Ears Hearing, Eyes Seeing: August 2008

Friday, August 29, 2008

From "Knowing the Face of God"

When we speak of a personal relationship with him, we are speaking of a relationship with a personality totally different from any we can know here on earth. What I know of him can only be the tiniest fraction of his fullness. Yet what I know today is real, it is deep, and it is entirely significant, for it lays the foundation of a relationship that will last forever.

So the phrase "a personal relationship" turns out to be a good way to speak of God. Knowing God is in some ways as simple and as familiar as knowing a friend. It is also as complex, as endless, as infatuating, and as frustrating as trying to understand those we love - or even ourselves. For the more we know, the more we are called to explore farther in and higher up. And in the immense echoing splendor of God there is much more to know than we can ever comprehend.

- Tim Stafford

Sunday, August 17, 2008

From "Knowing the Face of God"

Our problem is that Christ lives in us and that at the same time we wait for him to come. According to the Bible we are children of God, yet we often feel like orphans. Which perspective is the Bible speaking from, the middle or the end? Scripture, I believe, mainly presents us with a view of life from the end - "the eternal perspective," we might call it, or even "the heavenly view." This view separates what is real from what is unreal. What is real is what will last. Everything else, no matter how real it seems to us, is treated as insubstantial, hardly worth a snort. That is why Scripture can seem at times so blithely and irritatingly out of touch with reality, brushing past huge philosophical problems and personal agony. That is just how life is when you are looking from the end. Perspective changes everything. What seemed so important at the time has no significance at all.

- Tim Stafford