home from their house, I was practically overflowing with happiness, from all the love which I had witnessed and been able to be a part of all throughout the day. These relationships that God gives us, in which we can be loved and learn to love others, which force us to take our minds off of ourselves and think about, care for, and value the people around us, are such an incredible blessing, and it is right and good to be happy because of them!

But as I was driving home, I realized that this happiness isn't a stable, steadfast, lasting thing. It is an emotion, and it can come or leave at the drop of a hat, and as quickly as a butterfly takes wing. And because it takes you soaring so high, the fall can take your breath away when it comes. At least, that how it works for me; I do know quite a few people whose emotions seem to never fly so high or fall so low, so they never have to deal with the crazy contrast, with the unstoppable fear-inducing plummet when the peak of happiness is surmounted and passed. But for those of us whose emotions swing through the wide range of human feeling more easily and often, that happiness - even though it comes from good and wonderful things - can be dangerous, like walking on a tightrope. Though intoxicating, it is hazardous: the precarious heady happiness of temporality.

When happiness comes from Christ, as a result of being in Him and resting in the knowledge that all things are through Him and for Him, it can endure through the fickle whims of human emotion. The joys of fellowship and community can then deepen that happiness in the moment, without exciting the fear of instantly falling into a pit without so much as a warning sign, because the happiness we have in Christ can create a stable, solid ground to walk on, a place of emotional security in which to operate. Being in Him will not deaden or dampen our emotions, but it should give them a foundation to rest upon, and truth to inform them, so that we can use them - just as we use our minds and our bodies - for His glory.

Need

Towards the end of his book Perelandra, C.S. Lewis juxtaposes two seemingly opposite ideas as true ways of perceiving reality. There is first the idea that God has a purpose for us - a part for us in His plan that gives us meaning - and that He thus has need of us and we likewise have need of each other. No one is separate and alone; in the great plan of God, every part is necessary and depends on each other. We see this in the common biblical analogy of the church to a body, where every member is strengthened and built up by what the other members supply: no one of those members could survive separately, but each needs all and is needed by all. Even Christ, as the Head of the body, needs us (in a manner of speaking, for He is self-sufficient), that, for example, He might reveal in us His grace, mercy, and righteous judgment.

The second idea is that God has no need of anything that He created - He simply created us and loves us out of the overflowing abundance of His goodness. He was not less before He created us, nor is He the greater because He created us. He does not lavish His grace and blessing upon us because He needs our love or because we deserve His favor, but simply because He is. Likewise, in this idea, we have no real need of one another, and so we are able to love as He loves: freely, without the conditions of merit or need.

I can't say that one or the other of these ideas is false; both ring true to me. The first speaks to my inner hunger for purpose, to my desire to be needed, and to my honest admission that I desperately need God and other people. But the second expresses the riches of God's grace, explains how we can begin to love as God loves us, and leaves God's eternal glory unlimited. Maybe this is one of the seeming paradoxes of Christianity - the pairs of apparently contradictory truths whose reconciliation lies beyond our current ability to reason and understand, like the concept of the triune nature of God. What matters is that it is true. We are needed, and all that we do matters and has significance, and we must not let our feet slip; we are not needed, and we can give and love in the freedom of our insignificance, resting in the greatness of our God.

"He has immeasurable use for each thing that is made, that His love and splendour may flow forth like a strong river which has need of a great watercourse and fills alike the deep pools and the little crannies, that are filled equally and remain unequal; and when it has filled them brim full it flows over and makes new channels. We also have need beyond measure of all that He has made. Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely necessary to you and for your delight I was made. Blessed be He!
"He has no need at all of anything that is made. An eldil is not more needful to Him than a grain of the Dust: a peopled world no more needful than a world that is empty: but all needless alike, and what all add to Him is nothing. We also have no need of anything that us made. Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely superfluous, and your love shall be like His, born neither of your need nor of my deserving, but a plain bounty. Blessed be He!" - C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

God with us

In the midst of all that is evil and ugly and dark - in the middle of our failures, frustrations, sorrows, and dashed dreams - God stands with us. And with God is light, joy, hope, and truth. Where He is, grace triumphs over failure, condemnation is defeated by mercy, and sorrow is comforted by the love that went to the cross on our behalf. All the darkness of this world is passing; the light of God is everlasting. It will endure, and because we are in Him we will endure with it, through the destruction of all that is sinful and fallen into the restoration and renewal of all thing good and noble and lovely - through death into life.

