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The glory of God is man fully alive. —SAINT IRENAEUS
we all long for the transformation promised in the Scriptures, but it can feel so elusive.
We’re not fully convinced that God’s offer to us is life.
After a while, the accumulation of event after event that we do not like and do not understand erodes our confidence that we are part of something grand and good, and reduces us to a survivalist mind-set.
Jesus, take away the fog and the clouds and the veil, and help me see . . . give me eyes that really see.
When we hear the words eternal life, most of us tend to interpret that as “a life that waits for us in eternity.” But eternal means “unending,” not “later.”
And all of them discover that there is far more going on here than meets the eye.
This wise old seer is saying that there is a way of looking at life, and that those who discover it are able to live from the heart no matter what. How do we do this? By seeing with the eyes of the heart. “I pray . . . that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened” (Eph. 1:18).
This is precisely what the Bible has warned us about all these years: that we live in two worlds—or better, in one world with two parts, one part that we can see and one part that we cannot. We are urged, for our own welfare, to act as though the unseen world (the rest of reality) is, in fact, more weighty and more real and more dangerous than the part of reality we can see.
There is more going on here than meets the eye. Far more. That is Eternal Truth Number One.
Notice that those who have tried to wake us up to this reality were usually killed for it: the prophets, Jesus, Stephen, Paul, most of the disciples, in fact. Has it ever occurred to you that someone was trying to shut them up?
There is a glory to your life that your Enemy fears, and he is hell-bent on destroying that glory before you act on it.
David Whyte said that we live our lives under a pale sky, “the lost sense that we play out our lives as part of a greater story.”7
“Notice that those who have tried to wake us up to this reality were usually killed for it: the prophets, Jesus, Stephen, Paul, most of the disciples, in fact.
“The story of your life is the story of the long and brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you could be and fears it.”
We, too, have suffered a series of blows over time. And we, too, have seized upon efficiency, busyness, and productivity as the life we will live instead. Now we are lost. Dazed. Alert and oriented times zero. Sleepwalking through life. In order to find our way out of these woods, we must return to the heart.
Their hearts are not in their work. Far from it. However they arrived at what they’re doing with their lives, it wasn’t by listening to their heart.
A person’s character is determined by his motives, and motive is always a matter of the heart.
Rather, when God invited him to ask for anything in all the world, Solomon asked for a wise and discerning heart (1 Kings 3:9).
And loving requires a heart alive and awake and free.
as the destroyer of one system and the seed of something new.
God promised in the new covenant to “take away your heart of stone.” How? By joining us to the death of Christ. Our nature was nailed to the cross with Christ; we died there, with him, in him. Yes, it is a deep mystery—“deep magic” as Lewis called it
Deep Magic
