Paul Tripp shared his frustration in this post, “No Longer Amazed by Grace” after hearing the director of a national ministry claim nothing excites him anymore. He shared something from B.B. Warfield that has my heart all in rumbles with agreement. Read the whole thing, but here’s the last bit where Warfield sums up his warning to the seminarian who has become numb to divine things due to his constant contact with divine things.
Think of what your privilege is when your greatest danger is that the great things of religion may become common to you! Other men, oppressed by the hard conditions of life, sunk in the daily struggle for bread perhaps, distracted at any rate by the dreadful drag of the world upon them and the awful rush of the world’s work, find it hard to get time and opportunity so much as to pause and consider whether there be such things as God, and religion, and salvation from the sin that compasses them about and holds them captive. The very atmosphere of your life is these things; you breathe them in at every pore: they surround you, encompass you, press in upon you from every side. It is all in danger of becoming common to you! God forgive you, you are in danger of becoming weary of God!
O, that we would never lose our awe of God. No matter how many books, studies, conferences, or personal devotions at sunrise – may we never get bored of meeting with the Creator of the universe. May we always hold this gift of communion with tender gratitude, knowing we have no right to know anything of His mysteries. Every little bit revealed is pure gift.
Several weeks ago, I was babysitting a 6-year-old and his 4-year-old sister. Moments after their parents left, Connor found his sister and I in the middle of a stuffed animal introduction. He picked up some silver Mardi Gras beads and said, “Let’s play a game. Here’s what we do: I drop the beads on the ground and then we see what shapes we make.” He let the beads fall to the carpet and then we all just looked at the squiggles until shapes emerged. Our observations overlapped, “I see a heart!” and “Oh, there’s a butterfly” and “Do you see the snake?”
Once we’d exhausted the shapes, it was someone else’s turn to throw the beads to the carpet. The whole time, I was absolutely giddy with excitement. How many adults would think of such a game? This 6-year-old is brilliant! I loved how matter-of-fact he was about the game and about spotting shapes and about including his sister. I mostly loved the rasp in their voices right before they found something wonderful “..Oh, oh! Look at this flower!” The shapes came alive in those silver dots in a mess on the floor.
And if we can get excited – even giddy – about silver dots, then how much more should our excitement soar at the wonder of creation? How can we be amused by far lesser (yet still wonderful) things, and bored with the greatest and most wonderful things?
let LOVE fly like cRaZy
We need a soul check when we are no longer amazed at God’s grace. There is a Brenning Manning quote that I love. He says,”We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that He should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at His love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground.”