Month: July 2012

There is a luminosity about childhood. For many of us no other time in life was as full of peace and happiness, even joy, than our earliest years. This, I believe, holds true whether we were raised in religious or non-religious homes. There is something in the very nature of childhood that lends itself to what might be called a natural knowledge of and openness to God. Perhaps it is our innate awareness of this reality that has led adult theologians to speak of an “age of accountability”, the moment when children have their first recognition of the difference between good and evil in their own hearts and first know the need, at least dimly, to consciously receive Christ as personal sin-bearer. Before that moment it seems they have a kind of moral innocence, and with that an innate affinity for God.

Whatever one might believe about “Age of Accountability” theology no one, it seems, is able to retain the carefree nature of childhood into adult life. Often this is because childhood itself became “problematic” when abuse of various kinds or other hardships weaved themselves into our early existence. But even those who were nearly always happy as kids will tell you that life became harder, much harder, as they grew up and the heavy responsibilities of adulthood bore down upon them. It is no surprise, then, that one will often hear parents tell their children to fully enjoy their childhood today….while they can.

Paradoxically, as Christians we are taught to give up “childish ways”, but not childlike faith. Whatever the challenging nature of our mature years we are not to become cynical, disenchanted and doubtful about both the goodness of God and the goodness of the lives He has given us. Rather we are to retain the trust of a child towards our Heavenly Father. The Bible also seems to teach that the capacity for awe and wonder that seems natural during pre- adolescence is not something we can permanently do without, especially when it comes to pondering the divine nature. The question is how do we take this counsel and apply it to our lives in the years between young adulthood and old age? How do we recapture some of the cardinal joys of what some literally call the “wonder years”?

For this author the gateway has been, so far, two-fold: first the conscious grieving of losses I’ve known in both my adolescence and my adulthood and second the seeking of God in nature in the aftermath of that grieving. It as if my heart has finally had enough darkness bled from it by the grieving that I can now look out at the earth and sky and catch glimpses of the earth and sky of my childhood, now three decades behind me. At the same time I sense that the way I perceived reality then and the way I am beginning to perceive it again is, in some sense, also a replacement of the temporal perspective with the eternal. It seems that maybe the sublime awe and wonder I knew 30 or more years ago are exactly the same as I’m rediscovering now and that both are tastes of the reality of God, a reality that stands outside space and time.

I realize that this may sound more than a little mystical. For that I cannot apologize. I’m also realizing that without this kind of “mysticism” my Christian life would continue to be impoverished in a way I’m no longer willing to accept. The recapturing of childlikeness is an incredibly powerful thing and I believe it is God’s will for blessing me at this juncture in my life.

Perhaps He desires the same for some of you forlorn lost children sojourning in adult bodies out there. If so, I hope you might find your own way back to a new childlikeness that incorporates the best of the old and, in Christ, goes beyond it. If you do what you may experience is both renewed faith and a blessed taste of deep Heaven.

The answer to the entire existence which we have found as Christians is found in this great truth: that, through saving faith in Christ, we have received the love of the one Being in the universe who loves both perfectly and infinitely. The nature of this perfect and infinite love is such that we need not continue to fear its loss, as we have the loss of human love. There is nothing we must do to make or keep ourselves “lovable”. God the Father’s love for us, His children, is sure and certain. He is the only father who can be absolutely counted on to be ever-loving in the deepest sense of that term.

Yet many believers struggle with the nagging sense that they have not “fully received” the love of God in Christ. They sometimes equate this sense of not feeling deeply loved by their Lord with not being loved by Him at all. This is the tormenting lot of many a struggling, but authentic, child of God today. Such individuals have known divine love but fleetingly and their lives never seem, to themselves anyway, as being truly or wholly given over to Christ in a satisfactorily profound way.

Perhaps part of the problem with this distressing set of mind and heart comes from a lack of real understanding about the nature of love between the infinite and the finite. One does not have to perfectly and fully take in all of God’s love to know he or she is loved. In fact no human being can do so in real time in our present frame. The very nature of infinite love makes it not completely knowable by finite, fallen creatures such as ourselves at any given moment. This is the human condition at present. Even when we are caught up in the highest spiritual rapture, experiencing the ultimate “mountaintop experience” with the felt affection of the Lover of our souls we have not yet fully known that affection. How could we? Our hearts are not large enough to ever exhaust the supply of love God lavishes upon us.

But, thankfully, just because that love cannot ever be fully received and contained by us here on Earth does not mean it cannot, and has not, been taken in by us at all. Actually it can be taken in deeply, deeply enough to be both sufficient to our present need as well as superabundant beyond that need.

