Gratitude
We live our life mainly in two flavors, an attitude of gratitude for what we’ve received, or an attitude of resentment because we didn’t get what we feel we’re entitled to.
God freely gave his son that we might escape the consequences of our sinful and corrupt lives
Psychological research has demonstrated how and why people feel gratitude when they receive a gift like this.
1. Do we see the gift as as a thing of worth, a “pearl of great price”, or do we say, “who needs it, it’s just a piece of cheap junk?”
2. Is the gift costly to the giver or do we say, “What difference does it make to him, he can certainly easily afford it.”
3. Is the gift given to us for unselfish reasons, or does the giver have some secret cynical purpose in giving it to us, like is he just trying to make himself look good, or make us feel guilty?
4. Is the gift given to us gratuitously, that is with no obligation to do so, or given only because for some reason he has to.
Paul summed up god’s gift like this: God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
When you hear about this you have heard the gospel. If hearing the gospel doesn’t impress you that much, if you laugh it off, or postpone thinking about it indefinitely, you are allowed to go off and make your own way in the world. If on the other hand, your heart is touched, if you feel grateful for what God did in sending his son, you may enter through the door of repentance and baptism into a state of salvation. The gift you receive will be an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you. While we may be quite impressed by our worthiness or lack of worthiness to receive this gift, weighing carefully, in the words of Elwood P. Dowd in the movie Harvey, the great big terrible things we’ve done and the great big wonderful things we’re going to do. Our hopes, our regrets, our loves, our hates. All very large. But God is not. He simply says "By grace you have been saved though faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God
A gift that is not received is a gift null and void. Whether you know it or not, hearing the gospel is the central test of your life, and I believe, the reason you were born.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Even As Also I Am Known
In all the universe there’s only one creature that would turn and look God full in the face and offer to give him pointers about what he should do to make us like him better. And when we grow up we make the big decision about whether or not we will worship him. But the stars worship God day and night, without thinking. And our failure to automatically do so is strange, racked as we are with many tragic and ridiculous flaws. Our test of God’s goodness is whether or not he is willing and able to meet our needs as we see them, to save our skin when we’re in trouble, and help us to get a good job when we are unemployed. We size up his unshakeable moral laws from tiny hearts filled with lonely highways of corruption.
What makes us “tick” lies concealed from neighbors and spouses, and even from ourselves, but not from him. When we think we want a Corvette we really want a hug. Folks, we just don’t know ourselves very well. For our little mind is a many layered contraption, like seven layer dip. In the top part is our conscious mind from which we speak our opinions to everyone we meet, make demands for benefits and favors, order French fries, and make complaints. Then there is the unconscious of which we know little and have heard but rumors. In that part of the soul 24/7 sweep dangerous and vexing emotions which we try in vain to manage and conceal. And then further still beneath that is the vast and titanic body of forgotten and suppressed memory, rising in the night as we lay down to close our eyes, dominating us for six hours, holding us captive, and like the unseen mantle of our planet composing the overwhelming majority of our soul. It is forever encased in darkness, and is probably molten at the core. We know nothing of it, but is it the real “us”? There, at least, we are in fact, “out of control”, as our own dreams prove. Do you commit sin in your dreams? Are you responsible for these things? After all it is your mind they are going through. No wonder the prophet sang,
"The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked;
Who can know it?
The question for me has always been, how then can we pray, not knowing our own state, or even who we really are? Who am I to tell God my needs, as if I know them and he doesn’t? Does he not know me far more completely than I do?
The answer is simple. Though we pray from small hearts filled with doubt and corruption we pray with faith into the great heart of God, and that heart is filled with eternal grace through the gift of his Son.
This thing bothered the Apostle Paul, and he wrote about it. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
To know, even as we are known: this is the sweetness of heaven, and for those who trust in God and the one he has sent, it is even now on the horizon, in the great scheme of things not many days away.
What makes us “tick” lies concealed from neighbors and spouses, and even from ourselves, but not from him. When we think we want a Corvette we really want a hug. Folks, we just don’t know ourselves very well. For our little mind is a many layered contraption, like seven layer dip. In the top part is our conscious mind from which we speak our opinions to everyone we meet, make demands for benefits and favors, order French fries, and make complaints. Then there is the unconscious of which we know little and have heard but rumors. In that part of the soul 24/7 sweep dangerous and vexing emotions which we try in vain to manage and conceal. And then further still beneath that is the vast and titanic body of forgotten and suppressed memory, rising in the night as we lay down to close our eyes, dominating us for six hours, holding us captive, and like the unseen mantle of our planet composing the overwhelming majority of our soul. It is forever encased in darkness, and is probably molten at the core. We know nothing of it, but is it the real “us”? There, at least, we are in fact, “out of control”, as our own dreams prove. Do you commit sin in your dreams? Are you responsible for these things? After all it is your mind they are going through. No wonder the prophet sang,
"The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked;
Who can know it?
The question for me has always been, how then can we pray, not knowing our own state, or even who we really are? Who am I to tell God my needs, as if I know them and he doesn’t? Does he not know me far more completely than I do?
The answer is simple. Though we pray from small hearts filled with doubt and corruption we pray with faith into the great heart of God, and that heart is filled with eternal grace through the gift of his Son.
This thing bothered the Apostle Paul, and he wrote about it. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
To know, even as we are known: this is the sweetness of heaven, and for those who trust in God and the one he has sent, it is even now on the horizon, in the great scheme of things not many days away.
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