This world and its worries lie heavy on us, and we struggle with burdens beyond our strength and pains that seem to split our heart in pieces, and it is only a small comfort to know that someday they will pass away. What is greater is to know that God is with us, now, through those things. He is not distantly waiting for us to reach Him at the end of our lives! He is walking with us, by the quiet waters, in the green pastures, and even through the valley of the shadow of death.

His strength in my weakness

In a letter to the Corinthian church, the Apostle Paul wrote the following well-known passage:

"And He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me."

That first phrase - "My grace is sufficient for you" - is the one my mind usually lingers on (it's the one I have hanging on a wall in my house, too, which is probably why it comes to mind first!), but I want to set it aside and move past it today. Instead, I want to focus on the whole idea of God's strength being made perfect in our weaknesses - of our weakness being the opportunities for God's power to rest upon us and be made manifest in our lives.

When I think of my weaknesses, it is usually with shame, guilt, anxiety, and self-condemnation. I want to be cured of them, essentially: to be strong and perfect so that I can then give, love, sacrifice, and obey as God desires me to; to be righteous and above reproach in everything so that I can accomplish great and glorious things for God; to have my testimony be that He has made me perfect. At the center of this whirlwind is the desire to be something in myself so that I, myself, can please God. And I think most of us can relate to this desire to be able to offer something to Him, instead of always being needy and dependent!

But this is ultimately a self-focused desire, founded on pride (which is why our perceived failures and weaknesses, even about trivial things, matter so much to us, and why the slightest criticism has the potential to wound us deeply). While we do want to honor God, we also very much want it to be seen and known that we specifically are the ones honoring Him; we want Him to be glorified, but we specifically want Him to be glorified by our actions, and to share in His glory. Brothers and sisters, what I am slowly coming to know is that to truly honor Him our own honor must be utterly forsaken. In order to truly glorify Him with our lives we must learn not to desire our own glory in any way - to obey, and love, and seek God, and not care whether or not we are noticed, respected, or admired for our actions.

So our weaknesses really do become wonderful gifts, because they are precisely the areas where our obedience and love come from Christ's power rather than our own strength, and are thus the areas where we can most easily seek to glorify Him self-forgetfully. If we have nothing to offer, nothing to give, than we can give (but really it is God giving through us) without expecting glory or admiration in response. How could we expect those things, when the power to accomplish what we have done is not our own, but is God's power given to us, resting on us, and working through us?

Francois de Fenelon, a French priest and author from the late 1600s, wrote the following thoughts along these lines, which have been very convicting to me:

"Strength is made perfect in weakness. You are only strong in God when you are weak in yourself. Your weakness will be your strength if you accept it with a lowly heart.You will be tempted to believe that weakness and lowliness are not part of trusting God. It is commonly believed that to trust God you generously give God everything because you love Him so much. Heroic sacrifices are held up as true examples of trusting God. To truly trust God is not so glamorous." - The Seeking Heart

Isn't it true? We desire the glamor, the glory - we want to do great things for God and be the heroes whose stories are told throughout the church. But that is not truly trusting God, and it is not true strength in our faith either; true strength, perfect strength, is that which comes upon us from God in the midst of our weaknesses.

So I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses. My power is insufficient, but there is this great hope that Christ's power will rest upon me and work through me - and in this work it will be Christ Himself who receives the praise and the glory for whatever is accomplished, not me. And that is how it should be. It is His power, after all, that created me, sustains me, and gave me new life in Him through His death and resurrection. As I was unable to accomplish my own salvation, so I am unable in my own strength to continue in righteousness now that I have been saved. But in my weaknesses, His strength can be made manifest in my life, and I can begin to learn to set myself aside so that He may receive the glory, for it is His to receive.

