But It Is Hardly Credible That One Could Be So Positively Ignorant!

"Then I asked, 'Who are you, Lord?'

"'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,' the Lord replied,'" Acts 26:15.

Oswald's title and today's verse combined led me to the question: Do I know Jesus? I know a lot about him certainly. I grew up in the church afterall, spent 25 years or more in Sunday school. But Oswald writes of not being able to mistake the intimate insistence of God's voice that comes through the language I know best -- my circumstances. I wonder, am I listening? Or am I, like Paul, so sure I know who God is and what he wants that I've stopped my ears?

I am reminded again of another book I am reading, Sacred Journey, by Frederick Buechener, in which he wrote: "Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves" (emphasis mine).

I am a participant in grace, and listening for God's voice is not a passive activity.

The last part of today's entry contributes further to my question of how well I really know Jesus. Oswald writes: "We imagine that whatever is unpleasant is our duty! Is that anything like the spirit of our Lord, 'I delight to do Thy will, O My God.'"

This, in turn, reminded me of an excerpt my husband, Frank, read me from a book he is reading by Philip Yancey: "Jesus said that the truth will set us free and that he came to give life in all its fullness. If it's not setting you free and enlarging life, then it's not Jesus' message. If it doesn't sound like good news, it's not the gospel."

I think I have feared the so-called "health and wealth gospel" and "self-help psychobabble" so much, that I forgot Christianity is, in fact, based on the best news possible: God -- Creator of the Universe, loving Father, Counselor, Sovereign, Powerful and Wise -- loves me. He really, truly loves me. And, if I live a life without evidence of that, if I am so burdened by duty that I just keep my head down and plow ahead, forsaking joy, forsaking laughter, I am bearing false witness. I am persecuting Jesus by living a lie.

It is hardly credible that one could be so positively ignorant.

Barbara