Some of us have a tendency to be “all or nothing” kind of people. We want it all now or we think we are being somehow cheated of what we obviously “need”. The danger in this kind of faulty thinking is that we will minimize the blessing of God when it comes because we are convinced we should be constantly overwhelmed by blessing. The truth is that while God loves to bless His children He cannot give us more than we are ready to receive at any given time, and only He knows the proper measure of blessing at that time.

Furthermore we will never know the full extent of God’s love for us in this time and place. We are, in fact, destined to know it in ever-increasing measure throughout eternity and then only because we have crossed over from this world to the next and been “completed” in Christ. It is in this glorified state that the love of God will become known to us in a measure and quality we never dreamed of on Earth as it now is and as we now are.
For now it is enough that we have come to know the love of God in Christ to the extent that He has made it known to us. His love, like His grace, is sufficient onto the moment. There is always more to come. We can learn, over time, to rest in that fact and know we are the object of the affection of the One true Father whose love has no beginning and no end.

Many years ago I happened to gaze upon the face of a sleeping baby boy. I’ve seen many infants in the course of my life, but for some reason God decided to grant me an epiphany as I looked at this one. Perceiving his face I felt a then-rare sense of awe steal over me. In the serene visage of a tiny child I was suddenly overcome with a deep recognition of the dignity of a particular human being made in the image of almighty God. The perception only lasted in terms of seconds, but I have never forgotten it. That child’s face, and the realization of the presence of the divine in it, has been burned into my memory.

In an era when our culture has progressively forgotten God a sense of the reality of human dignity and the sacred value of human life have also become increasingly lost to far too many of us. Without the grounding of human worth in the reality and ultimate worth of the Creator of human existence people become expendable. This is because, apart from God, our existence is increasingly seen as meaningless and, thus, worthless. We see the results of this kind of thinking in everything from the contemporary fetish for violent media to the ongoing expansion of legalized abortion to our inexorably climbing suicide rates. Detach human value from divine origin and image-bearing and you are left with a sort of “societal death fetish”. This is the horrific trademark of the Post-Judeo-Christian worldview that has continued to gain ground in the West during the last few decades.

For this reason it is imperative that we who call ourselves Christians find the time to meditate on the implications of our origins. The truth is that a taste for violence and self-destruction is not unknown even among professed believers today. It is difficult not to wonder if this reflects just how deeply we have allowed ourselves to be influenced by the world that we are in, but not supposed to be of. In this light perhaps a holy rediscovery of the God-given value of human life must begin in the Church long before we expect to try to re-introduce it to the surrounding culture.

Such a re-discovery starts with the realization that while all value is derived from something. Ultimate value is only derived from Someone. Despite the Secular-Humanist’s sometimes strident objections nothing and no one has intrinsic value apart from God. It does no good to talk about human rights unless there is a transcendent value imputed to human beings that both justifies and delineates those rights. If that value is assigned by human beings it is being assigned by imperfect creatures whose perceived self-interest, at any given moment, will define what a “right” is for themselves and others and what isn’t. Such rights are fluid and will ultimately be changed to fit the temper of the times. We saw what this can lead to in the mass depredations of atheistic political systems during the 20th Century, so far the bloodiest in human history.

The only ground for real human moral progress will be found, if it is found at all, in re-centering human value from our profoundly imperfect selves to the perfect Maker of the Universe, the one perfectly revealed by the God-Man, Jesus Christ. Apart from this all that the most well-meaning people hope for in our future is doomed to be lost forever.

As I write these words I find myself wondering what kind of world that precious slumbering baby from years ago is even now growing up to inherit.

We long for permanence, for the unchanging, for constancy, and in this world we are frustrated because the truly permanent is not yet fully here. Notice I say not yet fully here. What is permanently here, for the believer, is God’s Spirit. The Holy Spirit is present even now to always remind us that, in the midst of this temporally-bound, fallen world the Eternal One has already come to dwell, and where God is so is His kingdom. The Kingdom of God is among us today, present in the form of a divine paradox, because while it is present it is not yet present in all its fullness.

Human beings seek to assuage the ache for permanence through any number of ultimately futile pursuits, many of which are not inherently evil, but none of which are fully effective. Our quests for the intransient may take the form, for instance, of simple nostalgia. Americans, as an example, are inveterate collectors. Witness the rise of eBay, now an international phenomenon. It appears that we can easily find and purchase a seemingly endless number of accoutrements from our youth that make us briefly feel a sense of childhood transcendence once again. Unfortunately the trappings of childhood do not keep us from continuing to age and coming to face the inevitability of leaving our comforting collections behind us in death.

