Tensions, Rhetorical Questions and Double Paranthesis

A pressing question lately has been why is it so important for God to reveal to us our nothingness. Is it because God is cruel? Does He enjoy our brokenness? Is it important for Him to make us small so that He can be great in our eyes? I found the answer in that we are taken from glory to glory.

Our great problem is that we believe we have discipline, love, joy and all the other things associated with being a Christian. And if we don’t have those things we ask God to give us what we don’t have. The problem with having something is that we can lose what we have. Or we don’t find it when we need it. The case is that God has much higher thoughts for us than giving us what we think we need.

So what does He do? In order for us to see what and who we truly are He first has to shred to pieces any illusions of what we think we have or what He will give us. We so desperately cling to these illusions that drastic measures must be employed to set us free. It is a most crucial and decisive process He takes us through. Yes, it hurts. It hurts like hell when we come to the bottom and discover we have nothing and in this place of nothingness see the illusions that up to now have defined us go down the drain. Purified and cleansed from a truckload of erroneous beliefs and assertions He now takes us through a reverse process.

He thoroughly shows us that we ARE all those things we believed we had or needed to have. You need discipline? Well, you are discipline! You need love? You are love! You need patience? Well, you are patience. This is the new level of glory to which He takes us. We don’t have to call for or pray for things we are. “Oh, God give me patience in this situation!” is turned to “I am patience in this situation.”

So when He let us face our nothingness in this bottomless pit (He is there with us as us. That He is even there as us is still beyond me. His thoughts are simply sometimes too high for me) it is solely an act of love to show us what we are not so that we by faith can see what we are. And what we are is immensely more glorious than what we thought we had or were. Our Father is only love, an infinite fountain of love and it is His great privilege to joyfully lead us to and show us the eternal riches in Him. It is imperative for Him to show us these things since we are created in His likeness. Thus we do not have a lot of stuff, we are a lot of stuff. We are the best wine there is!

Listen to me carefully now: THERE IS NO CONDEMNATION IN CHRIST JESUS! Why do I capitalize this? You see, when we are taken to level zero everything will literally go wrong. All that nasty stuff we had hemmed in by laws and regulations suddenly bursts forth and out in the open. We feel like the greatest sinner, the lousiest person on this earth. Great! Perfect! It is God’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes (if we have eyes to see.) We have to go there before we learn who we really are! The feeling of helplessness is pure gold. You can’t buy that for money. Comprehende?

(Please do not for a second think that I perfectly live in what I write about here or in other posts. Every tension you face I face too and Jesus before us. What is the great temptation in all this? Isn’t it to believe that we are separate units apart from God? (This is btw called a rhetorical question (just in case you wondered). “Rhetorical questions encourage the listener to think about what the (often obvious) answer to the question must be.” (Wikipedia)) If I hadn’t been taken through the same tensions as you I couldn’t have written a single word of importance. (As a math teacher I am used to a lot of parenthesis – even double parenthesis ;)))