"Knowing God" [XI]

~ The Adequacy of God ~

“You know what kind of life it is that Christ calls you, as His child, to live. His own example and teaching in the gospels (to look no further in the book of God than that) make it abundantly clear. You are called to go through this world as a pilgrim, a mere temporary resident, travelling light, and willing, as Christ directs, to do what the rich young ruler refused to do, give up material wealth and the security it provides, and live in a way that involves you in poverty, and loss of possessions. Having your treasure in heaven, you are not to budget for treasure on earth, nor for a high standard of living—you may well be required to forgo both. You are called to follow Christ, carrying your cross. What does that mean? Well, the only persons in the ancient world who carried a cross were condemned criminals going out to execution; they, like our Lord Himself, were made to carry the cross on which they were to be crucified. So that what Christ means is that you must accept for yourself the position of such a person in the sense that you renounce all future expectations from society and learn to take it as a matter of course if your fellow-men give you the cold shoulder and view you with contempt and disgust, as an alien sort of being. You may often find yourself treated in this fashion if you are loyal to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“[You] are called to be a meek man, not always standing up for your rights, nor concerned to get your own back, nor troubled in your heart by ill-treatment and personal slights (though, if you are normally sensitive, these things are bound to hurt you at the top level of consciousness); but you are simply to commit your cause to God and leave it to Him to vindicate you if and when He sees fit. Your attitude to your fellow-men, good and bad, nice and nasty, both Christians and unbelievers, is to be that of the Good Samaritan towards the Jew in the gutter—that is to say, your eyes must be open to see others’ needs, both spiritual and material; your heart must be ready to care for needy souls when you find them; your mind must be alert to plan out the best way to help them; and your will must be set against the trick that we are all so good at—‘passing the buck’, going by on the other side and contracting out of situations of need where sacrificial help is called for.”

“We are unlike the Christians of New Testament times. Our approach to life is conventional and static; theirs was not. The thought of ‘safety first’ was not a drag on their enterprise as it is on ours. By being exuberant, unconventional, and uninhibited in living by the gospel they turned their world upside down, but you could not accuse us twentieth-century Christians of doing anything like that. Why are we so different? Why, compared with them, do we appear as no more than half-way Christians? Whence comes the nervous, dithery, take-no-risks mood that mars so much of our discipleship? Why are we not free enough from fear and anxiety to allow ourselves to go full stretch in following Christ?”

“There are two sorts of sick consciences, those that are not aware enough of sin and those that are not aware enough of pardon… [Paul, in Romans 8:31-33] knows how easily the conscience of a Christian under pressure can grow morbid, particularly when that Christian’s nose is rubbed as Romans 7:14-25 would rub it in the reality of continued sin and failure. Paul knows too how impossible it is for Christian hope to rejoice a man’s heart while doubts of his security as a justified believer still remain… Paul speaks directly to the fear (to which no Christian is a total stranger) that present justification may be no more than provisional, and may one day be lost by reason of the imperfections of one’s Christian life. Paul does not for a moment deny that Christians fail and fall, sometimes grievously, nor does he question that (as all true Chrsitians know, and as his own words in Romans 7 reveal) the memory of sins committed after becoming a Christians is far more painful than are any thoughts of one’s moral lapses, however great, before that time. But Paul denies emphatically that any lapses now can endanger our justified status. The reason, he says in effect, is simple: nobody is in a position to get God’s verdict reviewed!... Nobody can alter God’s decision over His head—there is only one Judge!—and nobody can produce new evidence of your depravity that will make God change His mind. For God justified you with (so to speak) His eyes open. He knew the worst about you at the time when He accepted you for Jesus’s sake; and the verdict which He passed then was, and is, final.”

“God is adequate as our keeper. ‘Nothing… can separate us from the love of God,’ because the love of God holds us fast. Christians ‘are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation’ (1 Peter 1:5), and the power of God keeps them believing as well as keeping them safe through believing. Your faith will not fail while God sustains it; you are not strong enough to fall away while God is resolved to hold you.”

“[We] have been brought to the point where we both can and must get our life’s priorities straight. From current Christian publications you might think that the most vital issue for any real or would-be Christian in the world today is church union, or social witness, or dialogue with other Christians and other faiths, and refuting this or that –ism, or developing a Christian philosophy and culture, or what have you. But our line of study makes the present-day concentration on these things look like a gigantic conspiracy of misdirection. Of course, it is not that; the issues themselves are real and must be dealt with in their place. But it is tragic that, in paying attention to them, so many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, is, and always will be the true priority for every human being—that is, learning to know God in Christ.”