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July 19, 2020 - July 14, 2023
knowing myself as the sinner enables me to know something more: a God of mercy—something greater, for love responds to what is good and lovable; mercy responds to what is not good and makes it good and lovable, the gift of being myself.
Even in the Matthew passage just referenced, Jesus talks as much about self-discovery as self-sacrifice!
Christian spirituality has a great deal to do with the self, not just with God.
All give glory to God by being exactly what they are. For in being what God means them to be, they are obeying him.
We think. We consider options. We decide. We act. We doubt.
for if we find our true self we find God, and if we find God, we find our most authentic self.
as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.
Identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God.
true knowing of God demands that we know God not just as an abstraction or as objective data but in and through our lived experience.
Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known.
There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.
Not all knowledge transforms. Some merely puffs us up like an overfilled balloon.
Self-knowledge that is pursued apart from knowing our identity in relationship to God easily leads to self-inflation.
kept his focus (and, perhaps he hoped, God’s focus) off the deeper things about himself that were so profoundly disordered.
Truly transformational knowledge is always personal, never merely objective. It involves knowing of, not merely knowing about.
Because personal knowing is based on experience, it requires that we be open to the experience.
The things we know from experience we know beyond belief.
People who have never developed a deep personal knowing of God will be limited in the depth of their personal knowing of themselves.
people who are afraid to look deeply at themselves will of course be equally afraid to look deeply at God.
we come to know God best not by looking at God exclusively, but by looking at God and then looking at ourselves—then looking at God, and then again looking at ourselves. This is also the way we best come to know our selves.
however, highly unlikely that he could have known the depths of his fears or the magnitude of his pride. These levels of knowing of self awaited deeper knowing of God.
Wow
Deep knowing of God and deep knowing of self always develop interactively. The result is the authentic transformation of the self that is at the core of Christian spirituality.
It is quite astounding that God wants to be known by human beings. But nothing gives God more pleasure (Hosea 6:6).
The good news is that God can be known by human beings, personally and experientially.
God’s intention is that we know Divine love by experiencing it. But even when our Divine Lover seems distant, we can hold confident to the hope of the steadfast nature of God’s love because of the testimony of Scriptures and the witness of others.
“a little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about Him.”
Because God is love, God can only be known through love. To know God is to love God, and to love God is to know God (1 John 4:7-8).
The Christian God is known only in devotion, not objective detachment.
Thomas Merton writes that “we must know the truth, we must love the truth we know and we must act according to the measure of our love. Truth is God himself who cannot be known apart from love and cannot be loved apart from surrender to his will.”
Genuine knowing demands a response.
Some Christians speak of a personal encounter with Jesus as if this were a one-time matter—something that happens at conversion.
What God longs for us to experience is intimate knowing that comes by means of an ongoing relationship.
Relationships develop when people spend time together. Spending time with God ought to be the essence of prayer.
The starting point for learning to simply spend time with God is learning to do this with Jesus.
Spending time with Jesus allows us to ground our God-knowing in the concrete events of a concrete life.
Shared experience is the core of any friendship. And Spirit-guided meditation on the life of Jesus provides this possibility.
But productivity and efficiency miss the point.
I need to learn this
That is what friends do together—they waste time with each other.
True
As Jesus has begun to become more human and real to me, the invisible God of whom he is the image has become more accessible.
Both therefore support the development of a practical, down-to-earth spirituality in which we encounter God in the mundane and familiar parts of regular life.
“If God has come in the flesh, and if God keeps coming to us in our fleshly existence, then all of life is shot through with meaning. Earth is crammed with heaven, and heaven (when we finally get there) will be crammed with earth. Nothing wasted. Nothing lost. Nothing secular. Nothing absurd. . . . All are grist for the mill of a down-to-earth spirituality.”7
Our challenge is to unmask the Divine in the natural and name the presence of God in our lives.
The truth is that God is to be found in all things—even and most especially in the painful, tragic and unpleasant things.
Lucinda described her first experience of this as follows:
Important story
Instead the goal is simply increased awareness of God in the events of life and the depths of my being. It is attending to the God who is present.
J. I. Packer correctly captures the priority in all this knowing: “What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me.”
All our knowledge of God depends on God’s sustained initiative in knowing us.
Grounding our knowing of our self in God’s knowing of us anchors us in reality.
Until we dare to believe that nothing can separate us from God’s love—nothing that we could do or fail to do, nor anything that could be done by anyone else to us (Romans 8:31-39)—we remain in the elementary grades of the school of Christian spiritual transformation.
An identity grounded in God would mean that when we think of who we are, the first thing that would come to mind is our status as someone who is deeply loved by God.
Yes yes yes
