A few quotes to share this week, both of which deeply resonate with me while at the same time make me a bit nervous. Both are from Larry Crabb’s book, Shattered Dreams, which you may be happy to know I have almost completed!
“Oh! [God’s] grace and goodness toward us is so immeasurably great, that without great assaults and trials it cannot be understood.” —Martin Luther
Crabb expounds on this: “Good friends make our lives easier, not harder, so we think. . . . The problem is with our blessing-based, happiness-centered understanding of goodness. It is too small. . . . If Luther is right—that only in suffering do we learn to fully delight in God’s goodness—then it becomes immediately clear why our enjoyment of God is so shallow. We don’t like to suffer. We see no value in suffering. We arrange our lives to minimize suffering. And we believe Christianity offers a God who will cooperate with that plan.”
Note my own emphasis on the words “fully delight.” I believe we can delight in God when life is going just as we like. But can we fully delight in Him under such good circumstances? I’m not sure we’ve experienced the fullness of God until we’ve been with Him in times of suffering. It’s then that we begin to more fully understand His mercy, His sovereignty, His enoughness. And through these things, our delight in Him grows.
Crabb also quotes a friend in the midst of his own shattered dream:
“Faith, as I am growing to understand it more, is about looking beyond my circumstances to a person. To have faith in better circumstances, even in God creating better circumstances, is not true faith. I want to be the kind of man who can watch every dream go down in flames and still yearn to be intimately involved in kingdom living, intimately involved with my friend the King, and still be willing to take another risk just because it delights Him for me to do so. And my flesh shivers to think about it.”
In the past two years, I have made so many grand plans that have gone nowhere. But I, too, want to be the kind of person this paragraph describes. To keep dreaming, to keep risking, to choose doing "crazy" things for Christ over safety and comfort every time. I’m not that person today, and I’m painfully aware of it at times. But I keep dreaming that's who He'll help me become.
