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GOD IS ODD!

GOD IS ODD!
(A Phrase Borrowed From a Friend)

By Roger Salter
Special to Virtueonline
www.virtueonline.org
August 15, 2014

A PASTICHE ON DIVINE PROVIDENCE AND HUMAN PRIDE

Our God is the God of the extraordinary, the impossible, the miraculous, of wonders beyond conception. We are to expect great things of God as the apostle Paul confidently urges us to do: “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” (Ephesians 3:20-21). The potential in this utterance is astounding and immeasurable.

But we sometimes bemoan the lack of evidence in our personal lives and ministries (which we all have) for this assertion. James tells us why: “You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives. . .(James4: 2-3). That is, we pray in the interests of self-gratification or even in self-promotion; crassly in a worldly sense, cunningly in seemingly worthy and sanctified desires.

Both passages inform us that faithful and godly prayer is always in pursuit of the will and glory of God and our fruitful instrumentality in duly honoring him as his people. God works mightily in believers toward their on-going renovation and ultimate redemption. God works powerfully in his church as a witness to his being, greatness, goodness and purposes. His glory, revealed in his goodness, is his exclusive aim or objective in both salvation and judgment. Prayer must not trifle with him or seek to titillate our fancies and unregenerate preferences. God’s sovereignty and benevolence grant us a wide range of holy and helpful petition but he will never satisfy our selfish lusts and ambitions even, for want of a better description, when they seem to come under the category of spiritual ends. Self-advancement and self-aggrandizement are always lurking somewhere in our motives and movement. We are to offer prayer as best we can and the Holy Spirit edits it and makes it acceptable through the intercession of Christ our Advocate.

Our prayers are offered with confidence in God and caution about the condition in which we present them. We approach the high and lofty one with his tender compassion as our incentive. “Who is like unto the Lord our God, that has his dwelling so high; and yet humbles himself to behold the things that are in heaven and earth?” (Psalm 113:5-6). Our familial faith as dear children of God is careful not to fall into casual and chummy familiarity with him. He may be lofty in station and yet lowly of heart but his gentle accessibility is never to be interpreted as license to come to him sassily, cheekily or rashly. Reverence is our mien and mood.

Those great expectations of God that we are meant to entertain are often cheapened by the notion that God is at our bidding in the grand schemes that we enterprise, supposedly in his name. We are fascinated by mathematical calculations and manmade methods and timing to attain what we deem to be maximum success if only we operate certain mechanisms effectively. Whether something is big or small matters much to us. We obsessively engage in calculation and prognostication hoping to arrive at certainty in our efforts, with guarantees of effectiveness. We think quantitatively more often than we do in terms of quality. Divine dimensions and measurements are principally in the moral sphere. Trueness trumps statistics, virtue rather than volume. “Someone asked him, ‘Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?’‘ (Luke 16:23). Jesus didn’t answer with arithmetic but a spiritual imperative, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door” (Luke 16:24). The final conclusion is God’s. Our every effort is dependent upon grace from start to finish. He directs the process and determines the outcome (1 Corinthians 15:1).

God’s assurances are incentives, but they apply to his purposes and not ours. We have an obligation to faithfulness but no warrant for triumphalism or anticipation of automatic success in a ways that are self-pleasing and evident to others. We defer to the pleasure of God whose program in detail often differs from ours. “ ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways’, declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’” (Isaiah 55:9). We must not count on divine endorsement of every specific plan we devise. Our blueprints are not in the nature of obligations that he must meet.

The things we are required to do are in the spirit of “for God primarily, and if needs be, for God alone”. Like Jeremiah and other prophets, we are to face failure, in human terms, for God. We are to endure disappointments and reversals and not allow them to force us to give up. There is a species of Christian confidence that is glib and immature: a reference to biblical promise and precedent that is shallow and presumptuous, almost insolent. God does not rule out the occurrence of adversity and disaster for his people, even the collapse of pet projects. If needs be, we are “to fail for God” or fall into situations that mystify us and which fail to go according to plan. We may find ourselves in places that are painful and perplexing in the experience of the soul.

What of William Carey who arrived in India to see his wife lapse into insanity and learn that his trusted colleague has disappointed him. This stout-hearted man endured many other ordeals? What of John Paton who labored and appealed for years and in long journeys for funds for the purchase of a vessel to facilitate his ministry in the islands of Vanuatu (New Hebrides) only to see it sink in one of its earliest voyages? What of missionaries who train and prepare to take the gospel to dangerous zones and die before their ministry has even begun? (e.g. James Hannington and others in East Africa). What of Gottschalk (9th C), champion of Augustinianism, deeply admired by Archbishop Ussher, and cruelly treated and imprisoned for life, loathed by his archbishop, but loved by other good scholars and churchmen of the time? What of the great Anglican bishops Joseph Hall and John Davenant, the former deprived of his office by extreme puritans in his senior years, and the latter deeply humiliated by William Laud for upholding the doctrine of our 17th Article? How is it that an excellent candidate for a particular ministry, after much prayer from the applicant and those who appointed him, can die within hours of mutual acceptance? Why are there martyrdoms, curtailments of effective ministries (Spurgeon, Scougal, M’Cheyne, Andrew Gray), and numerous obstacles in the paths of godly servants who seek earnestly and profitably to carry out their work for the Lord?

