Hope and struggle.

Having finished my paper and my final exam, I now have time to read "fun books"! My first choice was Dan Allender's The Healing Path, which had been highly recommended to me. He covers so much in the book, but I selected a few quotes regarding hope and the struggle for faith in the face of suffering.

“Pain is seldom expected nor embraced when it comes. It is often denied or swept under the spiritual rug of ‘God’s sovereignty’... Few of us enter the tragedy of living in a fallen world and simultaneously struggle with God until our hearts bleed with hope.” p. 5

“Indeed, God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives. But that plan may be to labor for forty years with a recalcitrant, hard-hearted youth group that ages and dies in the wilderness, with only a few who make it into the Promised Land. How could God’s best for Moses be to bring the man to the brink of what he’d worked his whole life to achieve, and then bar him from enjoying it before he died? The fact is, God’s perfect plan might include untold suffering that has no clear purpose or meaning in this life.” p. 13.

“How are we to groan inwardly and also wait expectantly? It seems that when we groan most deeply, we most urgently anticipate resolution for our pain. But we cannot hope unless we learn to wait, and we cannot learn to wait if we have put God on our schedule.” p. 39

“The goal of evil is to destroy our future by stealing our hope.” p. 83

“To be truly human--to feel, to doubt, to struggle, to seek, ask, and knock without having to have an immediate answer or much of an answer at all.” p. 146

“My heart will never become any bigger than that in which or in whom I hope. But when my hope is centered on the coming redemption, I begin to take on His glory.” p. 146

“Bold prayer bombards heaven relentlessly with the cries of our soul.” p. 175

...and my new favorite...

“Hope is not an absence of sorrow but a refusal to allow powerlessness to silence our cry or to shake our confidence in God.” p. 151

A difficult question.

“Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
GOD, the Lord, is my strength;
He makes my feet like the deer’s;
He makes me tread on my high places.”
-Habbakkuk 3:17-19

After reading this passage this morning, I am wondering how much I love God for Himself and rejoice in Him for His own sake, or how much I love the gifts and blessings He gives. For I certainly have been blessed.

I can sing "His love endures forever" along with everyone else, but how would I really believe that if I had nothing except His love? Thankfully, He is a gracious God and is patient and gentle with our weakness, our humanity.

Wisdom gleaned while studying for my midterm exam.

If it's not obvious, I love quotations.

“Insofar as the church is conformed to the world, and the two communities appear to the onlooker to be merely two versions of the same thing, the church is contradicting its true identity… God’s historical purpose is to call out a people for Himself; that this people is a ‘holy’ people, set apart from the world to belong to Him and to obey Him.” --John Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, p. 17

“Men are in their nature ‘evil.’ It is out of their heart that evil things come and out of their heart that their mouth speaks, just as it is the tree which determines its fruit. So there is but one solution: ‘Make the tree good, and its fruit good.’ A new birth is essential. Only a belief in the necessity and possibility of a new birth can keep us from reading the Sermon on the Mount with either foolish optimism or hopeless despair.” --John Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, p. 29

Requests.

O God,
May I never be a blot or a blank in life,
cause the way of truth to be evil spoken of,
or make my liberty an occasion to the flesh.
May I by love serve others, and please my neighbour
for his good to edification.
May I attend to what is ornamental as well as essential in religion,
pursuing things that are lovely and of good report.
May I render my profession of the gospel
not only impressive, but amiable and inviting.
May I hold forth the way of Jesus with my temper as well as my tongue,
with my life as well as my lips.
May I say to all I meet,
I am journeying towards the Lord's given place,
come with me for your good...

--from The Valley of Vision, p. 274

Boredom.

This very postmodern confession of sin was evidently featured in a chapel service at the seminary last week and also in class tonight.

Father, we confess that we are satiated and bored;
Creation has bored us.
Work has bored us.
Family has bored us.
Friends have bored us.
Our homes bore us.
Television bores us.
Redemption has bored us.
Truth has bored us.
You have bored us.
No generation in history has ever had so much to entertain it.
We are jaded and cynical.
We think the world is our servant, so we are not thankful when things go well for us, and we are not patient when they do not.
We believe every desire should be satisfied, so we are not delighted when they are, and we are not humbled when they are not.
We laugh, but do not know joy.
We are captivated, but are never really awed.
We celebrate, but we do not worship.
Have mercy on us, and forgive us.
Amaze us with grace – blood stained, incarnate, Messianic grace - the Glory of God in Christ.

--Rev. Michael Kelly, Green Lake Presbyterian Church, Seattle

(This text and other worship elements are at The Liturgy Fellowship.)

Lenten thoughts.

We acknowledge our wickedness, O LORD, and the iniquity of our fathers, for we have sinned against You. Do not spurn us, for your name’s sake, do not dishonor your glorious throne; remember and do not break your covenant with us.
--Jeremiah 14:20-21

O Thou terrible Meek,
Let not pride swell my heart,
My nature is the mire beneath my feet, the dust to which I shall return...
Low as I am as a creature, I am lower as a sinner;
I have trampled thy law times without number;
Sin's deformity is stamped upon me, darkens my brow, touches me with corruption.
How can I flaunt myself proudly?
Lowest abasement is my due place, for I am less than nothing before thee.
Help me to see myself in thy sight, then pride must wither, decay, perish.
Humble my heart before thee, and replenish it with thy choicest gifts...
When I am tempted to think highly of myself, grant me to see the wily power of my spiritual enemy;
Help me to stand with wary eye on the watch-tower of faith, and to cling with determined grasp to my humble Lord;
If I fall let me hide myself in my Redeemer's righteousness, and when I escape, may I ascribe all deliverance to thy grace.
Keep me humble, meek, lowly.
--from The Valley of Vision, "Pride," pp. 160-161

Encouragement from an unexpected source.

For my Christian Ethics class, we were asked to read the first papal encyclical from Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est. Taking exception to parts 40-42 which discuss Mary and the saints, this Presbyterian was greatly encouraged and exhorted by his writing about God's love. Some bits and pieces:

"Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction." (part 1)

"God loves man... with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective [!] love; among all the nations he chooses Israel and loves her--but he does so precisely with a view to healing the whole human race." (part 9)

"God's passionate love for his people--for humanity--is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice. Here... [is]... the mysery of the Cross: so great is God's love for man that by becoming man He follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love." (part 10)

"Christ took the lowest place in the world--the Cross--and by this radical humility he redeemed us and constantly comes to our aid. Those who are in a position to help others will realize that in doing so they themselves receive help; ...we are not acting on the basis of any superiority or greater personal efficiency, but because the Lord has graciously enabled us to do so. There are times when the burden of need and our own limitations might tempt us to become discouraged. But precisely then we are helped by the knowledge that, in the end, we are only instruments in the Lord's hands; and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are personally responsible for building a better world. In all humility we will do what we can, and in all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord. It is God who governs the world, not we." (part 35)

"Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed. People who pray are not wasting their time, even though the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone." (part 36)

"Often we cannot understand why God refrains from intervening. Yet he does not prevent us from crying out, like Jesus on the Cross: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Matthew 27:46) We should continue asking this question in prayerful dialogue before his face: 'Lord, holy and true, how long will it be?' (Revelation 6:10)." (part 38)

And my personal favorite (and new mantra, which I have added to my sidebar above!)... "Hope is practised through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God's mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness. Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! It thus transforms our impatience and our doubts into the sure hope that God holds the world in his hands and that... in spite of all darkness he ultimately triumphs in glory." (part 39)