It is beautiful.
I am here for the Company of New Pastors Gathering - a group made up of new pastors in the Presbyterian Church who are meeting together a few times a year to support each other and stay spiritually enriched. It's funded by a grant to the church, so it ends up costing me nothing. That and it's a good help in the ministry.
The week thus far has consisted of a lot of introspection and thoughts about "providence," the notion that God is in control of everything.
It's good to have that reminder every once in a while.
It's easy to sense that in the midst of these mountains.
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If "God is in control of everything," does that mean He is responsible for all the bad---all the sin---that happens in the world?!? That sounds like predestination or even double-predestination . . Terminator II time.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure I am responsible for my own selfishness/my own sin, not God. If God controls my failures----nay, directs them----I see no goodness or providence in that.
I think the providence of God proposes that He walks with me even when I don't walk with Him; that He reaches out His Goodness to me even when I don't deserve it.
The GOODNESS is not that God controls us, but that He chooses to continue reaching out to us in love even when we/I selfishly forget to love Him.
The Providence of God = "I love Him, because He first loved me."
I would say that there is a difference between God's being in control of things and being responsible for things. Think of it as a parent who watches a child playing on the playground. That parent is in control of that child (if they truly are watching them), but they aren't controlling everything that the child is doing. The child can still fall down, but the parent is able to see that it is good to let the child grow, and sometimes growing involves falling down.
ReplyDeleteI'm uncomfortable with limiting God's power, saying that God is not in control when bad things happen - again, there is a difference between control and desire - as it portrays an image of God who goes in and out, and turns His back on us when we turn away from Him.
Again, if we view it like a child at the park with a parent, we can turn our backs on God, to the point that we don't see or feel God's presence, but that doesn't mean that God is not there, and not in control.
God's desire is for us all to live, but the world is a broken place because of the nature of sin. Still, in the midst of that, God is able to work all things for good. Romans 8 gets at this, saying that God works all things for good. When we step back and see the larger pictures, we can begin to see the ways in which we have learned from the times that we have fallen.
A professor told me one time that "Being a Christian means that you believe it will all work out well in the end. If things aren't well yet, then it isn't the end."
God has a plan, and that plan is not to leave us or forsake us.
I believe that God is directly involved with everything that happens, constantly bending bad to work for the ultimate good. That is one of the main things that scripture tells us, and it is a comfort to me, even in the midst of the badness around us.