Jeremiah in the pit did not seem to be a man favored by the Lord.

As Teresa of Avila remarked after her coach was overturned and happened to tumble down a steep incline casting her roughly on to the ground, “If God does this to his friends, what becomes of his enemies?”

We are not pledged a smooth course or untroubled souls. False assurances are often imparted to new converts or novices entering the ministry. Would any of us envy the experiences of the apostle Paul? Why are we educated to think in terms of an easy life as Christians, and glowing success, as we assess it, as God’s servants? There is an air of impudence sometimes in what we assume God should perform on our behalf. “Here’s the proposal Lord. Surely, you can’t refuse it.” George Whitefield entertained the assumption that his little son John would mature into a great evangelist but the little one died in infancy as a result of being ejected from a coach on a bumpy and rutted roadway. It is such a great danger when a sense of the favor of God causes us to favor ourselves and fondle our fancies excessively. It doesn’t take much divine blessing to tilt us in the direction of boastfulness. None of us are deservedly distinguished or indispensable. Spurgeon must have learned this very clearly from his constant bout with gout. Paul caught on from the thorn that God would not withdraw from his side. Jacob had his life-long limp. The Lord can deflate our cocksureness at any time by various methods of puncturing the out-of-control ego.

With all of his amazing popularity Whitefield admitted that many professed converts would fall away and that there is the risk of assuring such folk too soon. There is always the temptation to overrate effectiveness of Christian work and inflate statistics of given campaigns and events of outreach. We can become immoderate in our sense of being in control because we pull all the right levers and press God so persuasively in our importuning of his power. Our sometimes undetected hubris needs to yield to the demeanor of humility.

John Newton is so adept, in his own admissions, of cutting our self regard down to proper proportion. For there is a jealousy and diffidence of ourselves, a wariness, owing to a sense of the deceitfulness of our hearts, which is a grace and a gift of the Lord.”Of immature exuberance he opines, “When I see anyone, soon after they appear to be awakened, making a speedy profession of great joy, before they have a due acquaintance with their own hearts, I am in pain for them. I am not sorry to hear them afterwards complain that their joys are gone, and they are almost at their wits end; for without some such check, to make them feel their weakness and dependence, I seldom find them to turn out well; either their fervor abates without seeming reason, till they become quite cold, and sink into the world again (of which I see many instances), or if they do not give up all, their walk is uneven, and their spirit has not the savor of brokenness and true humility, which is the chief ornament of our holy profession.” So often he reinforces the wisdom of the apostle of self-confessed weakness. “For by the grace given me I say to everyone of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you” (Romans 12:3). Sound faith reaches out to God. In presumption we overreach ourselves. We need discernment to recognize the boundaries. ‘We must be weaned from our own wills” (Newton). Our setbacks advance this purpose.

Newton knows that kingdom work is mostly gradual, thankless, and unsensational: “The ministers are rejected, opposed, vilified; they are accounted troublers of the world, because they dare not, cannot stand silent while sinners are perishing before their eyes; and if, in the course of many sermons, they can prevail but on one soul to take timely warning, and to seek Jesus, who is the way, the truth, and the life, they account it a mercy and an honour, sufficient to overbalance all the labour and reproaches they are called to endure.” It is to be hoped that seminaries, in this age of celebrity ministers, sober the minds of their students with thoughts such as Newton’s before they leave the campus for the wild world.

Evangelicalism is often guilty of putting the pastor on a pedestal (and sometimes savagely tearing them down). Henry Venn writes wisely to his son John: “The placing of ministers is one of the chief prerogatives of our Lord and head. His thoughts and ways in this matter are totally different from ours. Hence we see several of his pastors and teachers in spheres very unfit for them, as it appears; - men of abilities, zeal, and application, preaching to a handful of peasants; - others, without talents, in places of great resort, amongst men of education. But every mouth must be stopped; and no enquiry is allowed, why he doeth so or so. Our business is indisputably plain - ‘Work while it is day.’ Be zealous and pure from the blood of all men, whether you speak to one hundred or some thousands. None more glorify God than patient satisfied pastors, who never admit the thought of choosing for themselves. You write the very truth, when you write, ‘I rejoice now particularly that I am not my own, nor, in respect of my situation in life, am I left to my own choice.’”

Thomas Cranmer, writing to Peter Martyr, speaks of God’s oddness in his dispensations towards his people. “‘. . . he may then more especially show himself to be the God of his people, when he seems to have altogether forsaken them; then raising them up when they think he is bringing them down, and laying them low; then glorifying them them, when he is thought to be confounding them ; then quickening them, when he is thought to be destroying them . So that we may say with Paul, When I am weak, then I am strong; and if I must needs glory, I will glory in my infirmities, in prisons, in revilings, in distress, in persecutions, in sufferings for Christ.’ I pray God to grant that I may endure to the end!”

From our vantage point, way beneath the throne, it sometimes seems that God could be capricious in a disturbing way, or indeed odd in a mystifying way. In our experiences, expectations, and enterprises he is revealing to us his sovereignty of infinite wisdom which will be manifest at the consummation of time to our complete contentment.

“In his heart man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps” (Proverbs 16:9).

The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church

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