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From Reaching for the Invisible God:

…what finally brought me to God: not the Bible or Christian literature or anyone’s sermons. I turned to God primarily because of my discovery of goodness and grace in the world: through nature, through classical music, through romantic love. Enjoying the gifts, I began to seek the giver; full of gratitude, I needed Someone to thank…God had been there all the while, waiting to be noticed. Though I still had no proof, only clues, the clues led me to exercise faith. (p. 118)

I really loved this comment because I feel that it sheds insight into how the holy spirit actually works in our hearts and minds. I’ve always wondered at how God does it. How does he take our fallen selfish thoughts and turn them into humility? How exactly does he change us from being jerk to being deeply aware of Jesus’ sacrifice and to generating love for the people around us? The usual example we know of is when tragedy hits someones life. They almost die or they lose their family in some horrible accident and it really slaps them around. But that kind of thing only happens to some people. It didn’t happen to me or even most of the people I know. So how did we all come to faith? Being raised by Christian parents? You can have that and still turn out bad. Everyone knows our efforts come to nil without the work of the spirit.

I like this because it’s another way that he works in our hearts to draw us to himself. I couldn’t put my finger on it before, but Yancy’s description is one I can relate to a lot.

Mark Byron offers some keen insight into spiritual warfare:

The classic verse in the area comes from James 4:7 – “Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you.”
Note that it doesn’t say “Whup the Devil’s ass, and he will flee from you.”

It’s a short post. Keep reading…

From Reaching for the Invisible God:

I learn about faith by looking back at Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for God proceeded in a most puzzling manner with all three. After God had promised to bring about a people as numerous as the stars in the sky, what followed more resembled a case study in family infertility. Abraham and Sarah entered their nineties before they saw their first child; that son married a barren woman; the grandson Jacob had to wait fourteen years for the wife of his dreams, only to discover her barren as well. This tortuous path toward populating a great nation shows that God operates on a different timetable than impatient human beings expect. Each of those Old Testament characters lived and died in faith, vowing to the end that God had indeed kept his promises. (p. 75)

I think it’s fascinating that the patriarch’s faith is presented as being so loosely tied to tangible results in their lifetime. I wonder if they were like us now: Wanting God to take care of their problems in a relatively short amount of time. (A couple of weeks sounds good.) Then, lying on their bed in their old age, they rally themselves to proclaim their faith, even thought they are about to die without seeing any of the promises come true. OR did they live their day-to-day life with this kind of conviction, not actually expecting God to deliver for a few hundred years or so. When you read about famous characters in an epic, it’s easy to imagine the latter, more mythical faith. However, remembering that Jacob was a guy just like me, I suspect it may have looked more like the former.

I would also like to relate this to eschatology for a moment. The pre-trib, pre-millennial rapture is a future that seems to me to appeal to the impatient Christian. We just hang on for a few more years and then God comes down and whacks everything into shape in a very short amount of time. Only 7 years or so. The post-millennial view sees the power of God working in the hearts of men and growing the church to cover the whole earth over several thousand MORE years from now. This is the slow, patient salvation of our world. When I open the bible, I see God working slowly.