Tag: trusting Jesus

Eternity And The Heart

eternity

August 4 (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

He has planted eternity in the human heart.  (NLT)

The tyranny of the urgent crushes the human spirit.  Consider for a moment the things that make you nervous or anxious, scared or worried.  Are they not things like paying your bills, dealing with a difficult relationship, or handling the mountain of work at your job?  The young person knows this anxiety as she prepares to enter a new level of school, and the elderly person knows it as he frets over burdening his family.  Seventeenth century thinker Blaise Pascal identified why this is so.  “Our imagination so enlarges the present by dint of continually reflecting on it, and so contracts eternity, by never reflecting on it, that we make a nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing.”

Contrast that with how God designed us.  He planted eternity in our hearts.  We were made to dream of and to ponder the limitless.  Do we have to put gas in the car?  Of course we do, but activities like that are not the focus of our lives, and neither are things like wealth, honor, and the accumulation of achievements.  We live in discrete moments, minute to minute, in bodies no taller than the tops of our heads and no faster than our muscles can contract, yet our hearts are made for eternity.  How, then, do we reverse the absurdity that Pascal identified?

We dwell in the eternal when we surrender to God.  When we give Him our fears and our worries, when we give Him our plans and our dreams and focus not on any of those things but on Him and His rich, extravagant, lavish, warm, perfect love for us, in such a moment our moments expand to eternity.  Confidence and peace become ours as we walk in sure relationship with our Lord.

Oh, Jesus, You overwhelm me with Your love and friendship.  When I think about it, I can’t imagine why I ever look to anything, be it my worries or successes, other than You.  If anything tempts me to look elsewhere, please draw my gaze back to You.  Amen.

Logical Love

February 3  (Galatians 2:20)

So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.  (NLT)

For some people, experiencing the love of God is like reaching the conclusion of a logical syllogism that begins with John 3:16.  God loves the world.  I am part of the world.  Therefore, God loves me.  While this is certainly true, it is rather cold comfort.  Replace God in that syllogism with the name of your friend or your spouse and you’ll see what I mean.

In this verse, however, Paul is completely open and honest about his own relationship with God.  It is not based on logical reasoning but intimate interaction.  He says it plainly.  God loves him, Paul.  As a result, he can live his life on earth trusting in Jesus.

In 1851 Herman Melville famously wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.”  You can sing “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” all you like.  You can convince others of your loving relationship with Him and may even trick yourself into believing it once in a while.  The proof will be in whether and to what extent you live by trusting Him.

Jesus, as You well know, I am a great faker.  I can convince just about everyone that I have a wonderful, Christian life.  The fact of the matter is that I need to feel You.  I need to sense Your love around me.  If there is anything blocking the way, show it to me so I can confess it and release it to You.  I want to be able to say what Paul said.  I want to live by trusting You.  Amen.