Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.  Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’  Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

• Matthew 7:21-23

Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that “We all possess knowledge.” But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.  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 8:1-3

“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.
“And this brings me to the other sense of glory-glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star.”

• C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

It is one thing that we get so much wrong when we are contemplating God.  We try to apply how we view the attributes of God instead of how God is that attribute and we see it through our broken lives.

But to get something backwards?  It is not that we know God, but that God knows us.  The same God that is omniscient.  In other words, He knows everything.  Yet, He says in His Holy Word that He will say to those who are not His that He never knew them.

It seems to be a burden on my heart recently, but I keep thinking about how we will spend eternity with God, yet there are far too many Christians that only seem to notice God on Sunday, that is besides saying a blessing at each meal.

And I fail miserably in keeping my eyes on Jesus all the time.  I may spend time each day at the computer writing about God’s Love, with my Bible open, studying reference material, and reading devotions, but I still slip up.

I feel the razor’s edge that C. S. Lewis mentions.  At times, I wonder, how could I be so stupid?

Have you ever had a Voice say, “This is another test”?  And you reply, “And I failed it again.”  But at that moment of saying that, you had not failed; you simply intended to fail.  Then when you do carry out your intention, you have at least two sins to confess.  God was there.  God nudged in the right direction, but that emotional response had to be responded … no I just wanted to respond that way, so that I did not feel like a total loser, but with two sins to confess instead of one, was I not a total loser?

No, if God says, “Welcome, my faithful servant,” I am not a loser at all.

God forgets our sins when we are His, but He never forgets us.  God knows His own, and that is a powerful reason to praise and glorify the almighty God of the universe who knows us and who lifts us up in the glory that we only attain by His Grace and Mercy.  Yes, there is weight to that Glory.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.