A Quote by Criss Jami
When we find that God's ways always coincide with our own ways, it's time to question who we're really worshipping, God or ourselves. The latter moves the nature of godliness from the King to our servant to a slave, a deduction into the realm of selfhood and then the lower, slavehood. It's a spiritual mathematics in that men who need God in his godhood are humble yet strong and spiritually ambitious while men who need a slave in their selfhood are ultimately paralyzed and will remain paralyzed.
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When we find that God's ways always coincide with our own ways, it's time to question who we're really worshipping, God or ourselves.
Isaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God's justice, because it suggests that we have it backward - the mystery lies not in God's unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God's ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. Despite all that we do to alienate ourselves from God, all that we do to insult and disobey, God abundantly pardons again and again.
As Muslim women, we have been liberated from this silent bondage. We don’t need society’s standard of beauty or fashion, to define our worth. We don’t need to become just like men to be honored, and we don’t need to wait for a prince to save or complete us. Our worth, our honor, our salvation, and our completion lies not in the slave. But, in the Lord of the slave.
Godliness has 'promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.' But the only way one can enter into godliness is by turning to God as a repentant sinner and receiving the Saviour He has provided in the Gospel. Therefore the crying need of our degenerate times is for a revival of true old-fashioned, Christ- centered, Bible preaching that will call upon all men everywhere to repent in view of that coming day when God will judge the world in righteousness by His Risen Son.
I believe our nation is in deep trouble. We seem to have lost our identity because in many ways we're separated from God. I believe it's imperative that God's people pray as Daniel did, or our nation may unravel morally and spiritually to the point of no return. I believe we desperately need the blessing of God.
Ironically, many people can't afford to give precisely because they're not giving. If we pay our debt to God first, then we will incur His blessing to help us pay our debts to men. But when we rob God to pay men, we rob ourselves of God's blessing.
When all of our idols are taken away, all our securities and defense mechanisms,
we find out who we really are. We’re so little, so poor, so emptyand a shock to ourselves. But the Biblical God takes away our shame,
and we are eventually able to present ourselves in an honest and humble form.
Then we find out who we really are and who God is for usand it is more than enough. That is how an enslaved people became God’s people, Israel.
When we think of training ourselves in godliness, we usually think of the traditional spiritual disciplines, but it can also be practical activities like taking a nature walk or listening to music - whatever helps us draw closer to God. God hardwired our brains and bodies in such a way that spiritual training, combined with God's work in us, has the very real effect of making us more attuned to spiritual reality and our true identity in Christ.
All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is"... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol-all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.
There are two things that are suited to humble the souls of men, and they are, first, a due consideration of God, and then of themselves - of God, in His greatness, glory, holiness, power, majesty, and authority; of ourselves, in our mean, abject, and sinful condition.
Here is where our real selfhood is rooted, in the divine spark or seed, in the image of God imprinted on the human soul. The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.
We should fix ourselves firmly in the presence of God by conversing all the time with Him...we should feed our soul with a lofty conception of God and from that derive great joy in being his. We should put life in our faith. We should give ourselves utterly to God in pure abandonment, in temporal and spiritual matters alike, and find contentment in the doing of His will,whether he takes us through sufferings or consolations.
Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him... To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls.
It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as "new men" regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.
There is no need to invent an ego that is separate from the divine if our basic human nature is trusted. If we trust ourselves, we know how to avoid interfering with nature and how to live in harmony. When we know God as an unseen, loving, and accepting power at the heart of everything, allowing us to make our own choices, then God is a trusted part of our nature.
God does not use perfect men; He uses men. And so, when I say that we need to be conformed to the image of Christ, we also need to recognize that God has always used men lacking something somewhere.
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