Saturday, August 2, 2008

The Reality of a Personal God

From time to time I come across things that someone has said that seem to be so profound and so revealing about truth. In addition, my words, in all likelihood, become a little routine after a while.

One of my "heroes" in the Faith is Dr. Francis Schaeffer. His words below resonate so deeply in my mind and heart. I pray that you will be deeply blessed as well. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this or any other matter.

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I do believe the Trinity can be experienced as the personality of God becomes real to us--as we know His person and not just doctrines about Him. And (perhaps most important) this can be experienced when we in some small measure begin to know the reality of His individual leading as we in moment by moment faith truly desire that He, the infinite person, might lead us, the finite persons.

The spiritual steps which meant so much to me...centered largely around the moment by moment realization of the blood of Christ. I realized then in theory, but now as something deeper than theory, that there is a further step which is more profound in the reality of the universe: this is the reality of taking our place as creatures, willingly and in love, in the presence of the infinite Creator. If we would only stop desiring to be God and, in reality and practice, take our place as creatures, then I think we could get on.

I am not thinking of this in some "mystical" area where God becomes an abstraction, but in strenuously practical areas of history in which we walk. If we would only allow the Agent of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to lead each individual instead of living in the areas of rules which are man-made and quite apart from the absolutes laid down in Scripture.

If only we would be willing to have Christ be the true Head, and be willing for exotic leadership of the Holy Spirit in our individual and corporate lives--rather than stagnifing the Holy Spirit's leadership of yesterday, as seen in the lives of other men who lived in different historic circumstances, when the infinite eye of God would see today's history as requiring a slightly different or radically different approach; or even stagnifying how the Holy Spirit has led us individually in the past. Why should the Holy Spirit's leading of us today be what it was a year ago, when our historic circumstance is always in flux? To me these things are not an abstraction.

As one small practical application, why do we insist on continuing organizations just because they were useful last week, or last year?


-Francis A. Schaeffer, Letters of Francis A. Schaeffer, Crossway Books,

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