Grace and The Sovereignty of God - Part IV

Thinking. Thinking. Thinking about God's grace and sovereignty.

This is an infinite topic because He is an infinite God. This is a finite blog series because I am a finite mind. But I am still not sure how long it will go on for.

But my thoughts now are on what I need to do as I live my life daily. How do I go about honoring Him and living it out in a life that has Christ as the central core? How do I make sure I am living the best I can to be pleasing to Him?

• Patience - I need to live a life that recognizes His sovereignty and waits for His timing. I need to sit and listen to Him and make His will my timing, not the other way around.
• Prudence - I need to live a life that is active in discerning and doing His will. I cannot sit back and wait for the Lord to drive me where He wants me to go, I need to follow hard after Him and go where He is directing me.

How do I balance the two? I am convinced that only through prayer can the discernment come to know when to wait and when to walk. If I am not listening for His voice, how can I expect to hear it? If I am not seeking Him in my life, how can I expect to see Him working in it?

Someone once told me the Lord does not steer a parked car. How true. I just hope I am wise enough to know to wait at times for the light to turn green.

Grace and The Sovereignty of God - Part III

Further thoughts regarding God's grace and sovereignty. One of the things I often hear is how can a loving God permit pain and suffering in the world.

I do not know all or necessarily any of the answer to that question, but here is how my recent thinking made me work through it (for now).

A loving God wants us to fully realize the joy that a close personal relationship with Him would bring, fueled by our faith and trust in Jesus and our desire to be obedient to the will of God that comes through that faith and trust. A loving God also allows us the freedom to make our own choices. I cannot fully reconcile God's sovereignty with the concept of personal accountability, but I do know we will stand in judgment one day (Hebrews 9:27), the results of which will depend whether we have trusted Christ or not. Lots more can be said about that. Lots more.

But moving on, I see pain and suffering in a fallen world being used to address two things:

• Pride - as sinful beings in a fallen world, we do need to deal with our pride and how it can drive us away from God, away from His will, away from the joyous union with Him.
• Dependence - as sinful beings in a fallen world, we need to come to terms that only dependence on Him will get us through to eternal salvation and security.

Pride cuts against dependence on God and drives us from it. maybe pain and suffering are actually a loving way to draw us to Him. 

It may sound cruel, but the temporary pain of a temporal life (even though it does not feel temporary when it is occurring) may be a loving way to draw us to the eternal joy of union woth God. 

We are after all sinful beings in need of saving from ourselves.

Grace and The Sovereignty of God - Part II

A good thing is happening here. I have been thinking a lot about grace, a lot about the sovereignty of God. I have written a little about my thoughts and that is making me think about it all the more. A good thing.

As I explore it a bit more two other thoughts begin to bubble up to the surface: acceptance and condemnation.

• With God's grace and sovereignty, you can accept people as they are.  Not necessarily accept what they are saying or doing, for that may be against God';s will. But accept them as people, and as a result, love them more as people. Not for what they do or say, but who they are. People, lost without a loving God unless they accept Christ as Savior, lost and unacceptable to all. That is, unacceptable without God's grace manifested in the atoning, substitutionary death of Jesus and His resurrection from the dead in victory over all.
• With God's grace and sovereignty, there is no need to condemn anyone.  When you realize your own unacceptability but for His grace, you realize there is no one you should be condemning, as you are no better than they. When you accept the fullness of His sovereignty, you realize there is no need to do so, because He is in control and will square all things in His timing.

Faith and trust in Jesus as the sole way to your eternal salvation was the starting point of my journey into God's grace and sovereignty. Such a rich journey, such a long way more to go.

Grace and The Sovereignty of God

I have been doing more thinking than writing lately, a condition that is probably better for me in the long run. What I have spent a good deal of time thinking about is grace and God's sovereignty.

I have come to some preliminary conclusions. I say preliminary because of well what the conclusions are:

• My study of grace and God's sovereignty is a life-long process: Now you see why my conclusions are preliminary, I do not believe you ever fully plumb the depths of either topic. The more I study, the more I meditate, the more I learn. And the farther I find I have to go.
• I tend to try to limit God's sovereignty: At least I usually do. The more I worry about my little world or expand that worry to what is going on in the world, I am actually limiting the sovereignty of the Lord. He is in control, I usually do not have a clue as to what He is up to until after He has accomplished His purposes.
• I need to keep the His grace and my living the Christian life separate: While I need to accept what He has willed, and do so with at least a minuscule measure of the grace Christ exhibited on earth, and the Father lavished on us from heaven; I do need to try to achieve all I am capable of in living in a Christ-like way. I should not accept what happens in the world without trying to do my part to influence and change it, but I cannot take the burden for righting all the world's problem. It is probably better if I just try to discern what role He has for me in my small corner of things.

So acceptance of His grace and sovereignty comes down to three things: faith, trust and obedience. Faith in God's character, trust that Christ is my salvation and obedience to His will. 

And I need to keep thinking about all of this daily.

A Daunting Thought

We are living in our lives in the place (physically, spiritually and mentally) where God permits us to be. Make no mistake about the sovereignty of God, about His ability to move us into new situations, a new place, to permit our lives to go into new directions as He so purposes for us. God can do this with an ease we cannot really understand for He is divine and in complete control over our lives.

