While there are beautiful analogies between God's love and faithfulness toward us and our relationships with our own children, we receive God's grace as men and women - not as children.
And we cannot afford to forget it.
We relate with God maturely, as he's created us to do. Therefore, we make decisions freely, for better or worse, that affect our relationship with him. He is faithful; he is ever faithful, but we are free. That is not to say that our decisions are not empowered or motivated or enabled by his grace, they certainly are - but they remain our decisions. And we must, as men and women, receive Christ this day and each day into our hearts and lives.
I don't believe God's grace can be over-inflated, but we can misunderstand and pervert it if we try to revise the story we are in, the story that God's grace has been written into.
. . . . .
I'm trying to order my thoughts on grace and our response to it - or how we respond to it (in snatches, moments stolen away from the children). And while many of you are scratching your heads on this one since I've failed to contextualize my thinking, I'm simply beginning to write in response to Calvinism and a kind of Universalism, both of which seem to be gaining some momentum in our pews. I'm thinking out loud on this one. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
1 comment:
Thanks, Anna - no, the parent-child analogy is right and it has its place. Like I said, I'm failing to contextualize my thoughts - I'll try to do better when I have some more time.
And you're right, there's so much we fail to understand about God - that we can't understand about God and what he is doing in the lives of those around us.
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