Posts By Mark

Looking for pleasure, resting in unmerited joy

Lord Father,

Prepare for me circumstances of life that do nothing but help me praise you, love you, honor you, obey you, and please you all the more, beyond the thousands of good and pleasurable things that fight for your fame.
There exists nothing that could even reflect or mimic your magnitude, your creativity, and your knowledge. This God is the only one worth trusting with life, because indeed you designed the very world in which we have this possibility. We all seek pleasure, and we fail to see that the way to get it is to run to He in whom the greatest pleasures live; He who offers and is what is most pleasurable. This is a love that man only wishes to grasp—the weight of glory, that Jesus, the Lord God and Christ, loved us by dying for sinful men like me so that I might actually obtain his holiness! I am yet a sinner; I am redeemed. My weight of sin has been removed by the love that bore my weight to set us free.
God, with this type of identity, I should be free to live fearless! No man nor ideology nor scheme nor success nor experience should ever convince me of anything other than this fact: I am sealed, hidden, and confirmed as a son of God through the death of Jesus on my behalf. This is final.
Lord God, with this confidence, may I draw near the graceful throne even in my sin, knowing you are faithful and willing to shower me with love I don’t deserve. And might this love overflow through me for no gain of my own! The world needs you; use my steps and my skills not to replace your kingdom with a fabricated one here; rather, give me what is required to point people in the direction of your kingdom and alter their lives forever. This can be done with anyone, anywhere, and anytime and is not bound by a place or tradition.
Father, lead me. Teach me boldness, truth, and love.
For the glory of your name until the day I die,

Amen.
  

 

Midnight Hour [Soren Kierkegaard]

Do you know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has thrown off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight to avoid this? Or are you not terrified of it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself; I have seen men who played hide and seek so long that at last in madness they digustingly obtruded upon others their secret thoughts which hitherto they had proudly concealed.

-Soren Kierkegaard

What Christians Say

Imagine you were in Egypt just after that first Passover. If you stopped Israelites in those days and said, "Who are you and what is happening here?" they would say, "I was a slave, under a sentence of death, but I took shelter under the blood of the lamb and escaped that bondage, and now God lives in our midst and we are following him to the Promised Land."

That is exactly what Christians say today. 


-Tim Keller, The King's Cross

Searching for true love

Nobody can give anyone else the kind or amount of love they're starved for. In the end we're all alike, groping for true love and incapable of fully giving it. What we need is someone to love us who doesn't need us at all. Someone who loves us radically, unconditionally, vulnerably. Someone who loves us just for our sake. If we received that kind of love, that would so assure us of our value, it would so fill us up, that maybe we could start to give love like that too. Who can give love with no need? Jesus. ... He has all the love within himself that the whole human race lacks. And the only way we're going to get any more is from him.

-Tim Keller, The King's Cross