At the mercy of God

It has been a pretty hard couple of weeks, and the two tests plus thesis presentation did not really help matters either. I have come to realize how easy it is for me to turn to pleasures other than God whenever things seem to heat up or stress begins to build up. In my insanity I would turn away from the Spring of Life and turn to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh, which are really no pleasures at all. For no sooner does it enter in that it turns to rot and one is left with an utter sense of despair. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. It was during this past week that I came across this verse in 2 Timothy;

"God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will."

- 2 Timothy 2: 25b - 26

After reading this verse, the one thing that has been in my mind the past few days is this: I am at the mercy of God.

Firstly, it is amazing what the Apostle Paul writes here. So often we think of repentance as something we do, which it is. But very rarely will you hear anyone say or preach that repentance, nay, our entire process of salvation is ordained, purposed and carried out by God Himself. One could say the role of a man in salvation is essentially zero other than as an eternally grateful recipient.

Which leads me to my second and titular point, that Paul could write, inspired by the Holy Spirit, that it essentially God's prerogative to grant mercy and grace as He sees fit. Here then is the only true Free Will in the entire universe. For if God may grant a person repentance, it stands to reason that the opposite also holds true, that God may not grant a person repentance nor let him come to him senses, thus allowing him to store up for himself the Wrath that will be poured out on that Last Day for all eternity. And this great realization, that I am at His mercy, and that at His pleasure He may and is able to throw both my body and soul into Hell, causes me to tremble before the One who sits on that throne. For I know that God would be entirely Just in condemning me to an eternity in darkness for even the smallest sin that I have ever done and I have given no reason whatsoever for Him to show His Mercy and Grace to me.

"What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy."

- Romans 9: 14-16

Oh how evil are the depths of Man's heart. How loathsome is he in the sight of the Holy One. Yet that He should redeem for Himself a people and grant unto us a privilege of which the likes no other being in creation could boast of. For let us never forget of those angels which fell with Satan and of whom no pardon was given or offered at all.

And yet that I should take the grace of God so often in vain and treat His mercy as some small thing. How quick am I to forget the goodness that He has shown to me, and like the children of Israel, turn aside to other "gods" and set my mind on things of the flesh. It is and has always been my constant struggle to have the faith to look in the mirror of God's Word and believe that God would save a wretch like me, who is so easily amused and satisfied by what the World offers.

You are at the mercy of God, should that not cause you to tremble?

The Lonliness of a Christian

The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from that of the unregenerate world. His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others of his kind, others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences he is forced to walk alone. The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way.

The man who has passed on into the divine presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. A certain amount of social fellowship will of course be his as he mingles with religious persons in the regular activities of the church, but true spiritual fellowship will be hard to find. But he should not expect things to be otherwise. After all, he is a stranger and a pilgrim, and the journey he takes is not on his feet but in his heart. He walks with God in the garden of his own soul - and who but God can walk there with him?

He is of another spirit from the multitudes that tread the courts of the Lord's house. He has seen that of which they have only heard, and he walks among them somewhat as Zacharias walked after his return from the altar when the people whispered, "He has seen a vision" (see Luke 1:22).

The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honored but to see his Savior glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens.

He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces (see Psalm 45:8), and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart. It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. "Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me" (Psalm 27:10).

His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else. He learns in inner solitude what he could not have learned in the crowd - that Christ is All in all, that He is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, that in Him we have and possess life's summum bonum.

Two things remain to be said. One, that the lonely man of whom we speak is not a haughty man, nor is he the holier-than-thou, austere saint so bitterly satirized in popular literature. He is likely to feel that he is the least of all men and is sure to blame himself for his very loneliness. He wants to share his feelings with others and to open his heart to some like-minded soul who will understand him, but the spiritual climate around him does not encourage it, so he remains silent and tells his griefs to God alone.

The second thing is that the lonely saint is not the withdrawn man who hardens himself against human suffering and spends his days contemplating the heavens. Just the opposite is true. His loneliness makes him sympathetic to the approach of the brokenhearted and the fallen and the sin-bruised. Because he is detached from the world he is all the more able to help it.

- A .W. Tozer

HT: Call it Grace

R. C. Sproul and Al Mohler on Seeker-Sensitive Methodology

A must-watch for many Singaporean Christians ignorant of the dangers of the Seeker-Sensitive methodology.

"...It's a strategy of unbelief. The 'minister' wants to grow his church, the 'minister' wants to see success, and so he's looking for all these programs and all these techniques to get people to come in... But he never goes over the bridge and gets to the Word. If you want a power in your Church, be an expository preacher; preach the Word because that's where the Spirit is. Isn't that God's strategy? If we believe God's strategy, we're going to preach the Word."

- R.C. Sproul

HT: LaneCh