Others seek constancy in deeper places like the human commitments of marriage and childbearing, through the loving companion and the generational legacy of offspring. Both of these things are God-given and good but, again, neither escapes the ticking clock of human mortality. Even if our spouses and children outlive us we must face the fact that, even then, our marriages and families do not travel with us beyond the grave.

These are just a few obvious examples of trying to secure the comfort of the unchanging. There are others, but all share one thing in common: they are trapped in the temporality of a world that is passing away, and thus cannot secure the very thing that they are sought for.

That thing is not really a thing at all, but a state. The Bible tells us that our Maker has “set eternity in our hearts”. The truth is we are eternal beings. This is one more aspect of being made in the image of our eternal Lord. Our deep yearning for permanence is a natural outgrowth of that image-bearing. We long for things not to change because we are the creation of the only One who never changes.

And so it is only in relationship with God that we can actually seek and find the permanence we legitimately crave. He truly is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow and in a world that finds itself in the throes of almost constant change this unchanging nature of God is the only refuge for eternal creatures such as us. By all means enjoy the good things of this world, enjoy them with gusto. But never forget that you cannot hold onto them. You can only truly hold on to Him, and wait for Heaven, the place of perfection, the eternally unchanging dwelling-place of God and His people.

When we who know the Lord are one day at last completely transformed, translated into the heavenly beings we were designed from the start to be, will we know both our origins in time as well as our previously barely known, eternality? What will we be in God’s eternal dwelling if not beings now living, as He does, outside of linear time? Yet, in that blessed state, will we still know our past, the temporally fixed existence that had its apparent start in time and was lived out in time?

There is almost an amnesiac quality to the Bible’s description of the future and infinite state of the blessed. The Scripture tells us of a day coming when all our tears will be washed away, just as all the former things of our once fallen existence will have passed from our consciousness as well. As perfected and eternal beings now dwelling in that eternity what might be the value of remembering our earthly pilgrimage?

All that may swirl through our heads and hearts today: our past, our present, our future, in short all the strands of our entire earthly existence, will they be eliminated from our consciousness or will something potentially greater take place?

Could it be that all the deep mystery of the divine that may have permeated our childhood, the aching deep calling deep in our present life, and the seemingly impenetrable and unknown future of our life here will all together some day, some final day of time as we have known it, be made right within us rather than only banished?

I’d like to think (and I confess that I may be “off-base” here theologically speaking), that there is such deep meaning in even the temporal life we’ve known here on earth that God will not suffer it to be lost so much as perfected and made whole to us. After all, even now, we appear to be somehow in the very center of God’s workings and intentions for the universe.

Sometimes these days I begin to feel overwhelmed by the weight of meaning just to be found in the natural world outside my window, a world that is somehow transcendently linked to the supernatural world that dwells invisibly behind it. The drama of God’s manifest and yet mysterious purposes, and purpose, lie out there beyond my ability to comprehend, but not my ability to apprehend. These are manifestations, no matter how fleeting, of glory, glimpses of the ultimate and they are being made known to my consciousness in the here and now, not in some future state.

Of course in that state we will know infinitely more than we do now, but perhaps our “nows” are somehow incorporated in a new way into our eternal future. Is the temporal lost forever in the eternal or does it become part of the eternal once we enter into the presence of our God? I do not and cannot know the answer, but I wonder….and I yearn to someday know the answer, even as I am known by the Answerer….

The hope of the Christian even in this life is to share, however incompletely, in the infinite fountain of our Lord’s innate and perfect love. To share in God’s love, to somehow partake of it and become a conduit of that love to others; is this not our highest earthly bliss?

The only right motive for service is love of God and love of others. We know this explicitly from 1st Corinthians 13 which clearly tells us that all ministry that is completely bereft of true love is, by its very nature, of no avail to us. It is perhaps also of little value to its object. Despite this many of us continue to “do right” towards people without a right heart within ourselves. Often our motivation is anchored in the fear that if we do not serve others we are either poor Christians or, worse, not real believers at all. But few things are more misleading than false love provoked by fear. Such activity is not of God to the extent that the motivation of fear trumps the motivation of love. Some ministry, therefore, may not be true ministry at all.

