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.
Believing is Seeing
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“You’ll see it when you believe it, mate.”
-Augustine, probably
According to the Church Father St. Augustine, faith comes first. To truly understand, we must first believe. Faith is the lens which brings Truth into focus. It is the key to open the doors of knowing God. The Word happily discloses itself to those who approach it rightly—that is, with believing hearts.
Let’s give it a shot this week.
That Which Makes Songs Sing
It has apparently been the most preached book of the Bible throughout church history, and it starts like this:
The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.
So the Song which follows is the greatest of all songs. It is greater than the Song of Moses and even the Song of Moses and of the Lamb. Here is proof enough that the Song of Solomon is the Song of God’s gospel love for us.
Perhaps it also means that God’s love is the Song that every true song sings, the Music which inspires all others. Every beautiful melody is a small expression of the beauteous goodness of God. Every good story is a reflection of the true Story. (This is true whether the musician or writer knows it or not.) And thus,
Singers and dancers [and producers and story writers] alike say, “All my springs are in you.”
Letting Us Make Mistakes
A more elusive part of good leadership is allowing people to make mistakes. Blatant rebellion is one thing, but sometimes (often!) we just get things wrong. It happens. And what does the Lord Jesus, our cosmic Leader, do? He is kind and patient with us, encouraging us to move forward that we may continue to grow. As one of our own poets has said,
Your gentleness made me great.
Ultra Fulcrum
I’m reading Saint Augustine On the Trinity and along the way, he gives this nifty little perspective on God’s power and control over his creation. The Maker alone, he says, has the power
to create and to rule the creature [created things] from the innermost and highest pivotal cause of all causation.
In other words, God is so present with what he has made that he governs and directs all things with the utmost precision, as it were, by the omnipotent pivot or fulcrum of his divine wisdom and might. He has his creation easily in hand like the artist’s brush (or Apple Pencil).
Therefore, we can trust him with all the affairs of life and eternity.
Better Than Expected
Once upon a time, someone I didn’t know contacted me for information about our church. He said he was thinking about visiting—”But,” he warned me, “don’t get your hopes up.” Well, he ended up stopping by and apparently found us to be better than expected, for he has been with us ever since. He too has exceeded my expectations in every way (which wasn’t too difficult since I heeded the prophetical warning and got my hopes down as low as humanly possible).
One of Satan’s tricks to keep us from believing the gospel is to lie about what it’s really like to be a Christian. “Sure, you can be forgiven and have eternal life, but then you’ll have to live the…(insert scary music)…Christian life.” How lamely he paints it, how goodie-goodie and boring it must be, how agonizing to leave behind our sinful pleasures and submit to that grumpy God in the sky. But oh how our expectations were exceeded when we tasted and saw that the Lord is good!
He plays the same trick on us after we become believers. “Don’t get your hopes up too much about God’s new creation in the life to come,” he says. And so we focus on the here and now, we fear what’s to come, and we lose sight of the mind-blowing realities that await us in Christ. Let’s clap back by getting our hopes up as high as we can about the good things God has in store for all who hope in him. Not to worry, they will be way better than ever expected.
God’s Toys
At the end of the day, we’re all kids. That’s how we feel inside, like the little boy or girl we once were. Compared to the ancestors of old, we are mere children indeed, dying at ages when their life spans were just beginning to blossom.
In any case, God stoops down to our level to teach us his wisdom. Often he does so by using earthly imagery to picture spiritual and heavenly realities. Saint Augustine put it like this:
The divine Scriptures are in the habit of making something like children’s toys out of things that occur in creation, by which to entice our sickly gaze and get us step by step to seek as best we can the things that are above…
Let’s enjoy the simple and earthen images with which the Scriptures are rich, allowing ourselves to be led by them to the greater realities which they embody. Let’s enjoy all created things in a manner that they may lead us to God’s throne.
Wisdom Wears a Smile
Who is like the wise? And who knows the interpretation of a thing? A man’s wisdom makes his face shine, and the hardness of his face is changed.
Ecclesiastes 8:1
Man’s ability to understand was pictured by the ancients (20th century cartoonists) as the cerebral light bulb. If the Bible was comics, the bulb floating above Solomon’s head would be 1000 watts, for God had turnt it all the way up.
He enjoyed the experience many times and describes it brilliantly, as quoted above. When we finally understand something that has been troubling or eluding us, our hardened scowl of confusion is eased and lifted by the lightness of comprehension.
Though we may hide it well on our faces, none can hide the furrowed brow of the soul. If we wish to find ourselves in a lighter frame of spirit, Solomon points the way: wisdom. We have but to ask, and we, like he, will have our generous share from God.
We may be haunted by unpleasant facts, but God’s gift of wisdom arranges all facts so we can read the greater fact or meaning in every thing, which is undoubtedly the glory of God in Christ for our good.