“Sometimes our faith in God is like that: snake infested. God doesn’t change but how we think about him does” -p21 hahha…so true
“If I am to go anywhere with God, to follow Him, … I will need more than a textbook knowledge of him.” -p27 ….dingding…seems obvious but so obvious its easy to overlook
“Wait, God says, Be patient. It will all work out in the end. That answer is infuriating in its vagueness and insipidness. … People in extremes are not much concerned about what works out in the end. They are wrung out in the agony of now.” -p41
Habakkuk: “The righteous,” he says, will live by his faith” -> key to the answer of is god good
“And faith is finally this: resting so utterly in the character of God–in the ultimate goodness of God–that you trust Him even when he seems untrustworthy.” p43
“Faithfulness bores us. Who among us lept up this morning as the sun rose, exclaiming ‘Look! Look…The sun!…its here again!’ Or who ran through he house shouting ‘…Behold Air! clean air, fresh air…’?” -p55
“In both creation and relationships, faithfulness is the most amazing yet least captivating trait” (examples: we tend use it in everyday speech to imply boring or lacking pizazz or drab but functional–such as a faithful car) -p56
“His faithfulness is great. it is not canceled out by our lack of faith” -p 58
Tangential question: but what makes Abraham qualified to be bestowed the title “father of faith” or some-such? This book points out his fickle human nature… “Abraham, left to his own, driven by his own anxiety and shortsightedness, would keep passing his wife off as his sister, would keep siring Ishmaels.” Does the one story about the son and the burnt offering cancel all that out?
“Who decides what my true self is that I should be true to it?”
Paul didn’t think that (his) suffering canceled out God’s faithfulness but rather to exemplify God’s faithfulness
“God always answers our prayers for strength”
“Other people have commented about our trust and faith in GOD, yet we fell that His faithfulness to us is what is getting us through. He has shined so bright through all of this that it would take a tremendous effort not to trust him. HE is doing it all–not us. -John & Linda” –> point: God brings us to faith, we don’t bring ourselves to faith. this is like the same thing Pastor Tommy was saying in the sermon on Sunday about how God can do through us what we can’t do in ourselves
shelter, food, air, sun, rain, freedom, health, safety: none of these things are things God guarantees (expressions of His faithfulness, but not its essence). Three things God does promise on the basis of His character…that “we have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure”: (1) he is faithful to forgive our confessed sins and purify us from their unrighteousness (2) faithful to make use holy and blameless before Christ (no one who trusts in him will be found wanting on the day of judgment) (3)God is faithful to get us home (rejoice that your names are written in heaven, not in the circumstantial/insubstantial/ephemeral)
“But I can hear Sonny, his voice sharp with doubt, raw with grief: ‘Does He? Does he love *me*?'” stings with a sadness of believing the lie, when you can identify, even a little bit, with a thought like that.
This book irritates me a little in that I want to take out a red pen and mark it up cuz it needs anther dose of proofreading badly. “Persecution of the Jewish people began four thousand years ago and has carried on since, almost with interruption.” almost WITH interruption? things don’t “carry on” with interruption–that’s a contradiction in terms.
1John11-12: “this is how god showed his love among us…this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he love us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
Problem with apologetics: “rightness” doesn’t move people to repentance and faith…. “the older I get, the more I think he struggled to reconcile *his experience* with the promise of God’s love” (this reminds me of somebody I know…) but it comes down to the same question as posed by Sonny…does God really love us?
“We have this instinct for love that won’t quite, that is hardy and wily, irrational, spendthrift, naively stubborn. It keeps hitching its skirts and running to embrace knaves and prodigals.” -p82
this guy really likes “big” words. rather than saying “with clear, and passionate certainty” he says “with lucid, fervid certainty”. Note to self: I understand better what I’m reading when I look up such complex vocabulary on dictionary.com rather than relying on my intuition about what the word means–hairs of the meaning are better gotten when one has a dictionary definition idea of the meaning. some of the big words from this chapter: quixotic (okay, that one I’ll give a break to livejournal users for livejournal popularizing that odd word). transcendence. knaves. prodigals. surly. gaunt. fervid manqué. mirthful. ethereal. What is this? SAT practice? I can’t decide whether I dig the large vocabulary or am turned off by it. Maybe both at the same time?
“Love that does not suffer with the suffering of the beloved is not love at all.”
Finally…the answers. “But how can we rest in this? There’s only one way, actually: to love as he loves” also see zeph.3:16-17 (look this context up later!)
“And the more we dare to love like Him, the more we will taste the reality of this love. We will start to rely on it. Well put all our weight there.”