Wings

If I had wings, I would fly.

-Warren G

Isaiah saw seraphim and mentions first their wings. What wondrous things they must have been! Man has no wings. We are bound in God’s will to this ground from which we were made. And yet sometimes we long for them, as King David says: “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away” (Psalm 55:6). But wings or no, one day we will fly. It suits us, therefore, to live humbly before the Lord until that time when he calls us to meet him in the air.

A Grace in the Hem is Worth Two in the Heavens

You may recall that Isaiah saw the hem of the Lord’s robe filling the temple. Like the woman who was instantly healed, the hem of the Lord‘s robe is that which we grasp of him by faith. The temple foreshadowed the gospel economy of God’s mercy to sinners in the body of his Son. Christ crucified is full of the fringes of the infinite Majesty of the infinite God—hems of grace which guilt-ridden sinners may take by the fistful.

Always Enough Time

For those who want to serve God, he will provide the time. The willing heart will find a way. Joshua made the sun stand still through his prayer—and so, through faith even we may find just the time we need to execute the Lord’s will in our busy lives.

It’s Giving Thanks

Gratitude is a vibe, an aura. You can tell when someone has the ol’ attitude of gratitude…a posture of appreciation. Thankfulness is universal—not only when we are blessed with the things we want most, but when we begin to recognize the innumerable gifts of God in our lives that we don’t deserve. It is a correct view of our gracious Creator. Let’s represent him well with a thankful spirit before him.

What is Evil?

Scholars are divided, but the old idea of evil is that of privation. In other words, evil does not exist as a thing on its own but rather it is the corruption of that which is good.

All that God created is good; sin and evil corrupt these good things. Let’s think of sin this way and see it as that which threatens ever to undo us. Let’s also rejoice in the healing refuge, the mighty cross!

The Reformed Doctrine of Going With the Flow

Philosophers like Lao Tzu have taught the importance of moving with the nature of things rather than against them. Interestingly, his concept of the Tao is akin to the Greek concept of the Logos. As the apostles (and church history) demonstrate for us, believers may profit from the true conclusions of natural philosophers as they grasp at the truth of the invisible God and the principles of his creation.

But the philosophy of moving with things as they are also finds expression in the biblical doctrine of God’s loving sovereignty in our lives. If we trust him, we can embrace the people and predicaments he has put in our daily lives instead of wishing things were otherwise and trying to make them so (one of the classic blunders). So as it turns out Reformed theology is pretty zen.

What Makes What We Say True?

We may happen to be right about something when we make a guess or repeat what we’ve heard, but what we think and say is truest when we think and speak that which we know to be true. A word is true, says Augustine, when it has “sprung from things that are known.” As one of the poets has said,

No man could stop my flow

Because I know what I speak and I speak what I know.

Let’s think and speak in this way.

The Order of Saint Augustine

Augustine talks about justification and sanctification like the process of first removing a weapon which has wounded the body and then healing the wound. The order is important. The wound can never heal until the blade be removed. It is just the same with our sin. First, it must be removed by forgiveness in Christ. Only then can the injured soul begin to heal in holiness. Let’s be sure to get the order right.

Follow the Leader

Death is just another path, one we all must take.

-Gandalf

Easy to say til it stares you in the hairy eyeballs. But to that path all must go. Let us steel ourselves against the storm by placing all our hope in Christ long before our feet are placed upon that last road. For he has passed that way and lit the journey for all who wish to follow him through.

The Webs He Weaves

“Oh, the tangled webs we weave,” wrote Sir Walter Scott. The saying has passed into common use because of its striking truth. Our lies and wrongdoings tend to get us into even more trouble in the future. Every believer has learned this through painful experience.

But all the while our God is weaving his wondrous webs of providence to save us. He is always netting together his secret provisions and using the evil intensions of others (and even sometimes our own failings—plot twist!) to prepare webs to catch us when all hope is lost. Life yeets us to our doom but we find that it’s nothing but net.