[The Grand Weaver]

- CHAPTERS ONE – TWO -

“We must recognize that divine intervention is nowhere near as simple a thing as we might imagine. For it to sustain us and give us staying power—to help us remain firm and see God’s hand at every stage in our lives—it must look quite different from what we would usually prescribe for ourselves. It cannot be only a journey of unmistakable blessing and a path of ease. To allow God to be God we must follow him for who he is and what he intends, and not for what we want or what we prefer.”

“To be able to accept the wonder and the marvel of one’s own personality, however flawed or ‘accidental,’ and place it in and trust it to the hands of the One who made it, is one of the greatest achievements in life. His ‘registration number’ is on you. Your DNA matters because the essence of who you are matters and whose you are by design matters. Every little feature and ‘accident’ of your personality matter. Consider it God’s sovereign imprint on you.”

“God does not display his work in abstract terms. He prefers the concrete, and this means that at the end of your life one of three things will happen to your heart: it will grow hard, it will be broken, or it will be tender. Nobody escapes. Your heart will become coarse and desensitized, be crushed under the weight of disappointment, or be made tender by that which makes the heart of God tender as well. God’s heart is a caring heart. As the writer of the letter to the Hebrews reminds us, our infirmities deeply touch God [Heb 2.14-18; 4.14-5.3]… God the Grand Weaver seeks those with tender hearts so that he can put his imprint on them. Your hurts and your disappointments are part of that design, to shape your heart and the way you feel about reality. The hurts you live through will always shape you. There is no other way.”

“Only if you are willing to pray sincerely for God’s will to be done and are willing to live the life apportioned to you will you see the breathtaking view of God that he wants you to have, through the windows he has placed in your life. You cannot always live on the mountaintop, but when you walk through the valley, the memory of the view from the mountain will sustain you and give you the strength to carry you through.”

“Faith is a thing of the mind. If you do not believe that God is in control and has formed you for a purpose, then you will flounder in the high seas of purposelessness, drowning in the currents and drifting further into nothingness… The Bible is a book on life building, written for us as we sojourn on this planet. Interestingly, it also tells us that the rudder and sail remain in God’s control and that we enter the high seas with the understanding that we must trust him. If you do not have the mind of faith, then you will fall into repeated peril—and God will get the blame. A life of simple trust is a blessed life, and it sees beyond any impediment through the mind committed to God’s way.”

“God has made it imperative in the design of life that we become willing to trust beyond ourselves. Walking by faith means to follow Someone else who knows more than we do, Someone who is also good.”

“The single most important thread working through your disappointments is that your heart and mind ponder and grasp what the cross of Jesus Christ is all about. Either your heart and mind will be shaped by that reality or they will be misshapen by false utopias.”

- CHAPTERS THREE – FOUR -

“Accomplishment and dream careers do not necessarily lead to happiness. Making it to number one really means knowing where God wants you to be and serving him there with your best efforts. The goal, then, is to find the threads God has in place for you and to follow his plan for you with excellence.”

“God shapes the precious life he saves and does so for a special purpose. A new burden begins, a new impetus lodges in the heart. A new purpose for doing what you do steadies that call. The pattern starts to unfold—a pattern for which God has been shaping you as he takes you through a lifelong pursuit and to a treasured fulfillment of serving him well.”

“Submit to God’s design, and be number one in his eyes. Know that you are God’s temple. Bathe your life in prayer. Live out your life in humility of spirit that serves for the right reasons. Seek the counsel and example of godly men and women. Finally, exhibit a commitment to the preeminence of Christ in all things. These are the components of a call. Self-glory, power, sensuality, and the seduction of material gain impede such a call.”

“The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; rather, our fundamental problem is spiritual. It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. Herein lies the cardinal difference between moralizing religions and Jesus’ offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.”

“Approximately fourteen centuries before Christ… the Hebrew people received the Ten Commandments. An extraordinary first line gives the basis of the Ten Laws: ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me’ (Exodus 20:2-3). To miss this preamble is to miss the entire content of the Mosaic law. It provides the clue to each of the systems of law that have emerged through time. Here the Hebrew-Christian worldview stands distinct and definitively different. Redemption precedes morality, and not the other way around. While every moral law ever given to humanity provides a set of rules to abide by in order to avoid punishment or some other retribution, the moral law in the Bible hangs on the redemption of humanity provided by God… Those who play by the rules sometimes think that this is all there is to it and that they merit their due reward. Yet God repeatedly points out that without the redemption of the heart, all moralizing is hollow.”

“Why does a man honor his vows? Why does a woman honor her vows? Is it to earn the love of their spouse, or is it to demonstrate the sacredness of their love? True love engenders a life that honors its commitment. That is the role of obedience to God’s moral precepts—putting hands and feet to belief, embodying the nature of what one’s ultimate commitment reflects—the very character of God. Jesus said to let our lives so shine before people that they would glorify God as a result (see Matthew 5:16)—this is the end result of a life that takes the moral commands seriously.”

“Whatever you do, whether it be at work or in marriage, through your language or your ambitions, in your thoughts or your intents, do all and think all to the glory of God (see 1 Corinthians 10:31) and by the rules he has put in place—rules that serve not to restrain us but to be the means for us to soar with the purpose for which he has designed all choices.”

- CHAPTERS FIVE – SEVEN -

“The context of your life reminds us again and again that where you see intelligence in the result, you see a mind behind the result. But naturalists who are determined to do away with God debunk the notion of design with designed arguments. So they take a text out of context, betraying their own pretext to turn away from reason. The net result is a life detached from its moorings. Life simply cannot be lived that way, and so spirituality comes in through the back door, offering an escape from the barrenness of naturalism. But without truth, the threads do not make a beautiful design. Without trust, spirituality is nothing more than a confession that sheer matter alone does not answer life’s deepest hungers.”

“Our society often fails to come to terms with [the] will. Why do we shun it so? Mainly because it is difficult and persistent. Yesterday’s victory does not guarantee tomorrow’s. The relentlessness of the enemy of our souls demands that we remain ever watchful, and that’s the hard part. We want results without effort. We want a lifestyle, but we don’t really know what life is about. We want success without having to pay the price to get there. We want straight As, but we don’t want to study. We want a blessed marriage, but we don’t want the effort and commitment that it takes.”

“We must take hold of God’s promise to bless us. He does not want us to struggle without his voice or his wisdom. He brings us to the place of his choosing, one way or the other.”

“So where does one begin? With self-crucifixion. In effect, we go to our own funeral and bury the self-will so that God’s will can reign supremely in our hearts. Our will has no power to do God’s will until it first dies to its own desires and the Holy Spirit brings a fresh power within.”

“Who am I? What does it mean to ‘be’? The answer is this: I am a child of God related to my heavenly father. I must be this child in my own understanding. I am not my own. I belong to him. Resting in that knowledge, I know what it is to be his. I should pursue doing God’s will, then, and by his grace he will enable my will.”