Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Random Thoughts


Thoughts culled from my random file, gathered from my Twitter tweets, Facebook updates and Instagrams. About love, forgiveness, divine grace, and finding our lives in Christ. Some have come to me in moments of prayer and quiet reflection, some in interaction with others. Offered as “jump starts” for your faith.
  • We are united with Christ not by reason of our faith but by reason of His Incarnation. What we do with that is a matter of faith. We can rebel against it, but we cannot undo it.
  • Funny thing. The more I consider Christ, the more my theology changes in conformity to Him ... and that seems to be confusing for some people.
  • The judgment of God does not come to condemn us but to restore us. Not to enslave us but to set us free.
  • Christ is God’s Yes to us. Faith echoes Amen.
  • The Resurrection of Christ shows that the love of God is truly unconditional, for not even death can stop it.
  • Eternal life. Eternal love. Same thing.
  • We live continually in the presence of Divine Love.
  • Whatever it is for which you would be rewarded, that you must beware.
  • The confession that Jesus is Lord is a form of anarchy, for it means that Caesar is not.
  • If you would see the kingdom of God, forgive one another.
  • God always gets the last word, and it is a good word: Love.
  • If ever there was a time when God hated anyone, even for a moment, it would be His undoing, for God is love.
  • If you are seeking Christ, you will find Him in the middle of your mess and at the bottom of your ditch.
  • Faith is not about certainty but about trust.
  • Lord, keep me from being part of the strife but make me a part of the peace. Amen.
  • Thank God, nothing depends on our certainty.
  • Christ is God’s elect who, by the Incarnation, has become one with all of humanity.
  • Believe the life of Christ in you.
  • Christ is our only true reality. In Him we live and move and have our being, and in Him all things hold together. Everything that moves away from Him moves towards nothing.
  • Christ inhabits every broken story until all the world is mended.
  • Christian theology does not begin with philosophy or theological abstraction but with the concrete revelation of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.
  • Christ is not only God’s Yes to us, He is also our Yes to God.
  • Christ did not come to institute a new moralism but to give us New Life.
  • When the brokenness of sin meets the faithfulness of Christ? No contest. When the power of death meets the life of Christ? No contest. Sin and death were doomed by the Incarnation, when God became one with us.
  • The Incarnation means that whatever is true of Christ in his humanity is true of us in ours. But it also means that we partake of his divinity and become by grace what Christ is by nature.
  • Christ is God’s humanity and our divinity.
  • Christ is the image of the invisible God, in whom all the fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form, and in whom we are made complete and become partakers of the divine nature.
  • Christ is the True Light who gives light to everyone in the world. Faith is an awakening to the light of Christ within us.
  • Sometimes my failures all gang up and fool me about who I am. Sometimes my successes do, too.
  • Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us ... for we are all in the same boat.
  • We are holy not by keeping a moral code but because God has chosen us in Christ through the Incarnation. It is by faith that we embrace this holiness.
  • If it comes down to a choice between prayer and politics, I’ve seen what both can do. I will choose prayer. Every time.
  • The gospel means there is nothing so broken that it cannot be mended, for Christ is making all things new.
  • Prayer is not a way of escaping the reality of the world but of becoming more deeply aligned with it.
More random thoughts …