Worship and work

In the middle of a little book of discourses, there is a collection of discourses on What We Learn From the Lilies In the Field and From the Birds of the Air, and the middle of this little collection is a discourse entitled "How Glorious It Is to Be a Human Being." And in this discourse the author argues that the glory of being human comes from these two things that we alone of all creation can do: that we can worship, and that we can work.

When the author of this discourse took the time to look at the lilies of the field, as Jesus commanded, and thought about how God clothes us in so much more glory than the lilies, he saw that this clothing must refer to something innate in us as being humans, not in our literal clothing (which has never been so glorious as the lily, not even that which adorned King Solomon). And what was this particular glory, that could be compared to the beauty in which the lilies were clothed? It was, the author concluded, simply that to be human means to have been created in the image of God, in a unique manner not shared by any other created thing. The lily bears witness to its Creator, but it does not bear the image of its Creator. We as human beings do, and that is our glory. In the quote I posted earlier, you can read how the author of this discourse explained that we resemble God as His inverse image by worshiping Him, and how that worship is our glory because by it we show that we were made in His image.

When this author then turned to look at the birds of the air, he saw how the bird did not worry about providing for himself in the future because the bird did not work nor have indeed any conception of the future. So while we ought to learn not to worry from the bird, our not worrying is different in essence from the bird's, because we touch the eternal and thus understand the future. It is our glory - as a created being with an eternal spirit, not just a temporal body - to be able to understand the worry about the future, and it is our glory to be able to work for the needs of our eternity and our future as the bird cannot work but as God Himself does work. It is another aspect of our being created in the image of God! And when we work, because we understand that it is God who provides for us ultimately as He provides for the bird (which is why we need not worry), we can think of ourselves as working together with God instead of as working for ourselves. And this also is our glory.

So to worship God and to work together with God (as being made in His image we are able to do in a way that nature cannot) - those are the things that the author of this discourse has concluded are the twin glories of a human being. And it makes me excited! For in those two glories we find eternal value and purpose for our lives, in God. Live is not empty and dark, because we have a God who loves us, who is worthy of our love and adoration and praise, in whom we can delight. Neither is life meaningless and despairing, because we have a God with whom we can work as He carries out His great eternal plan - and even the most trivial aspects of our temporal work are woven by Him into that great plan.

Another meditation on God's grace

When you begin to understand God's grace, it changes everything. How you perceive God, how you perceive yourself, how you perceive other people, how you deal with sins and shortcomings in yourself and others, how you deal with successes and recognition (both yours and others'), and how you handle all kinds of situations - all these things start to change. At least, this is what I am starting to see in myself as God has seemingly been coming at me on every side with this concept of grace, and interestingly enough, I'm seeing this change even in the midst of my sin. I don't mean that I'm suddenly sinning less, unfortunately, but that my response to my own sin is qualitatively different, at least a little bit. Sin does not automatically lead to despair, when grace is present; one failure does not mean that we need fear losing God's acceptance and love, when His grace has covered all our sins already and has reconciled us to Him.

The wonder of God's grace is that even as we mourn over and despise our own sin we can find peace for the past, strength for the present, and encouragement for the future through our hope in Jesus Christ. Do you know that wonder, of finding the strength in Him to forget the failures of the past and to try again to follow Him? The liberty of God's grace is that our lives are no longer bound by a list of "oughts" - a book of duties supplying an correct course of action for every situation - but rather by His love. Do you know that liberty, that breathtaking freedom of learning to live by grace rather than by law, of stepping outside the rigid walls of earthly duty and walking in the love and light of heaven? Outwardly, your actions may not change much, but the heart behind them will be altogether new. The burden of God's grace - and yet it is not a burden at all, but a gift whose value is beyond measure - is that He desires us to become channels, to pour out to others in every trivial daily event of our lives the great grace which He constantly pours upon us. To be able to give that grace to others, not as yet another thing we ought to do for God, to please Him with our law-keeping; nor yet with condescension, as if we were so great that we could certainly spare some grace for those lowly people around us; but with humility of heart, knowing we need grace at least as much as they do, and with gratitude of spirit that God has given us this chance to imitate Him in this most beautiful of His works toward us - that is a gift beyond description.