That we are capable of this kind of false service is, of course, the bad news. The much better news is that, through Christ, every believer may gain access to the pure and inexhaustible love of the Father, both for us and others. As God’s children we can know His love through the conduit opened to us when the blood of his Son washed us clean and the resurrection power of that same Son gave us new life. The love of God is something we can now share in to the degree that we truly want it.

Actually, truth be told, the majority of Christians most likely have sometimes done the right thing for the wrong reason. In the end it does us no good to let a sense of guilt over our less than perfect motivation lead to a vicious cycle of guilty feelings compelling us to serve for the wrong reasons leading to more guilty feelings. It is the kindness of God that leads us towards real repentance in this area as in any other of the Christian life. It is Him first loving us that sets us free to love others from a sincere heart. As we receive love from this inexhaustible part of the divine nature we are filled to overflowing and then “naturally” pass that love onto others.

Of course this may sound too easy to those of us who are, like Hannah Hurnard’s famous character, “Much Afraid”. For us it often feels like even perfect love is somehow insufficient to drive our fear out of us, but this is a lie of the enemy of our souls that we have decided to accept. If we are willing to let Him our Lord will, in time, drive out the deepest fears from our hearts. A mustard seed of faith in the combination of his goodness and his omnipotence can start this process (one that, admittedly, is often life-long; especially if we have known great oppression or tragedy in our former existence.)

The key is desire and even that is, like faith, a gift of God. Once we have tasted of His love and the joy that comes from giving the overflow of that love away to other needy souls the desire can form in our hearts for more. Now we only need cultivate it by diligently seeking to know our Lord in greater and greater measure, a task also made worthwhile by the initial taste of God’s holy and infinite affection towards us.

Again, such an enduring filling of our hearts with divine love worth sharing is not an instantaneous event. It is progressive. It may last a lifetime and not be complete until He completes us the day we stand before Him and come to fully know Him as we are fully known. In the meantime we may struggle and struggle hard with our dying, fear-based flesh, but we need not despair because in the economy of sanctification the old cliché actually does hold true; love, God’s love, eventually conquers all.

We perhaps cannot approach God rightly without a consciousness of mystery. All the systematic theology in the world cannot completely remove the veil from a Being Who is infinitely beyond us by His very nature. This is not to say that He cannot be known by us but, as one pastor I knew once said, there is a vast difference between apprehending Him and comprehending Him.

Some will say that the Incarnation removed the veil of unknowing for those of us who have put our faith in Jesus Christ. In one sense this is no doubt true. Through the Son of God we who call ourselves by His name have been given the opportunity to know the Creator of the Universe in a profoundly new and personal way. But even the presence of the Spirit of Christ living within us does not eliminate the mysteriousness of the divine. The true believer today may know far more of God, the Father, than even the most pious Israelite did in the time prior to the Advent. Yet today’s Christian must still grapple with and accept the sublimity of his Lord. So many of our experiences with spiritual things remain beyond our ability to fully describe, much less completely understand. We sometimes enter the realm of the inexpressible when we are authentically touched by the Holy Spirit.

That this is true need not be a troubling thing. It is possible to revel in the manifold mysteries of God. What are needed to experience this are a meek heart and a humble mind. Those who must have some kind of mathematical calculus in their knowledge of God are individuals who know even less of Him than those who embrace the limits of their earthly knowledge of Him. Only the one who recognizes her creaturely limits is in a position to touch that mystery and be touched by it, by Him, in blessing.

The history of the faith is full of what we might call “orthodox Christian mystics”, men and women who knew their Bible but who also came to know their Lord in deeply sublime and ineffable ways. These are human beings who accepted the propositional certainties of sound doctrine, but who also met with God in ways that either partially or completely resist description. Such brethren have been given a great gift in being allowed these experiences with the “Lover of their souls” and those of us who have not had them ourselves should not enviously question what they have experienced. It might be much better for us to ask the Holy Spirit of Christ to similarly touch us.

The Christian life is, among other things, a journey of experience. Experience may need to sometimes be put under the theological microscope of propositional, cognitive biblical interpretation. It can not be blindly assumed that every mystical experience is of God. But to abandon all mystical experience as somehow misleading us into error is to impoverish ourselves spiritually and perhaps miss out on profound blessings our Lord intends to give us.

We dare not and, in fact, cannot exclude mystery from our faith because the object of that faith is, as stated earlier, mysterious by nature. This is especially the case with His finite and fallen creation. How could an infinite and eternal Being be anything less than mysterious to even we who know Him in salvation? Even the deepest Christian is still, on this side of Heaven, looking at God “as through a glass darkly”.

Thanks be to God that it will not always be that way.