If you are not at that place where you want to be in your life, ask yourself these questions:

• Are you seeking Him out, seeking His will?
• Are you actively resisting the will of God?
• Have you done things in the past that you know were in rebellion to God, so now He has permitted you to be in a place that is not where you would have wanted?
• Are you learning anything about yourself from where you are in your life?
• Are you growing closer to Him?
• Are you still in rebellion?

I think God so loves us that He permits us to be in rebellion to Him because that is the choice we make. He allows us in situations that can harm us because it is where we have chosen to go in our lives. It doesn't mean He loves us any less; it means He loves us enough to give us the choice to come to Him or not.

If you are in a situation in which you would rather not be, it may mean God has something for you to learn, it may mean you are facing the consequences of your decisions; it may mean God is planning to use you in ways you cannot imagine, to His greater glory. And for the growth of your character and love for Him.

I am not saying life is always easy or fair. It is a fallen world inhabited by sinful beings, and not always pleasant to deal with. But He has a place for us in His mansion, a life to come so joyful we cannot truly comprehend it. And all He asks is that we turn to His Son for our salvation, that we trust in Him alone and no one else.

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
Romans 8:18 (New American Standard Bible)

It might not make your world any different now, but it should make it a bit more bearable. Where you are is where He has permitted you to be, based on the purposes of His will and the choices of your life. A daunting thought.

Continue your walk. I do, as I seek out my path on The Narrow Road.

Technorati Tags: Jesus, God, sovereignty, joy, life, rebellion

Unable

"A God whom we could understand exhaustively, and whose revelation of Himself confronted us with no mysteries whatsoever, would be a God in man's image, and therefore an imaginary God, not the God of the Bible at all."
J I Packer - Evangelism & The Sovereignty Of God

We cannot comprehend the sovereignty of God and the concept of human responsibility. Volumes have been written on it, and I will not even try to attempt to lay out an argument. God is sovereign but we are responsible for, accountable for, our actions. Go figure it out, I cannot (Nor can you).

I like how Packer takes it out in the above quote. Who are we to even think we can understand God? Do we even want a God we can fully understand? If we could, would not He be just one of us?

I for one am thrilled I cannot comprehend my God in all His fullness. I have faith in His character, that He is who He says He is and will do what he said He would. That is enough to comprehend.

And more than enough to live my life according to His will.


Technorati Tags: God, J I Packer, sovereignty, responsibility, accountability

Stay Out of His Way

"For it is not true that some Christians believe in divine sovereignty while others hold an opposite view. What is true is that all Christians believe in divine sovereignty, but some are not aware they do, and mistakenly imagine and insist that they reject it. What causes this odd state of affairs? The root cause is the same a sin most cases of error in the Church - the intruding of rationalistic speculations, the passion for systematic consistency, a reluctance to recognize the existence of mystery and to let God be wiser than men, and a consequent subjecting of Scripture to the supposed demands of human logic."
J I Packer - Evangelism & The Sovereignty Of God

Finished Pascal and started reading Packer. I find this much easier to wrap my mind around; I am almost relieved to be moving on. Need to finish this book before I start reading for the next seminary class. This quote struck me in that I have always been suspicious (since I became a Christian that is) of man's attempts to put God in a box instead of leaving Him in the book He wrote for us. I struggle in class at times with those theories and systems that seem all too man-made and not enough God honoring.

I worry about attempts to explain God too fully, which in my mind goes beyond our natural inquisitiveness and winds smack dab in the middle of a heart of pride. He is divine and incomprehensible to the finite mind; He is depths no one can fathom or plumb to their full extent. We try too hard to accomplish what we can never achieve - a full understanding of God. Fortunately, He has a full understanding of us and permits these feeble attempts without letting them diminish His love for us.

So I try to focus on Him rather than trying to master Him, I try to stay out of His way. I need to understand a good deal about God so as to understand how to live my life faithfully to His will, but I do not need to fully comprehend Him to do so. To try is the height of pride and foolishness.

As a result, it would be better to first approach a brother and sister in Christ looking for that common element of faith in Him; salvation through Him alone, trust in Him not self; than to try to haggle over those man-made systems and differences we throw out to defend our own prideful positions.

Get on The Narrow Road and stay out of His way.

Technorati Tags: J I Packer, God, Jesus, sovereignty, bible

The Lord's Will

In looking at my journal of an entry I posted on this day in 2007, I was struck by a thought I penned that day:

"...The Lord's will is not my concern, but fulfilling it is".

It was from reflecting on the choosing of Rebekah as Isaac's wife in Genesis 24. Specifically, it was triggered by Laban's and Bethuel's response to the servant of Abraham as he explained how God guided him to Rebekah at the well:

Then Laban and Bethuel replied, "The matter comes from the LORD; so we cannot speak to you bad or good".
Genesis 24:50 (NASB)

What I see now is that three years ago I affirmed to myself that I am to follow God, seek His will and let Him work out His purposes. How much time did I spend fighting His will and seeking to use my own ability to wrest the path of my life onto my own self constructed stage in the interim?. Oh, lots and lots. He who ignores his own warnings from his past are doomed to repeat them. And so I teach myself.

In Christ I have a peace, a assurance of eternal salvation that I cannot lose, no matter what transpires in the intervening time of my life until the day I stand before Him.

I am not concerned about the Lord's will, that is His to determine in His sovereignty.

But I am concerned in seeking it out and rushing to meet Him there.




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