Random Thoughts

Thoughts culled from my random file, gathered from my Twitter tweets, Facebook updates and Instagrams. About God, the mystery of the Incarnation, redemption, faith, and life in Christ. Some have come to me in moments of prayer and quiet reflection, some in interaction with others. The stuff that memes are made of. Offered as “jump starts” for your faith.

• When you love, you don’t think about sacrifice.
• The Incarnation means that Christ did not die on the cross simply instead of us but that he died as us. His death was our death so that his life is now our life.
• The Incarnation, when God became man, is the atonement — the at·one·ment. For in Christ, God has become one with all humankind. The Cross and Resurrection flow inevitably from that.
• At his baptism, Christ identified with us in our brokenness and shame, and turned us to God. In our baptism, we are identified with him in his death and resurrection.
• Lord, let the prayer of my breathing be as angels ascending and descending, inhaling the breath of your Spirit and breathing out your praise. Amen.
• God is love. Grace is the love of God reaching out to us. Glory is the revelation of that love and grace — the revelation we have in Jesus Christ.
• The holiness of God is the revelation of his love, and the justice of God is the revelation of his mercy. All is perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ.
• Let go the what ifs of the future and if onlys of the past. They keep you from the one thing that matters: this present moment with God — the only moment there is.
• Jesus did not come into the world to get mixed up with religion.
• The fast God desires is one that never ends, an ongoing process of faith being formed by the love of God.
• Repentance does not change how God sees us but how we see God.
• Sin, like repentance, does not change the way God sees us but the way we see God.
  
• It is through the gift of repentance that God shows us the way to life. It is a good day to repent.
• Life is not a passing stream of moments. It is but one moment. This one.
• Our understanding of eternal things gets flattened out in our time-bound perspective, like trying to understand a three-dimensional world from a two-dimensional point of view.
• Our true origin is not in time but in eternity, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
• We are naïve about evil until we have recognized the depths of it in our own heart.
• Pride has ten thousand faces, and every one of them is false.
• In praying, “Forgive us our trespasses,” we are asking forgiveness not only for ourselves but for everyone else as well. For there is no them; there is only us — of whom we are all a part.
• God redeems our every moment, transforming them by the blood of the Cross and the power of the Resurrection, making them all one.
• With God there is no merit system. No points are awarded or taken away. There is simply no such reckoning, and never has been. There is only the love of God surrounding us through Christ by the Holy Spirit.
• Christ has broken the gates of Hades and set us free. The only hell now is the one we create within our own hearts.
• In Christ, God has reconciled us to Himself, and so also to our true selves, who are created in the image of God.
• Though we are created in the image of God and to be like Him, still we are finite creatures and ever shall be. How then shall we suppose that anyone possesses an infinite ability to resist the love of God forever?
• There is no us and them. There is only Christ, in whom all in heaven and on earth are made one.

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