Showing posts with label Sarah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sarah. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Vain Salvation

These days, when we read that we are to “love our enemies”, many Christians in the West find ourselves thinking long and hard to find anyone in our lives to whom that word genuinely applies. We are just a bit short in the enemy department ... or at least that’s my personal experience.

There are notable exceptions, but the sorts of foes modern Christians encounter are more along the lines of surly relatives, ungrateful children or fellow employees with a tendency to step on others to get ahead. And I suppose not too many of us are overly disappointed with that arrangement.

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

The Missing Backstop

It was I who kept you from sinning against me.”

Francis Thompson famously referred to the “Hound of Heaven”, his metaphor for a God whose hand is so relentlessly upon the affairs of a person’s life that the divine influence can be neither evaded nor ignored.

There have been times when I too had a very strong impression God was personally on my case, and that all my efforts to circumvent or evade his will were doomed to end in utter futility. At other times, his impact on my choices and the circumstances around them, if present at all, has been incredibly subtle. Absent evidence of God’s direct involvement, to ascribe any specific decisions I have made in this life to the influence of providence would be, I think, quite presumptuous.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Vain Salvation

The most recent version of this post is available here.