Little gifts and mighty graces

God is always giving us little gifts - the sun coming out after rain, the happiness of welcoming a loved one home again, good food and a full stomach, the comforting warmth of blankets and pillows at the end of the day, the quiet pleasure of a day of rest, and so on. Indiscriminately, he fills our days full of these little gifts; sometimes we rejoice in them with gratitude, and sometimes we hardly notice them. Assuming we choose not to ignore them, though, these little gifts are enough to bring us joy and satisfaction for a lifetime. However, God does not limit Himself to them. His purpose, being set on eternity as well as temporality, is not content with merely blessing us in this life; He wishes also to bless us with gifts that will last for eternity and with gifts that will bring eternity to our hearts here and now. Obviously the greatest of these gifts is salvation! In between this overwhelming, unfathomable, unbelievable grace, and the little daily graces that we take for granted, though, are many rich and beautiful gifts - graces that surprise and amaze us with their extravagance, and that transform and inspire our hearts.

These intermediate graces are, I think, children of the grace of salvation. Having saved us - having bought us with the blood of Christ, adopted us into His family, and sealed us with His Spirit - God is not content to have merely covered us with His righteousness: He desires to cause that righteousness to grow up and bear fruit within our very hearts. To accomplish this purpose, He bestows upon us these sanctifying graces. There is the grace of knowing His tender comfort in the midst of great sorrow; of gaining security and peace through His strength becoming our defense in times of worry or fear; of hearing His ever-loving voice answer our confusion with His truth; and so on. They are less frequent than the little common graces, but they are also more powerful. They cause us to know God more, and thus they are indescribably wonderful.

One of the most wonderful of these graces is when God removes for a moment some veil of sin and allows us to see something with His eyes instead of our own. We may not have even realized that our vision was so obscured - but then all at once everything looks different, and we know that it looks as it truly is and the way we had formerly perceived it was skewed and blurred. To compare it to something much more trivial, it is akin to putting on a pair of glasses and suddenly seeing the world without the astigmatism and myopia. Overwhelmed by joy, the heart effortlessly overflows with praise; it is impossible to contain the gratitude at being given such a grace as this, at being privileged for one brief moment to see with clearer sight. There is humility, also, in the knowledge that the vision is not born of any merit of our own, but is purely gift and grace, and in the deepened recognition of our sinfulness and of how small our relationship with God really is - but it is the humility of self-forgetfulness, not the humility of despair. With eyes newly open in Christ to some beautiful and glorious truth, we lose ourselves in Him; our whole being is colored through and through with His radiance, and His light is the joy of our hearts.

There is a strange shyness about the things we see by these graces; the sweetness is too piercing and too intimate for it to be revealed to the world as some great spiritual experience. It is like trying to tell someone the secrets you whisper with your lover - the joy is too high, the love is too great, and above all the thing itself pulls back from being told. These graces change our hearts and draw us nearer to God; they give us new eyes to see more clearly; they are the planting of seeds and the bearing of fruit in our lives; but they themselves are not known outside the heart in which they labor. They are the love-notes of our eternal Bridegroom, delighting in His Bride.

In the beauty of holiness

"O, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!" - Ps. 96:9a

What makes our worship beautiful in the eyes of God? From this verse, I would say that it is our holiness before Him that fills our praises and sacrifices with beauty.

But I am not holy, I cry! Do You not see the petty selfishness in my heart, the irritation over trivial inconveniences, the all-too-ready sharpened words of anger, or the idleness with which I can approach my responsibilities? How can I ever hope to come before You, my God, with worship that is genuinely beautiful, that is not torn and stained by my unholiness?

