Thursday, April 30, 2009

to be free with clarity

thy word declares,
thou wilt supply my needs
for blessings now, O LORD,
i humbly seek

so goes an old hmyn. never been quite sure how one can be asking for blessings and still be humble, but if it's possible, then

the blessings i seek from God are: a love for purity that overwhelms all other desires, and the freedom from all that is lewd, hot, heavy, dispassionate, distant, and all the other words that describe the bondage of sin. i want to be breathing the cool, crisp morning air like i am now, knowing that my mind and body are clear as the morning dewdrops and fresh rain.

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/edit: well well well. guess what. God has decided to show me what humility means. i've been a post-modern humilist, sigh.

John Piper on humility
Excerpt: "A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. ... [and] the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which makes him stop working altogether. . . . We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table".

Humility is as 1st Peter 4:19 says: "Entrust your soul to the faithful Creator". And if I can't do that, it's because I'm proud. I still have control issues.

But see, control issues are yet another part of the bondage problem. A muddy shirt cannot make itself clean; there's no way it ever can. It needs soap, warm water, and help to scrub it clean, and make it white again. I have not the least bit inclination to walk around the world with a muddy shirt that will cause my body to rash and whose dirt, when gotten into my rashes, to result in my body breaking out in sores. It will be painful and chafing.
In that same way, I will entrust my soul to the faithful Creator, who will stop my soul's decomposing, and wash me clean.

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thanks to gayle, for the link to piper(:

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