A Quote by Dallas Willard
Why doesn't God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.
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My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.
Today is [the feast of] Santa Rita, Patron Saint of impossible things - but this seems impossible: let us ask of her this grace, this grace that all, all, all people would do good and that we would encounter one another in this work, which is a work of creation, like the creation of the Father. A work of the family, because we are all children of God, all of us, all of us! And God loves us, all of us! May Santa Rita grant us this grace, which seems almost impossible. Amen.
Why do we fail? Is it because we are unlucky? Is it because we have not worked very hard? I s it because we have not invoked God's Compassion and Blessings? Is it because God has accepted this failure as an experience He wanted to have in our life? Is it because God has granted this failure to us? Is it because God has willed that we should lose? No! not it is for a different reason that we experience failure. It is for the strengthening of our consciousness that, at times, God grants us defeat.
It is the will of our heavenly Father that we should come to Him freely and confidently and make known our desires to Him, just as we would have our children come freely and of their own accord and speak to us about the things they would like to have.
Friends should be chosen by a higher principle of selection than any worldly one. They should be chosen for character, for goodness, for truth and trustworthiness, because they have sympathy with us in our best thoughts and holiest aspirations, because they have community of mind in the things of the soul.
Why pray? Evidently, God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers ("your Father knows what you need before you ask him"). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image.
Think about how many of us have wondered why we don't fit, why our faith doesn't stabilize us, why we seem so out of sync with most of the world. Genuine faith is the isolating force in our lives that creates tension wherever we go. To put it another way, faith is the unbalancing force in our lives that is the fruit of God's disturbing presence.
I am persuaded, from all the facts that have come to me, that it would have been possible, if we had functioned as the Lord intended us to function, if we had paid our tithes and our offerings as the Lord intended us to pay them, we might have gone on without one dollar from our federal government. And has it ever occurred to you what a mighty influence we should have exercised for good and for respect and for all of the virtues that we have been taught, and that God has commanded us to exercise and cultivate and practice, if we had just followed along what he has asked us to do?
The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.
I've often said why does God leave us here on earth, once we accept Christ, once we're in the family, why didn't he just kill us. Why leave us here? Well, because he's working on our character through these trials, these tribulations, we're learning to practice what we're going to do in heaven. So really, the kingdom mindset is actually the eternal mindset. It's not just about eternal life. Eternal life is getting ready for that.
We can learn that reward comes in creation and re-creation, no just in the consumption of the world around us. Active participation in the process of creation is our right and our privilege. We can learn to measure the success of our ideas not by our bank accounts by their impact on the world.
It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.
God has made us humans in God's own image. So therefore the highest way to talk about God is by some kind of analogy with ourselves. So, naturally, if we who are finite and sinful suffer in multiple ways because of sin and evil and the horrible things that happen in our world, how much more does God, who is infinite, sinless, and knows the totality of all that happens to everybody, suffer pain and heartache at the suffering of his human and non-human creation - and be angry at all that causes it?
It is absurd to think that anything in us could have the least influence upon our election. Some say that God did foresee that such persons would believe, and therefore did choose them; so they would make the business of salvation to depend upon something in us. Whereas God does not choose us FOR faith, but TO faith. "He hath chosen us, that we should be holy" (Eph. 1:4), not because we would be holy, but that we might be holy. We are elected to boldness, not for it.
Everyone in the top of their fields is pouring everything they have into this, which is why it was such a massive undertaking and why filming was extended. It's not because things are going badly. It's because they're so massive and it's so complicated and we want to get it right. We're not just phoning it in. We're taking our time with it because it's really important.
God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath.
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