Good morning…
In cleaning our home to welcome our guests later this afternoon, I ran across a book I had totally forgotten about. Underlined. Highlighted. Circled and starred. A few years back I devoured each page during my two year training to become a spiritual director. Guided by the Spirit, I am now drawn to dog-eared page number ninety-eight to feast again on fresh, enduring wisdom.
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Excerpt from Hearing God: Developing A Conversational Relationship With God by Dallas Willard
The traces of God that have always been obvious to the earnest seeker (Rom 1:19) are found in the purposeful order that appears within nature and history as well as in our individual lives. It is impossible to develop this point fully here, but the order of events large and small throughout our world strongly suggests to an unbiased observer that there is a providential and personal oversight of our world and our lives.
This is what the apostle Paul has in mind when he says, in his sermon on Mars Hill in Athens, that God so arranged our world that we should seek the Lord and – as the Jerusalem Bible nicely translates it – “by feeling (our) way towards him, succeed in finding him. Yet in fact he is not far from any of us, since it is in him that we live, and move, and exist” (Acts 17:27-28). Since God is not far, God hears when we speak. When he speaks, we can hear him.
The New Testament presents Christ the Son as continually “sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Heb 1:3) and as the very glue of the universe. “In him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). A. H. Strong spells this out:
Christ is the originator and the upholder of the universe… In him, the power of God, the universe became an actual, real thing, perceptible to others; and in him it consists, or holds together, from hour to hour. The steady will of Christ constitutes the law of the universe and makes it a cosmos instead of chaos, just as his will brought it into being in the beginning.
…There is no reason in the established truths of science to suppose that God cannot reach us and be with us in order to guide and communicate with us.
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The question for all of us then becomes, “Will I live as an earnest seeker of the traces left by God today?”
I open up Biblegateway.com right now; I sense God continuing our conversation. The “randomly chosen” verse of the day ends with these words: The plan wasn’t written out with ink on paper, with pages and pages of legal footnotes, killing your spirit. It’s written with Spirit on spirit, his life on our lives! (2 Corinthians 3:6b, MSG).
To me, this feels like a tiny timely trace of God reaching, guiding, speaking. Spirit on spirit. His life on our lives. Instead of us living in chaos, the steady will of Christ holds us together in this intimately connected cosmos.
That’s plain enough, isn’t it? You’re no longer wandering exiles. This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You’re no longer strangers or outsiders. You belong here, with as much right to the name Christian as anyone. God is building a home. He’s using us all—irrespective of how we got here—in what he is building. He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now he’s using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day—a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home (Ephesians 2:19-22, MSG).
…Sue…
