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January 6 - January 27, 2023
Words used in church tend to confuse people. The pastor proclaims that “Christ himself lives in you” and “we are more than conquerors,” and although these words may stir up a wistful sense of longing, for many people they hardly apply to day-to-day experience.
We in the church have humility and contrition to offer the world, not a formula for success.
“The Christian has a great advantage over other men,” said C. S. Lewis5, “not by being less fallen than they, nor less doomed to live in fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world.” That recognition forms my starting point in undertaking a journey to know God.
“God is whispering to me right now that someone in this audience is struggling with a broken marriage.” I know for a fact that some statements exactly like these are deceitful, from speakers who say them sloppily or manipulatively. The wording implies a kind of voice-to-voice conversation that did not take place, and the fudged report has the effect of creating a spiritual caste that downgrades others’ experiences.
What gives me hope, though, is that Jesus worked with whatever grain of faith a person might muster.
And just as I tend to be calculated about my decisions, considering all sides, I also experience the curse of the “on the other hand” syndrome whenever I read a bright promise in the Bible.
Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?
Those who honestly confront their doubts often find themselves growing into a faith that transcends the doubts.
Adam, Sarah, Jacob, Job, Jeremiah, Jonah, Thomas, Martha, Peter, and many other characters in the Bible demonstrate a third category: the loyal traitor, who questions, squirms, and rebels yet still remains loyal. God appears far less threatened by doubt than does his church.
learned that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear.
When we get our spiritual house in order, we’ll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty. FLANNERY O’CONNOR21
“Tempting God means trying to get more assurance than God has given,” said the wise bishop Lesslie Newbigin
Relationships gain strength when they are stretched to the breaking point and do not break.
If the Book of Job teaches one lesson, especially in God’s speech at the end, it is that human beings have no business, let alone competence, in trying to figure out all the intricacies of why things happen.
Some take that passage as a comfort: “His eye is on the sparrow,” goes the song, “And I know he watches me.” Ironically, Jesus said it in the midst of dire warnings to his followers that they would face floggings, arrest, and even execution — hardly much comfort.* Jacques Ellul9 points out a common mistranslation: the Greek text simply has, “apart from your Father,” and says nothing about God’s will: It is to make things plain that “will” has been added. But the addition changes the meaning completely. In the one case, God wills the death of the sparrow, in the other death does not take place
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If knowing answers to life’s questions is absolutely necessary to you, then forget the journey. You will never make it, for this is a journey of unknowables — of unanswered questions, enigmas, incomprehensibles, and most of all, things unfair. MADAME JEANNE GUYON15
The French novelist Flaubert said that a great writer should stand in his novel like God in his creation: nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be heard. God is everywhere and yet invisible, silent, seemingly absent and indifferent.
Providence may be a great mystery, nonetheless I find no justification for blaming God for what God so clearly opposes.
In such a world, Donne has a clear choice: to fear God or to fear everything else, to trust God or to trust nothing.
As Tolstoy10 said, we have control over no other time. The past is unchangeable, the future unpredictable. I can only live the life directly before me.
If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching4 comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” Note the sequence: Choose to do God’s will, and the confidence will later follow.
Scott Peck’s13 book The Road Less Traveled spent more time on The New York Times best-seller list than any book in history,
used to believe that Christianity solved problems and made life easier. Increasingly, I believe that my faith complicates life, in ways it should be complicated. As a Christian, I cannot not care about the environment, about homelessness and poverty, about racism and religious persecution, about injustice and violence. God does not give me that option. The Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood14 agrees: “In many areas the gospel, instead of taking away people’s burdens, actually adds to them.” He cites John Woolman, a successful Quaker merchant who lived a comfortable life until God convicted him
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“Take my yoke16 upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus offers a peace that involves new turmoil, a rest that involves new tasks. The “peace of God17, which transcends all understanding” promised in the New Testament is a peace in the midst of warfare, a calmness in the midst of fear, a confidence in the midst of doubt.
As for faith, it will always mean believing in what cannot be proven, committing to that of which we can never be sure. A person who lives in faith must proceed on incomplete evidence, trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.
An ancient Orthodox writer18 wrote, “God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped, he would not be God.”
