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wo recent posts from Pam , and from Richard have got me thinking... how big is the God we say we know, how big is the God we speak of, do we see his arms wide open to embrace us as the father receiving his prodigal home, running to meet us throwing all decorum aside ... or do we to quote Richard see God as a divine miser, one who is narrow and intent upon judgement...
Every debt, no matter how small, must be paid for. Every account must be settled. The books must be kept straight, even if that means extracting the price from his own son.* To misquote Cowper, “Behind a smiling providence / He hides a frowning face”. Such a god has much to commend him. He is at least unbendingly fair. But he is not the God that Jesus proclaimed, pointed to and embodied.
How big is our God... Paul prays in Ephesians that we might catch a full picture of God, that we might be filled with love and awed just as he is...
Ephes. 3:14-21 (MsgB)
My response is to get down on my knees before the Father, this magnificent Father who parcels out all heaven and earth. I ask him to strengthen you by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength— that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you'll be able to take in with all Christians the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.
Glory to God in the church!
Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus!
Glory down all the generations!
Glory through all millennia! Oh, yes!
He is caught up in wonder and glories in the picture that this God is over all and in all and through all...
How big is your God, how wonderful, how rich in mercy how full of grace... a good friend of mine used to say that love will draw people further than dynamite can blow them...
I am out of words to express the sense of wonder that I feel, for every so often my eyes are opened to see that my God is too small, and the reality is that she is all encompassing and all knowing, ever present and is love...
It is in response to this that my soul comes alive and sings again, that hope is restored and faith renewed... Jesus called people to see, he calls us to see, to see beyond our own prejudices and to embrace life in all its fullness....that we might live beyond the labels of denomination and creed that enclose hold us in...
Ron Feurgeson describes an early morning epiphany in India...
It is hard to describe the sense of eternity. The vastness of the terrain, the sense of Indias history make us feel very small -and yet at one with it all. A bird swoops effortlessly and slowly, like a soul released. The silence is tangible. Death itself seems almost natural, a moving into that deeper oneness. It is impossible to sit here, sensing the communion, and not feel in some way changed.
It strikes me then that protestantism has too narrow a base, at least the protestantism I have known...
It strikes me then that my life has too parochial a base...
....
God is disclosed in a new way. Whatever God refers to, She is not Presbyterian, or Christian, or Buddhist or Hindu. Or anything else we can label or contain...
No God simply is.... and
"Earth is crammed with heaven
and every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees
takes off his shoes"- Elizabeth Barret Browning
