What if God sent a boat?
“Augustine has been there. Later in his life, in a sermon on the African shore in Hippo, he would revisit this with his congregation.
When you’ve tried everything but keep finding that what you grasped as ultimate bleeds through your fingers as finite, he says, It is as if someone could see his home country from a long way away, but is cut off from it by the sea; he sees where to go, but does not have the means to get there. In the same way all of us long to reach that secure place of ours where that which is is, because it alone always is as it is. But in between lies the sea of this world through which we are going, even though we already see where we are going (many, however, do not see where they are going). 19
The brutal truth: You can’t get there from here. Not even a map is enough. You might already have realized where you need to go, but the question is how to get there. What if God sent a boat? What if the Creator captained a ferry from that other shore? “So that we might also have the means to go, the one we were longing to go to came here from there. And what did he make? A wooden raft for us to cross the sea on.” 20 God sends a raft from home: “For no one can cross the sea of this world unless carried over it on the cross of Christ.” Get on, God invites. Hang on. I’ll never let you go. It’s not just a matter of finally settling down or coming to the end of the road. We find rest because we are found; we make it home because someone comes to get us. The prodigal’s story reframes everything because of how it ends: “While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15: 20). The wayward son is not defined by his prodigality but by the welcome of a father who never stopped looking, who is ever scanning the distance, and who runs to gather him up in an embrace. God is not tapping his foot judgmentally inside the door as you sneak in, crawling over the threshold in shame. He’s the father running toward you, losing his sandals on the way, his robes spilling off his shoulders, with a laughing smile whose joy says, “I can’t believe you came home!” This is what grace looks like.
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Where does my consolation come from?
“Each person, in whatever his station in life, will endure and overcome troubles, inconveniences, disappointments, and anxieties, convinced that his burden has been placed upon him by God. Great consolation will follow from all of this. For every work performed in obedience to ones calling, no matter how ordinary and common, is radiant - most valuable in the eyes of our Lord
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Fighting Temptation
“You may remember that I said that the first step towards humility was to realize that one is proud. I want to add now that the next thing is to make some serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first week. Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will have discovered some truths about oneself. No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.
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What is faith?
“To the Hebrew mind, therefore faith meant confidence. It was the capacity to enter life with courageous expectation. The person of faith did more than believe in his heart or develop an attitude of trust. He stepped out into life to act on that belief. His mental assurances and convictions were transformed into action. The person of faith was one who was so committed to do that like Abraham, he ventured into the unknown with the full expectation that God would meet him there. Thus in the biblical sense, to have faith was to move out in life and know God would be there waiting. It was the “call to step boldly into tomorrow, to embrace the new – with confidence that every new day would prove to be a meeting place with the holy and eternal God. The opposite of faith was to cling desperately to yesterday, fearing that if one ever left it, one would leave God.
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