I just finished the book “Shattered Dreams” by Larry Crabb and loved it. The following excerpt really articulates well how we as Christians have weakened our understanding of the holiness of God. Without the full understanding of who God is our worship is shallow at best.
Why Our Encounter with God is Weak
Who is God, the God we desire to know?
He is…the Holy God of passionate wrath. But we’ve weakened this view of Him by introducing grace too soon.
God has now become…a Fatherly God of strict standards. But we’ve dismissed His standards in our misguided campaign against legalism.
So we’ve reduced God further to…a Helpful God of useful principles.
Who are we, as people longing to enjoy God?
We are…arrogant people who deserve eternal misery, whose awareness of that arrogance is weakened by our talking too soon and too much about our longings, until we become merely…
Scoldabley selfish people who really ought to do better, a view of ourselves we then dismiss as insensitive to our deep hurt, so we come to see ourselves as…
Understandable strugglers who deserve to be understood and helped.
-Shattered Dreams, pages 192 and 195
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3 comments:
I am struck by the truth of these words. Well chosen, Amber. I hope they humble me and call me to worship.
m.
I respect Larry Crabb’s work and will try to read this book. But your chosen excerpts seem to go to the other extreme. He is both. Grace and Holiness. We are to find the balance and try to live in that place with Him.
God’s Word says that God is Holy, God is Love and God is Light. Never is God called Grace. It is because of His love for us that he has grace for us. We are perfect sinners and well accomplished at it too. We do not deserve His grace and it doesn’t come close to the meaning of His holiness. There is no balance to be had between holiness and grace. They aren’t even on the same planet. We need to humbly fall under the feet of Christ on the cross and be sprinkled by the blood of his pierced side. Isaiah 53:5-6 says “He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities…We like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way. The Lord has laid the iniquity of us all on Him.” Worship a Holy God. We need to turn from our “ideas” about the cultural God, dig into what His holy word tells us and begin to live a blameless and pure life by living out His word.
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