Highlights: Ep. 37 | Mere Christianity | Part 16 | The Road Less Traveled
The secret to the abundant life is not our responsibility but our response to God’s ability. (E.Stanley Jones)
First: The Imitation of Christ - “Let’s Pretend.”
Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children's games are so important. They are always pretending to be grown-ups – playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the pretense of being grown-ups helps them to grow up in earnest. Now, the moment you realize, “Here I am dressing up as Christ” it is extremely likely that you will see at once some way in which, at that very moment, the pretense could be made less of a pretense and more of a reality. (Lewis) We tend to become the decisions we make. The more we choose something, we become that something. We are all in the process of solidifying our identities by the decisions we make. With each decision we make, we pick up momentum in the direction of that decision. (Boyd)
Second: Spiritual Practices Prayer - primarily relational - not transactional. Prayer is not a button to be pushed, it’s a relationship to be pursued.” (Nieuwhoff) Church - the Christian community. The one really adequate instrument for learning about God, is the whole Christian community, …the church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons , even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. (Lewis) The man who seeks God in isolation from his fellows is likely to find, not God, but the devil, who will bear an embarrassing resemblance to himself. (Ben Patterson)
Third, God-sightings - God reveals himself through, “Nature, through our own bodies, through books and through life experiences.” When our mind “runs (from the patch of light) back up the sunbeam to the sun”…we get a “tiny theophany" - a vision of God. (Lewis, Letters to Malcolm) There is never a place in our lives where God isn't rich. There is never a time in our lives when God doesn't want to share his richness with us. And we don't have to retreat into a cave…He is always with us. What God wants from us is not a dramatic withdrawal from the lives around us, but instead a dramatic awareness of his presence within the lives around us. (Dresser)
Fourth, God allows troubles. We may be content to remain what we call “ordinary people,” but he is determined to carry out a quite different plan…No possible degree of holiness or heroism which has ever been recorded of the greatest saints is beyond what he has determined to produce in every one of us in the end. The job will not be completed in this life but he means to get us as far as possible before death. That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. Because God is forcing (us) on or up to a higher level, putting (us) into situations where (we) will have to be a very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than (we) ever dreamed of being before. (Lewis)
Maybe we should stop asking God to get us out of difficult circumstances and start asking him what he wants us to get out of those difficult circumstances. (Mark Batterson)
God loves us just the way we are but he loves us too much to leave us the way we are.
Letters from a Skeptic, Gregory Boyd
This Is How We Pray, Adam Dresser
In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day, Mark Batterson