Enjoying Life Under the Sun

Discouragement is not mainly a circumstance to escape, but is a spiritual exposure:  It reveals where hope has quietly become centered on my expectations, success, or control rather than on God.   Instead I am to address life’s apparent futility through the reality of God’s redeeming love. Discouragement exposes self-focus Discouragement can be “disenchanted egotism”:  I become crushed because events have not unfolded as I  believed they should.  The spiritual lesson is not to deny pain, disappointment, or grief, but to let disappointment uncover any demand that God must fulfill our preferred timetable or outcome. A helpful question in a discouraged season is: “What expectation am I treating as indispensable, and have I placed it above trust in God Himself?” Darkness can be discipline I need to learn to see some seasons of obscurity as God’s training in attentiveness, not automatic evidence of divine displeasure.  He compares this to songbirds taught to sin...

How do I develop a faith that meets real life? Ecclesiastes 2 is the place where Solomon tests life by pleasure, achievement, wisdom, and wealth— only to conclude that, apart from God, even the best of human experience is “vanity” (futility).  Spiritual truth is proved not on the mountaintop but in the messy, ordinary pressures of actual circumstances. The test of faith is in ordinary pressure, not in spiritual highs Visions, mysticism, and “mountain-top” experiences are tested when I am “in the soup” of actual circumstances.  In other words, the real measure of my relationship with God is how I live when life is complicated, disappointing, or morally ambiguous—not when I feel spiritually elevated. “The test of mountain-top experiences, of mysticism, of visions of God and of solitariness is when you are ‘in the soup’ of actual circumstances.” Truth to learn:  I shouldn't judge my spiritual life by my best moments;  judge it by how Christ’s reality holds when I'm...

How does my faith relate to reason, suffering, and everyday life? Life’s foundation is tragic, not purely rational.   “The basis of things is not rational, but tragic.”  Reason is a great gift and my guide among facts, but it cannot explain why things are the way they are.  Spiritually, this means I must not expect faith to remove life’s mysteries or make everything logically tidy;  instead, I learn to trust God amid irrational and painful realities. Hebrew wisdom starts from belief in God and moves toward practical living.   Unlike modern (Greek-style) speculation about origins and ultimate causes, Hebrew wisdom “does not try to find out whether or not God exists”;  it assumes God and asks how to live well in the actual whirl of life.  The spiritual lesson is to anchor thinking in revealed truth and then apply it to concrete obedience, prayer, work, and enjoyment. Rationalism is “hard pressed” by lived experience.   The rationalist claim is that ...

O LORD, I hang on you; I see, believe, live, when your will, not mine, is done; I can plead nothing in myself in regard of any worthiness and grace, in regard of your providence and promises, but only your good pleasure. If your mercy make me poor and vile, may you be blessed. Prayers arising from my needs are preparations for future mercies; Help me to honor you by believing before I feel, for great is the sin if I make feeling a cause of faith. Show me what sins hide you from me and eclipse your love; Help me to humble myself for past evils, to be resolved to walk with more care, For if I do not walk holily before you, how can I be assured of my salvation? It is the meek and humble who are shown your covenant, know your will, are pardoned and healed, who by faith depend and rest upon grace, who are sanctified and quickened, who evidence your love. Help me to pray with the conviction that whatever I receive is your gift, so that I may pray until prayer be granted; Teach me to believe ...

  O SUPREME MOVING CAUSE, May I always be subordinate to you, be dependent upon you, be found in the path where you do walk, and where your Spirit moves, take heed of estrangement from you, of becoming insensible of your love. You do not move men like stones, but do endue them with life, not to enable them to move without you, but in submission to you, the first mover. O Lord, I am astonished at the difference between my receivings and my deservings, between the state I am now in and my past gracelessness, between the heaven I am bound for and the hell I merit. Who made me to differ, but you? for I was no more ready to receive Christ than were others; I could not have begun to love you had you not first loved me, or been willing unless you had first made me so. O that such a crown should fit the head of such a sinner! such high advancement be for an unfruitful person!  such joys for so vile a rebel! Infinite wisdom cast the design of salvation into the mold of purchase and fre...

  MY GOD, You have helped me to see, that whatever good be in honor and rejoicing; how good is he who gives them, and can withdraw them. that blessedness does not lie so much in receiving good from and in you, but in holding forth your glory and virture; that it is an amazing thing to see Deity in a creature, speaking, acting; filling, shining through it; that nothing is good but you, that I am near good when I am near you, that to be like you is a glorious thing:  This is my magnet, my attraction. You are all my good in times of peace, my only support in days of trouble, my one sufficiency when life shall end. Help me to see how good your will is in all, and even when it crosses mine teach me to be pleased with it. Grant me to feel you in fire, and food and every providence, and to see that you many gifts and creatures are but your hands and fingers taking hold of me. You bottomless fountain of all good, I give myself to you out of love, for all I have or own is yours, my goo...