What is man, that You are mindful of him?

I am quite overwhelmed by several things.

1. The depth and spread and reach of God's love and mercy and grace and care and tenderness and faithfulness and intervention and Providence. There is nothing they cannot reach, there is nothing that can hide itself from them. And I rejoice in this.

2. The depth and spread and reach of God's love and mercy and grace and care and tenderness and faithfulness and intervention and Providence, in spite of my wayward heart and the slow pace I seem to be holding in sanctification. His patience blows my mind. His faithfulness, even more so.

3. How people can mistake the creature for the Creator. How even fellow Christians mistake the work of the Creator for the work of the creature. There is only One who can work goodness and love in us. There is only One who can fix the mess that we are born into and live in. There is only One who can say to me, You are justified in Christ, now walk in Him. There is only One who can put His exquisite and unique and satisfying love into a heart that has never known anything like it. 

4. How all of Creation shouts and proclaims the beauty of the Creator. And how magnificent common grace is - Who could have even thought of blessing all, both righteous and unrighteous, but a God whose character is that of love and grace and kindness? Who would have ever thought that Someone would care so much for what He has made - to the extent that He would sacrifice Himself! to salvage the good work of His hand, that had intentionally ship-wrecked itself for the selfish pleasure of it? But God who is rich in mercy...

...how can this not be overwhelming?

BB Warfield & Revelation

"The one [general revelation] is adapted to man as man; the other [special revelation] to man as sinner; and since man, on becoming sinner, has not ceased to be man, but has only acquired new needs requiring additional provisions to bring him to the end of his existence, so the revelation directed to man as sinner does not supersede that given to man as man, but supplements it with these new provisions for this attainment, in his new condition of blindness, helplessness and guilt induced by sin, of the end of his being."

- B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 74.

This quote really helped clarify in my mind the purposes of both "stages" of divine revelation.

Os Guinness & Oswald Chambers

"If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in His presence."

- Oswald Chambers

Wow, what a powerful thought. It is true that God calls to His children as their loving Father, but we must never forget the nature of such a Father - One who is Holy and Utterly Separate from us. Indeed, we must approach Him with fear and trembling, and live a life that pants after holiness, for just as He is holy, so we too must be holy in all we do. We must unshod our feet from the worldly shoes that are quick to sprint off the narrow road, and we must (however slowly) endeavor to tread the Way with bare feet. For, as one great saint put it, "better to stumble along the narrow way, than to run quick and sure out of it."

Another quote that cut me to the quick was from Os Guinness.

"To follow the call of God is therefore to live before the heart of God. It is to live life coram Deo (before the heart of God) and thus to shift our awareness of audiences to the point where only the last and highest - God - counts."

 - Os Guinness, The Call

This is something that I struggle with on a day-to-day basis. How I long to repeat St. Paul's words after him, "If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ." (Gal. 1:10) But I find myself quite prone to living according to the affirmations of others, and worst of all, myself. May I ever seek to find my affirmation in Christ and by Christ - for it is only in Him that I am affirmed as an heir, and it is only because of Him that I am named a son.