Читать книгу Hear the Ancient Wisdom - Charles Ringma - Страница 17

January 10

Grateful Faithfulness

The grace and blessing of God are given freely. They don’t come with strings attached. But they do call us to community, worship, faithfulness, responsibility, and service.

God is not first and foremost there for us, as if we are the center of things. We are there for God. And God is no Father Christmas.

God is a covenant-making God, calling us into his grace and goodness and into a relationship where our greatest desire becomes the vision to glorify God and to do his will. St. Clement is clear about this. He writes, “Take care, my friends, that his [God’s] many blessings do not turn out to be our condemnation, which will be the case if we fail to live worthily of him . . . and to do what is good and pleasing . . .”10

Grace issues in gratefulness and obedience and this forms the ethical shape of our lives. This is living life in God, in the Spirit. And this will always be a cruciform life.

Graced by the love of God in Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit, we will seek to conform our ways to God’s ways and will. This both honors God and replicates the way of God in our world. Thus godliness shapes all we are and do.

Our activism, therefore, should spring from grace. And it is to be marked by joy and gratefulness.

Thought

A God pleaser will do more for the well-being of humanity than a people pleaser.