Come to Me in My grace, He replies, in the soft whisper of love. Don't you remember, My child, that you are in My Son and He is in you? When I look at you, I see His righteousness; in Him, you are holy and blameless in truth and in love. Do not be afraid! And do not come in your own strength, dressed in the rags of your own righteousness - come clothed in the righteousness of My Son, which He freely gave to you. You are holy in Him, and in Him you are beautiful and your worship is beautiful to Me. I am Your God, and I have made You beautiful with the beauty of holiness!

"O come, let us worship and bow down;
Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
For He is our God,
And we are the people of His pasture,
And the sheep of His hand." - Psalm 95:6-7

A hurt and a healing (or, a sin and a repentance)

For the past week, I thought I was pregnant. I had all the right signs (which might be TMI given the regular tone of my writing here), and I was just waiting until Monday morning to take the pregnancy test (7-9 days after I would have expected to have natural evidence of no pregnancy) to make sure that I wouldn't have a false negative. By yesterday evening I was starting to let myself be really excited - I'd never been that late in my life, even when I was young and more irregular, or when I was hypothyroid and had longer cycles, and I hadn't even been close to being that late since I got married and started tracking my cycles more diligently. But this morning when I woke up, my body told me most definitely that I was not pregnant. So either I was just abnormally very late for some unknown reason, or I had an early pregnancy loss. 

Emotionally, it doesn't really make a difference. As logistically difficult as having a child would be right now, it hurt so much to have those hopes dashed when I had begun to think a child was actually already here. Honestly, I was angry at God. It felt like He was teasing me, or mocking me - like He was blowing up my bubble of happiness and expectation so big just so He could shatter it. Because He is in control of all these things, you know? He knows that my cycle is like clockwork, and He knew how excited I would get at the thought of having a baby with Paul (like a living overflow of our love), and yet He still caused it to happen. It just didn't seem very fair or nice of Him to do something like that. So I simmered away all day, trying not to be angry at God but still feeling hurt when I thought about it.

Before we went to our church service at 5, while Paul was showering, I listened to an Adventures in Odyssey program that just so happened to be about Job. The part that has always confused me the most about Job was God's response to Job at the end of the book, because it doesn't really address any of the things that Job had been suffering or discussing throughout the rest of the book. God simply reveals Himself in His glory, wisdom, power, and love. In the Adventures in Odyssey, they point out that Job's primary sin is one of self-righteousness - he perceives himself as being righteous and thus perceives his circumstances as unfair, implying that God is unjust. And it struck me that maybe I was doing that same thing - thinking that I didn't deserve to have my hopes raised and then crushed, that God was unjust or unloving to allow that to happen. I was taking my belief about what should happen in my life and using that to judge God's character and actions - and at the end of Job, the question left hanging is "who am I, a man, that I should judge the God who made and sustains me?" So, ever so gently, through a humorous children's program, God began to point out my self-righteous and presumptuous attitude about the whole situation.

Then, when we got to church, the assistant pastor opened the service with a scripture reading (as is usual) from the book of Job (which is not) - and it was from chapter 38, where God is showing Job His power and asking him who he thinks he is. Okay God, obviously this is something You really want me to understand, and something that You want me to repent of. God doesn't do things flippantly or carelessly, as if He were playing games with our lives, nor does He take joy in our sorrows or cause us pain for no reason. Whatever happened, I ought to trust Him to have a good and holy purpose as He is a good and holy God, you know? And as we were singing the final song of the night, I realized that even though God did not give me this good gift now (like I had thought He was for a few days there) - and even if He never does, as hard and disappointing as that would be! - He has already given me the greatest gift He could ever give: His redeeming grace, through His own Son Jesus Christ. In that alone is undeniable proof of His goodness and His love towards me! A hurt like my situation this morning shouldn't make me doubt His goodness when I know that He has given His Son for my eternal salvation, blessing, and glory :) So as we sang (and as I sang with tears in the sorrow of repentance and the joy of being loved), "it is well, it is well, with my soul."

