Proverbs 9:6
Leave simpleness, and live, and walk in the ways of insight.
This is not asking us to leave the simple for the complicated, but rather to forsake the shallow life for one of depth. This is what Jesus calls us to.
We can hang out around the surface of comatose enslavement to our emotions, or we can walk thru the valley of suffering of both our lives and the lives of others and yet find God there, still, and really live, by embracing it. Watching the movie Shadowlands a while back, I was reminded of C.S. Lewis saying he wasn’t so sure God wants us to be happy. But to love and be loved. I took him to mean happiness in that shallow sense where we have all we want, so to speak. Isn’t life deeper than “having all we want?” Than everything going “my way?”
Unconditional love is being loved no matter what, not getting everything you want.
What’s that William Wallace quote? “Every man dies. Not every man really lives.”
Matthew 9:8
When the crowds saw it they were frightened, and praised God for giving authority like this to humans.
Here we have Jesus forgiving the paralytic man’s sins as well as healing his paralysis. When the power of God is made manifest thru someone, it is kinda scary and also commands praise to Him for it.
The mysterium tremendum ac fascinosum, am I right?
We don’t seem to see this much these days in America. We are so into praising people here, even Christians. Why? Are we still so self-reliant? What if we really depended on God to do things? [To change lives, not to do things we ourselves are empowered to do.] What if we prayed for things with that holy expectancy that He will actually carry it out? Praying without really believing it will happen is a waste of breath isn’t it?
I crave to see and be a part of the power of God that demands His praise and not my own.
They praised God for giving authority like this to humans.
We are capable of so much more than we realize. The power that raised Jesus from the dead resides within us. And if we are turned toward God, away from sin, abiding in Him, we will be in position to experience that real power. We will experience His authority over everything, that He has overcome the world in which we have troubles. (I do not pretend to know how this works, nor am I saying that it is God’s will always to heal. That is all well above my pay grade.)
Few people are focused on one thing long enough to experience much cosmic energy from it.
I am convinced that if you spent just a half hour in silence before God every week, completely in abandoned focus on nothing but Him, that your life would drastically change. Your life would be drastically, ridiculously different.