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The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us.
He is not a police officer on patrol, watching over the universe, ready to club us if we get out of hand or put us in jail if we get obstreperous. He
The word mercy means that the upward look to God in the heavens does not expect God to stay in the heavens but to come down, to enter our condition, to accomplish the vast enterprise of redemption, to fashion in us his eternal salvation. “The root meaning ‘to stoop,’ ‘to be inclined,’ has been conjectured.”
Servitude is not a vague woolgathering in the general direction of God and certainly not a cringing, cowering terror under the lash of God.
Servitude is specific in its expectation, and what it...
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The Christian is a person who recognizes that our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master. The Christian realizes that every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive. Recognizing and realizing that, we urgently want to live under the mastery of God.
All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.
joining Jesus and the psalm we learn a way of work that does not acquire things or amass possessions but responds to God and develops relationships. People are at the center of Christian work.
The character of our work is shaped not by accomplishments or possessions but in the birth of relationships:
For it makes very little difference how much money Christians carry in their wallets or purses. It makes little difference how our culture values and rewards our work . . . if God doesn’t. For our work creates neither life nor righteousness. Relentless, compulsive work habits (“work your worried fingers to the bone”) which our society rewards and admires are seen by the psalmist as a sign of weak faith and assertive pride, as if God could not be trusted to accomplish his will, as if we could rearrange the universe by our own effort.
As Christians do the jobs and tasks assigned to them in what the world calls work, we learn to pay attention to and practice what God is doing in love and justice, in helping and healing, in liberating and cheering.
Psalm 127 insists on a perspective in which our effort is at the periphery and God’s work is at the center.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. G. K. CHESTERTON
Blessing has inherent in it the power to increase. It functions by sharing and delight in life. “Life consists in the constant meeting of souls, which must share their contents with each other. The blessed gives to the others, because the strength instinctively pours from him and up around him . . . . The characteristic of blessing is to multiply.”4
we must develop better and deeper concepts of happiness than those held by the world, which makes a happy life to consist in “ease, honours, and great wealth.”
We acknowledge God as our maker and lover and accept Christ as the means by which we can be in living relationship with God. We accept the announced and proclaimed truth that God is at the center of our existence, find out how he has constructed this world (his creation), how he has provided for
our redemption, and proceed to walk in that way.
Awe. The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have to him: Will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will we always be trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle?
Such is the conduct of those who are trying to achieve some meaning in their lives, pursuing their right to happiness, but refusing to take the well-traveled roads that lead there.
And patience has a positive tonic effect on others; because of the presence of the patient person, they revive and go on, as if he were the gyroscope of the ship providing
a stable ground. But the patient person himself does not enjoy it. PAUL GOODMAN
Then, at the other end, when all the temptations had failed, that brutal assault when his body was turned into a torture chamber. And we know the result: an incomprehensible kindness (“Father, forgive them”), an unprecedented serenity (“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”) and—resurrection.
However much we feel the inappropriateness of this kind of thing in a man or woman of faith, we must also admit to its authenticity. For who does not experience flashes of anger at those who make our way hard and difficult? There are times in the long obedience of Christian discipleship when we get tired and fatigue draws our tempers short.
“You shall not hate your brother in your heart . . . . You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:17-18
The psalms are not sung by perfect pilgrims.
Perseverance does not mean “perfection.” It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us. We
For perseverance is not resignation, putting up with things the way they are, staying in the same old rut year after year after year, or being a doormat for people to wipe their feet on. Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength.
But we will not learn it by swallowing our sense of outrage on the one hand or, on the other, excusing all wickedness as a neurosis.
We will do it by offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.
“Righteous is out and out a term denoting relationship, and . . . it does this in the sense of referring to a real relationship between two parties . . . and not to the relationship of an object under consideration to an idea.”1
God sticks to his relationship.
He establishes a personal relationship with us and stays with it.
The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering com...
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Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness. We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but becau...
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Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our l...
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morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms. It is out of ...
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The Christian faith is the discovery of that center in the God who sticks with us, the righteous God.
my life a prayer—
with GOD’s arrival comes love, with GOD’s arrival comes generous redemption.
Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair. Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them
A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering. If we do not make that decision, we are endangered on every side. A man or woman of faith who fails to acknowledge and deal with suffering becomes, at last, either a cynic or a melancholic or a suicide.
pain. It acts as if they should not be, and hence it devalues the experience of suffering. But this myth denies our encounter with reality.”
[And so] think more of the depth of God than the depth of your cry. The worst thing that can happen to a man is to have no God to cry to out of
Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition.
For the fact that God participates in it by sympathy implies that He is really present in its midst, and this means again that He wills that it should not be, that He wills therefore to remove it.7
And this, of course, is why we are able to face, acknowledge, accept and live through suffering: we know that it can never be ultimate, it can never constitute the bottom line. God is at the foundation and God is at the boundaries.
Such are the two great realities of Psalm 130: suffering is real; God is real. Suffering is a mark of our existential authenticity; God is proof of our essential and eternal humanity.
Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulations, of scurrying and worrying. And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do.
It is imagination put in the harness of faith.
We are in special and constant need of expert correction.