A Prayer

In the midst of the world's chaos, may we find peace in Christ.

When all around us society crumbles, communities fall apart, and people's lives are broken, and everyone seems hell-bent on progressing in the course that brought us to this place, may we find hope in the faithfulness of our Lord. May we remember that His promises are true and that His Word cannot be shaken.

When all our civil leaders are tainted by corruption and greed, and political campaigning becomes political mudslinging with no hope of integrity or improvement, may we remember that we are ultimately citizens of heaven, and may we find strength in the knowledge that God's throne is founded on righteousness and justice.

When people we know, in the face of society's brokenness, still tell us that supporting marriage and family is "weird", may we learn to feel compassion rather than contempt for the blindness - and may we remember that God has power both to open their eyes and to heal the torn fabric of our nation's families. May we remember that no obstacle is too great for Him to overcome, no wrong tradition so firmly entrenched that He cannot uproot it.

When the pain in the eyes and the bitter words of others reveal the despair and empty loneliness of their hearts, may we, by Your grace, Lord, be ministers of that grace to them in their hurt and in their lostness. May we remember that Your grace has saved us out of the depths of our sin! - and thus is more than sufficient to save and heal these others also.

In the valley of the shadow of death, may we find comfort in Your guiding presence.

O Root of Jesse

Today's antiphon remembers that Jesus is the eternal king of the nation of Israel, because He has come to reign forever on the throne of David as God promised to David himself so long before, and it also hints at the whole-worldliness of the salvation Jesus came to bring.

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before You kings will shut their mouths,
to You the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

In declaring Jesus to be the Root of Jesse, we are reminded of the greater picture of God's plan - we see the Incarnation in the light of history rather than as an isolated event coming unexpectedly out of nowhere. As God, Jesus sits on the throne of heaven; as man, He is rightful heir to the throne of David, and thus in His person unites the two thrones as a precursor to uniting the two kingdoms beneath them. It is symbolic of the reconciliation He makes between each of us and God the Father through His own body on the cross.

Similarly, by saying that the nations will make their prayer to Him, we see the future aspect of the event of the Incarnation. In the past, God was the God of Israel; in the future, He shall be the God of all peoples - and the great turning point was the life and death of Christ, who though coming of the house of David and the nation of Israel yet offered salvation to Jews and Gentiles alike through the sacrifice of His own body. We are no longer outside His walls; He has called us His people. The One who fulfilled all the prophecies, to prove His truth and faithfulness, has done a new thing: He has called all nations to Himself, and built His people from all the peoples of the world.

O Adonai

Today's antiphon recognizes God in His historical role towards the nation of Israel, for whom He is both the redeemer and the lawgiver:

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

Adonai, meaning "lord" or "master," is the name of God that most highlights the direct authority of God over our lives; more than merely pointing out the objective and philosophical authority of God over creation as the Creator, it emphasizes the direct and specific authority that God has over each of us (and our thoughts and our actions). He is our Master, our Adonai, and as such has the right to give us laws to obey, as He gave to Moses.

But the wonder of the first coming of Christ is that this purely magisterial aspect of our relationship with God has been colored with new elements - replaced, even, with the deeper love and intimacy of friendship and even marital love. As Jesus told His disciples, 

"No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you." - John 15:15

And again in Hosea, in the middle of a beautiful prophecy about the restoration and redemption of Israel with the coming of the Messiah:

"'And it shall be, in that day,'
Says the Lord, 'That you will call Me "My Husband,"
And no longer call Me "My Master"'" - Hosea 2:16

The One who came with fire in the earth-shaking power of His holiness, who gave us the perfect and unattainable standard of the law, has also come with redeeming love, and made a way for us to become righteous and be reconciled to Him, that He should be our Husband rather than our Master. This great transformation of our relation to God is the purpose of the Incarnation and the promise of Christmas.