resist
as most of you know, i successfully lacerated my spleen while snowboarding a week and a half ago. i haven't been able to do much, not even read or journal 'cause the pain meds i was on made me a bit loopy and when i tried to write i would see double.
thankfully the pain has gone down and i haven't had to take as many pills (it's also a good thing that i haven't had to use so many 'cause i only have one left!), and now my brain is functioning more normally and my eyes can see straight!
so, i was able to get some reading done yesterday. i'm still reading "pleasures evermore" which i've been on for about the past year and a half (haven't had much time for personal reading)...but i only have like 60 pages left! w00t! here're some notable quotes i read yesterday:
"If [God] didn't love you, if His heart wasn't for you, why would He care what you do?" (p.228)
"What are all these rationalizations [of why it's okay to sin] based on? One lie. The most pernicious, heinous, satanic lie of all. They are based on the lie that God really isn't good after all; that God is neither able nor willing to do for our souls or bodies what they so desperately need done; that therefore God can't be trusted with our fears and doubts and hopes and hurts. Because God doesn't care and can't be trusted, we'll find satisfaction somewhere else. And so often, we do." (p.233)
"The reason we resist God's laws and pursue our own sinful strategies is because we believe that we can do better at securing our happiness than God can." (p.237)
thankfully the pain has gone down and i haven't had to take as many pills (it's also a good thing that i haven't had to use so many 'cause i only have one left!), and now my brain is functioning more normally and my eyes can see straight!
so, i was able to get some reading done yesterday. i'm still reading "pleasures evermore" which i've been on for about the past year and a half (haven't had much time for personal reading)...but i only have like 60 pages left! w00t! here're some notable quotes i read yesterday:
"If [God] didn't love you, if His heart wasn't for you, why would He care what you do?" (p.228)
"What are all these rationalizations [of why it's okay to sin] based on? One lie. The most pernicious, heinous, satanic lie of all. They are based on the lie that God really isn't good after all; that God is neither able nor willing to do for our souls or bodies what they so desperately need done; that therefore God can't be trusted with our fears and doubts and hopes and hurts. Because God doesn't care and can't be trusted, we'll find satisfaction somewhere else. And so often, we do." (p.233)
"The reason we resist God's laws and pursue our own sinful strategies is because we believe that we can do better at securing our happiness than God can." (p.237)
Labels: books, christian hedonism, quotes
posted by Elias at 11:19
4 Comments:
i think, in that second quote, the idea that we believe this lie about the character of God has to do with what my friend shanley was talking about the other day: the idea of humanizing God. because of our sin, our finiteness, we cannot see or understand Who God is. and therefore we put Him into our simple human perspective. that is the base. but we go down from there. we strip away His attributes to make Him more like us because we cannot achieve the heights He has. and our sin nature demands that we make allowances for ourselves. so, in order to do this, we downsize God. we humanize Him and make Him "compassionate" and "understanding" instead of holy, pure, and righteous. we don't understand, however, that in so doing we are recreating Him.
He IS compassionate. but in a perfect sense. in a righteous sense.
am i making sense?
yeah, i get what you're saying.
i think it all goes back to the awesome quote from A.W. Tozer in his book "Knowledge of the Holy" when he says, "What comes in to your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you." And then he goes on in that chapter to talk about how the church has never risen above her view of God. Our view and understanding of God defines us.
off of Angela's comment on humanizing God because of sin and finiteness, i too, thought of a Tozer quote, but a different one.
"When we try to imagine what God is like we must of necessity use that-which-is-not-God as the raw material for our minds to work on; hence whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not God."
and also in Tozer's book, a quote from Novatian:
"For God is greater than mind itself. His greatness cannot be conceived. Nay, could we conceive of His greatness He would be less than the human mind which could form the conception. He is greater than all language, and no statement can express Him. Indeed, if any statement could express Him, He would be less than human speech which could by such statement comprehend and gather up all that He is. All our thoughts about Him will be less than He, and our loftiest utterances will be trivialities in comparison with Him."
Amen- it bothers me when preachers preach- DO this and DON'T DO this- what we DO is a display of our view of God SO if preachers would devote themselves to knowing God and then guiding their flock to see God in Scriptures and therefore to KNOW God and Christ would be more lovely among those who profess Him.
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