Brennan Manning's "Ruthless Trust" is an intense, challenging and inspiring look at how to trust Christ...ruthlessly. Here are a few excerpts from today's reading...
Faith + Hope = Trust "Faith and hope work together to form a trusting disciple."
"Jesus alone reveals who God is. He is the source of our information about transcendence/divinity. We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God, however we must deduce everything about God from what we know about Jesus."
"TRUST means the willingness to become absolutely empty of all terrfying and comforting images of God that we have held, so that the gift of God in Jesus Christ may come to us in on God's terms."
A friend said something yesterday that convicted me deeply. He said, "If I could just understand that all of this that I have, and I mean everything; my wife, my kids, my possessions, my job, my very heartbeat and breath of life...all of this is God's. It's not mine. It's when I try to hold on to these things so tightly and act like I own them or something that I start feeling fearful and insecure about life and myself. All this is His! He's just letting me borrow it to see how I will bring Him glory in it."
So I asked him, "But don't you get these flashes of brilliance when you feel like you got it? You know, like you hit the nail on the head?"
"Yeah," he said. "They last about a nanosecond."
So true. God, may you expand those nanoseconds of spiritual transcendence in our lives into seconds, minutes, hours...dare I ask for days, months or years...that we would bring you glory.
"Apart from me, you can do nothing." John 15:5
Hi TD, I like your post very much and the reading from John 15:5. I'm reading a book by theologian and psychotherapist, Thomas Moore, entitled "Writing in the Sand - Jesus & the Soul of the Gospels". Mr. Moore writes not a book about Christianity but more necessarily about how we understate the power of Jesus' humanity and Godship. A quote I find interesting - "Jesus was a sophisticated man who lived simply, walking from town to town, healing and comforting, while espousing a spiritual philosophy that has yet to be fully appreciated and understood. He lived in primitive times compared to our own, but his thinking was more advanced than ours. I suspect that our tendency to sentimentalize him or turn him into a moral crusader is a defense against the sheer radical challenge of his intellect. As long as we piously enshrine his personality, we don't have to feel the full force of his vision for humanity."
ReplyDeleteMoore is one of the few writers that I think dare to speak out for Christ's intellect and his vision. Most writers strive, it seems to me, just to emphasize that Jesus is God's son (no small issue) and that he will save us. But as thinking persons (as we were created to be) why would we follow someone who was only a miracle worker and a carpenter? It makes sense to me that J had/has to be the most intelligent human being ever to have walked the earth. Any thoughts about this?