“Put together all the tenderest love you know of, multiply it by infinity, and you will begin to see glimpses of the love and grace of God.” -Hannah Whitall Smith-
The Spirit of the Lord speaks within my soul and says, “Within the breast of every man is the divine image of God , in whose image and likeness he was made, that sin is a perversion and sickness an imposter, and that the grace and power of God through the Holy Ghost delivers man from all bondage and darkness, and man in all his nature rises into union and communion with God and becomes one with Him in the truest sense. -John Lake-
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“He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery. He meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing.” -Robert F. Capon-
A few years ago I was working at the kitchen table on some bible related stuff. I was talking to my self saying where was so and so in the bible? (I remember it but did not know where it was.) I said to my daughter I’m trying to find ‘where in the bible is so and so’ and to my amazement she hollered out ‘so and so verse’ I said ‘how the heck did you know that’ she said I googled it.
We are in a new era.
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Charles de Foucauld, the founder of the Little Brothers of Jesus,-
“The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything.” Never to be afraid of anything, even death, which, after all, is but that final breakthrough into the open, waiting, outstretched arms of Abba.”
Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
“I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a tea cup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.”
Are our broadest hopes broad enough? Shall there be a nook or abyss, in all the universe of God, finally unlightened by the Cross? Shall there be a sin, or sorrow, or pain unhealed? Is the very universe, is creation in all its extent, a field wide enough for the Son of God?
“We must go out into a desert of some kind (your backyard will do) and come into a personal experience of the awesome love of God.”
Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
“The same God who loves us as we are also loves us to much to leave us as we are. Perhaps because we tend to hold to ideas about God that reflect our own suppositions and fears, more than God’s self-revelation. We reduce God to our own dimensions, ascribing to him our own reactions and responses, especially our own petty and conditional kind of love, and so end up believing in a God cast in our own image and likeness."
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“When a man or woman is truly honest (not just working at it) it is virtually impossible to insult them personally. There is nothing there to insult. Those who were truly ready for the kingdom were just such people. Their inner poverty of spirit and rigorous honesty had set them free. They were people who had nothing to be proud of.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
“Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat denial of the gospel of grace. Our approach to the Christian life is as absurd as the enthusiastic young man who had just received his plumber’s license and was taken to see Niagara Falls. He studied it for a minute and then said, “I think I can fix this. " ― Brennan Manning,
"The life of grace is not an effort on our part to achieve a goal we set ourselves. It is a continually renewed attempt simply to believe that someone else has done all the achieving that is needed and to live in relationship with that person, whether we achieve or not. If that doesn’t seem like much to you, you’re right: it isn’t. And, as a matter of fact, the life of grace is even less than that. It’s not even our life at all, but the life of that Someone Else rising like a tide in the ruins of our death.” -Robert Farrar Capon-
BREAKING GOOD NEWS
Apostle Paul reports that the impact of death, burial, and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ, 2,000 years ago shown to be more, not less, powerful than the disobedience of man He created 4,000 years prior (Romans 5:19)! Christians “horrified” and “offended” by this “heresy!” Furiously argue redemption of all mankind is an “insult to the cross of Christ”… -John Moneypenny-
Are our broadest hopes broad enough? Shall there be a nook or abyss, in all the universe of God, finally unlightened by the Cross? Shall there be a sin, or sorrow, or pain unhealed? Is the very universe, is creation in all its extent, a field wide enough for the Son of God?
“If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach.” Dr. Wm. Barclay-
“Trust him. And when you have done that, you are living the life of grace. No matter what happens to you in the course of that trusting - no matter how many waverings you may have, no matter how many suspicions that you have bought a poke with no pig in it, no matter how much heaviness and sadness your lapses, vices, indispositions, and bratty whining may cause you - you believe simply that Somebody Else, by his death and resurrection, has made it all right, and you just say thank you and shut up. The whole slop-closet full of mildewed performances (which is all you have to offer) is simply your death; it is Jesus who is your life. If he refused to condemn you because your works were rotten, he certainly isn’t going to flunk you because your faith isn’t so hot. You can fail utterly, therefore, and still live the life of grace. You can fold up spiritually, morally, or intellectually and still be safe. Because at the very worst, all you can be is dead - and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.” - Robert Farrar Capon-
“I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing. [I believe] such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son, and the many brethren, rush inside the center of the life-giving fire whose outer circles burn. I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.” -George MacDonald-
What this parable (i.e. The Prodigal Father and Two Lost Sons) is saying is first of all that, as far as Jesus is concerned, repentance involves not the admission of guilt or the acknowledgement of fault but the confession of death…Confession is not a medicine leading to recovery. If we could recover – if we could say that beginning tomorrow or the week after next we would be well again – why then, all we would need to do would be apologize, not confess. We could simply say that we were sorry about the recent unpleasantness, but that, thank God and the resilience of our better instincts, it is all over now….
But we never recover. We die. And if we live again, it is not because the old parts of our life are jiggled back into line, but because without waiting for realignment, some wholly other life takes up residence in our death. Grace does not do things tit-for-tat; it acts finally and fully from the start.
Confession has nothing to do with getting ourselves forgiven. Confession is not a transaction, not a negotiation in order to secure forgiveness; it is the after-the-last grasp of a corpse that finally can afford to admit it’s dead and accept resurrection. Forgiveness surrounds us, beats upon us all our lives; we confess only to wake ourselves up to what we already have…We are not forgiven, therefore, because we made ourselves forgivable or even because we had faith; we are forgiven solely because there is a Forgiver. -Robert Farrar Capon-
“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.” - Robert F. Capon-
Are our broadest hopes broad enough? Shall there be a nook or abyss, in all the universe of God, finally unlightened by the Cross? Shall there be a sin, or sorrow, or pain unhealed? Is the very universe, is creation in all its extent, a field wide enough for the Son of God?
Matt.25 Parable of the talents.
“The gift of grace is not a reward for hard work or good behavior, it is a lark, a joke, a hilariously inequitable largesse: it is, in a word, a gift . Don’t you see, Arthur? It’s all a game. All that matters is that you play at all, not that you play well or badly. You could have earned a million with the money I gave you, or you could have earned two cents. You could even have blown it on the horses for all I care: at least that way you would have been a gambler after my own heart. But when you crawl in here and insult me— me , Mr. Risk Himself—by telling me you decided that I couldn’t be trusted enough for you to gamble on a two-bit loss, that I was some legalistic type who went only by the books, well…” -Robert F. Capon-
.Nothing can be lost that is not first owned. Just as a parent is compelled by civil law to be responsible for his family and his property, so the Creator --by His own divine law–is compelled to take care of the children He has created. And that means not only caring for the good children, but for the bad ones and lost ones as well. So the word lost came to be for Mrs. Smith, a term of greatest comfort. If a person is a “lost sinner” it only means that he is temporarily separated from the Good Shepherd who owns him. The Shepherd is bound by all duties of ownership to go after all those who are lost until they are found. -Catherine Marshall- (Beyond Ourselves)
Note
Mrs. Smith= Hannah W. Smith
“Destruction, like salvation, is eonian. It is not the end or aim of God. That would be sheer insanity. Imagine a God, Whose very essence is love, desiring to lose a single creature with an endless capacity for loving and glorifying Him! Imagine a man so berserk as to smash a machine which could bring him an unlimited income! We would put such a creature under restraint, where he could not harm others, as well as himself. We have not such a God. He destroys nothing that He cannot restore. He loses nothing that will not return to Him laden with praise and glory for Himself. Destruction is a passing process, not a finished goal. Through God it will work out the welfare of His creatures, and the glory of our Saviour and His Father.”
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