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When it comes to recognizing the truth of our own identities, most of us experience a symbolic version of blindness that keeps us from seeing ourselves for who we really are. We live unawakened lives marked by self-perpetuating lies about
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“Jesus’ answer puts paid to any easy-going vending-machine theology (one sin in, one punishment out). ‘He didn’t sin,’ replied Jesus, ‘nor did his parents. It happened so that God’s works could be seen in him.’ (John 9.1–3) Jesus, in other words, doesn’t look back to a hypothetical cause which would enable the onlookers to feel smug that they had understood some inner cosmic moral mechanism, some sin that God had had to punish. He looks forward to see what God is going to do about it. That translates directly into what he, Jesus, is going to do about it. For he is the light of the world.”
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
“Alongside this Israel-and-God story there runs the deeper story of the good creation and the dark power that from the start has tried to destroy God’s good handiwork. I do not claim to understand that dark power. As I shall suggest later, I don’t think we’re meant to. We are simply to know that when we are caught up in awful circumstances, apparent gross injustices, terrible plagues – or when we are accused of wicked things of which we are innocent, suffering strange sicknesses with no apparent reason, let alone cure – at those points we are to lament, we are to complain, we are to state the case, and leave it with God. God himself declares at the end that Job has told the truth (42.8). He has clung on to the fact that God is just, even though his own misery seems to deny it. Jesus not only drew on that story. He lived it. He died under it. That brings us, then, to the story of Jesus himself.”
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
“The answer is that God does send thunderbolts – human ones. He sends in the poor in Spirit, the meek, the mourners, the peacemakers, the hungry-for-justice people. They are the way God wants to act in his world. They are more effective than any lightning flashes or actual thunderbolts. They will use their initiative; they will see where the real needs are, and go to meet them. They will weep at the tombs of their friends. At the tombs of their enemies. Some of them will get hurt. Some may be killed. That is the story of Acts, all through. There will be problems, punishments, setbacks, shipwrecks, but God’s purpose will come through. These people, prayerful, humble, faithful, will be the answer, not to the question Why? But to the question What? What needs to be done here? Who is most at risk? How can we help? Who shall we send? God works in all things with and through those who love him.”
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
― God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath
“Prayer is a means of bringing our authentic self to God and meeting him in these mysteries. We pray because we hope and believe that surrender can be forged there, on our knees. We pray because sometimes this is all we can do when desire and the undesirable have us knotted inside. We pray because, when the woods have gone dark, when the distance between God’s Word says it and I believe it feels like impossible terrain to travel and our only companions are doubt and fear, we need words as simple as these: Your will be done.”
― Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith
― Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith
“there is so little of our own maturity and growth that we actually superintend. “I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual transformation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual practices that keep me open and available to God.”1 We give grace accessibility to our hearts when we engage in intentional spiritual practices. One important spiritual practice is the practice of confession. As Andy Crouch writes, As for Christians, well, we really have just one thing going for us. We have publicly declared . . . that we are desperately in need of Another to give us his righteousness, to complete us, to live in us. We have publicly and flagrantly abandoned the project of self-justification that is at the heart of every person’s compulsion to manage perceptions. . . . This means telling the world—before the world does its own investigative journalism—that we’re not as bad as they think sometimes. We’re worse. . . . If we’re being honest about our own beauty and brokenness, the beautiful broken One will make himself known to our neighbors.2 Confession allows us to be the worst of sinners and yet remain confident that God is committed to us still. Holy desire is best”
― Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith
― Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith
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