Yes, marriage lives on love, but it is the kind of love that parenthood demands, or Christian discipleship: a gritty decision to go forward, step by step, one foot in front of the other.
We tend to focus on the miracles and the dramatic appearances such as to Moses in a burning bush and to the prophets in dreams and visions.
God shared a camping experience with the Hebrews not because he needed a place to live, but because they needed his actual presence in order to get to know him.
I keep returning to this fact about Jesus because both as a Christian and as a writer I have spent a disproportionate share of my time exploring the mysteries of pain and suffering. I come away with as many questions as answers. Nonetheless, I have learned one important principle: not to judge God by some misfortune that befalls me or someone I love. My questions about providence and suffering are primarily answered in the person of Jesus, not in day-to-day events I may encounter now.
After thirty-eight chapters of theorizing by Job and his friends, God roared out of a storm, flattening them all with his first words.
Our relations with other people, as I have said, always involve a degree of uncertainty and doubt. Neighbors of a mass murderer often express surprise when the criminal is led away in handcuffs: “He was such a nice man.” All of us keep a part of ourselves, the inner self, hidden, and show the world only an outer self.
The “disadvantage” of knowing God through the Holy Spirit is that, when God turned over the mission to his church, he truly turned it over. As a result, many people who reject God are rejecting not God but a caricature of him presented by the church.
Etty Hillesum
It will sometimes appear that God cannot help us, or at least does not.
“Like many others, I find myself something of a perfectionist, and if we don’t watch ourselves this obsession for the perfect can make us arrogantly critical of other people, and in certain moods, desperately critical of ourselves.”
The visible world forces itself on me without invitation; I must consciously cultivate the invisible. I wish the process were spontaneous and natural, but I have never found it so. Indeed, I have found that such a process, like anything of worth, requires discipline. “If I omit practice one day, I notice it. If two days the critics notice it, if three days the public notices it,” said the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. The Christian life likewise involves daily acts of will, a deliberate reorientation to a new — and in some ways unnatural — personal identity.
I explained, the church is God’s presence on earth, his Body. And if the church does its job — if the church shows up at the scene of disasters, visits the sick, staffs the AIDS clinics, counsels the rape victims, feeds the hungry, houses the homeless — I don’t think the world will ask that question with the same urgency. They will know where God is when it hurts: in the bodies of his people, ministering to a fallen world. Indeed, our consciousness of God’s presence often comes as a byproduct of other people’s presence.
Question your doubts as much as your faith. By personality, or perhaps as a reaction to a fundamentalist past, I brood on doubts and experience faith in occasional flashes. Isn’t it about time for me to reverse the pattern?
I’ve decided there is one key in determining whether individual drug addicts can be cured: if they deeply believe they are a forgivable child of God. Not a failure-free child of God, a forgivable one.”
A child must, at some point, learn to accept the world as it is rather than as he or she wants it to be.
Likewise, a Christian who expects God to solve all family problems, heal all diseases, and thwart baldness, graying, wrinkling, presbyopia, osteoporosis, senility, and the other effects of aging is pursuing childish magic, not mature religion.
Kathleen Norris
AS I LOOK BACK on my own pilgrimage, I can see the grave dangers in childish faith. I had to learn that life is not fair and that God will not magically level the playing field for me.
Personal spirituality grows as a byproduct of sustained interaction with God.
Life with God advances like any relationship: unsteadily, with misunderstandings and long periods of silence, with victories and failures, testings and triumphs. To achieve the perfection that drew us on the quest, we must wait until the race has ended, until death, and the waiting itself is an act of extraordinary faith and courage.
DR. PAUL BRAND
Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
The people who had the most optimistic view of human nature, those who envisioned a steady progression toward emergence of “the new socialist man,” fell the hardest, littering the Siberian tundra and Chinese plains with perhaps a hundred million corpses.
Redemption promises not replacement — a wholly new creation imposed on the old — but a transformation that somehow makes use of all that went before. We will realize God’s design as reclaimed originals, like a priceless oil painting restored after a fire or a cathedral rebuilt after a bombing. Redemption involves a kind of alchemy, a philosophers’ stone that makes gold from clay. In the end, evil itself will serve as a tool of good.
