Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Right Idea - Wrong Reason
- What God looks for in us is humility, brokeness, trembling. He is God and we are not.
- The religious attitude is as rejected by God in these verses as the true unbeliever for both of them reject God’s ways.
- The sarcastic mockers who call us “extreme Christians” will get their comeupance! We go against the flow and will receive opposition...
- There will be a great multitude that no-one can count from every tribe and language. We don’t passively wait for revival, we wake up and work for many to follow Christ
I cannot argue on iota with this advice. All of this are good things to do. But the idea that we do them "to draw God's attention" makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up AND I think defies the reformed understanding of God.
On an emotional level, we are not in a competition for our parents attention. We worship a God of infinite attention who can gaze upon us all with equal love and equal concern. In fact, we must rely on His attention to accomplish even these things to "attract" it.
Which brings me to the second point. In the reformed understanding we can do nothing to merit God's attention. Even His attention is an expression of His grace. We simply have it by virtue of His nature.
I tend to think that truly following Christ involves such abandon that while we rely on His complete and utter unearned attention, we will be so focused on Him and His will that we will not an do not care whether He is looking at us specifically in this moment. We seek to become His, to use or ignore as He sees fit.
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