Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know.  But whoever loves God is known by God.”

• 1 Corinthians 8:2-3

“Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being ‘noticed’ by God.  But this is almost the language of the New Testament.  St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (1 Cor. 8:3).  It is a strange promise.  Does not God know all things at all times?  But it is dreadfully re-echoed in another passage of the New Testament.  There we are warned that it may happen to anyone of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, “I never knew you. Depart from Me.”  In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all.  We can be left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored.  On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged.  We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities.  Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.  And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.”

• C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

For the past couple of days, I have spent a lot of time writing about pride.  It is the pride of the nation’s leaders that they think they can succeed against the problem of Climate Change, especially when not all countries are onboard.  It was Pharaoh’s pride that caused him to think that he had created the Nile River and not God.  It was and is pride that ignores the existence of God, thinking that we are the top of the evolutionary world, all by undirected evolution.

C. S. Lewis wrote that to be humble, we must first realize that we are proud, or something like that.

But this C. S. Lewis quote turns out to be the opposite of pride.  To think that God knows me and is concerned about me could easily cause me to puff up with pride, but no.

The Creator of the universe spends some of His time counting the hairs on my head. Imagine that!  Me, a poor sinner who has problems placing one foot in front of the other, is, as Mark Lowry sings, the apple of God’s eye.  Okay, in What’s Not to Love, Mark Lowry is saying he is the apple of God’s eye, but if I sang the song instead …

But have you ever wondered if your picture is not in His wallet?

When we struggle with temptation or we see some area of our life that is two steps forward and then one step back, it is easy at times to hear that voice saying that we are not worthy of God’s Love.

Of course, we are not worthy.  God loved us while we were still sinners.  There is nothing we can do to be saved.  That’s why God’s Grace and Mercy are so far out there that we cannot comprehend it.  Yet, we accept that free gift.  We may try to do for others, but not from a standpoint of paying God back for the gift, but to show God’s Love toward someone else.  God’s Love tends to overflow like that.

And when we get really busy loving God and loving others too, we have less time to ponder C. S. Lewis’ razor edge issue.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.