Afterwords -- week 22
"But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin." (1 John 1:7 ESV)
"...it is by the daily application of this blood to the conscience that peace is daily upheld there. When the propitiation by Christ is out of the mind, then, on the strength of its old propensities, does it lapse either into the forgetfulness of God, or into a fearful distrust of him." (William Romaine, The Life, Walk, and Triumph of Faith)
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May 21, 2022
Dear friends,
When we seek to walk in the light -- that is, living in daily fellowship with Christ -- we will become aware of sin in our lives. This can be frustrating, embarrassing, even debilitating, when we think, "will there be no end to discovering bad stuff in my life?" The Lord Jesus, however, did not chide his disciples for their need of cleansing, but rather, he emphasized that it was an ongoing and normal aspect of having "a share" with Jesus in this life. As in the physical world, washing is also part and parcel with discipleship...
Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, do you wash my feet?" Jesus answered him, "What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand." Peter said to him, "You shall never wash my feet." Jesus answered him, "If I do not wash you, you have no share with me." (John 13:5-8 ESV)
We must always remember, however, that when we confess our sins (1 John 1:9), the cleansing comes from the once-for-all-time sacrifice of Christ on our behalf (1 John 2:1-2; Hebrews 10:12-14). All of our sins were included in his death upon the cross. A. W. Pink once wrote, “God foresaw my every fall, my every sin, my every backsliding, yet nevertheless fixed his heart upon me.” One day in the new creation all sin, and all need for cleansing, will be gone. But until then confession and cleansing will be a regular part of the Christian life. These are precious truths for those who are seeking to walk with Christ in this world.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF BOOKS by Henry Wessells, is a poem I first heard in the documentary, "The Booksellers" (2020). Below is the poem, and here is a post I wrote on the power of words.
In silence between writer and reader
A memory of words and hands takes form.
We learn substance and worth through others’ eyes:
Cloth, flesh, ink, skin, paper, dust — these are but
Material forms in which ideas dwell.
In the roar of a crowded shelf of books
Desert sun and arctic night, distant seas
Of thought awaken, mingle, and are still.
Minds meet where the reading hand grasps the void
And inks its passage in empty margins.
Lost, forgotten, thumbed, split: we bear the scars
Of patient decades and centuries’ dreams.
Whose hands will next hold me I do not know —
The book, too, reads its readers in real time.
(Published in Temporary Culture, 2014)
WHAT ORWELL LEARNED FROM CHESTERTON. In a First Things web article M. D. Aeschliman writes about how George Orwell, wanting to be free from Judeo-Christian morality, despaired of what life might be like without the blessings of Christian culture...
But Chesterton understood something that Orwell would not steadily meditate: This set of allegedly “normal” beliefs is not “ineradicable.” Orwell wanted—loved, in fact—the fruits of centuries of Christian civilization, including manners and customs, and often said so, dreading their replacements. But those fruits that Orwell loved came from Judeo-Christian roots. It was Chesterton’s long quest to recover and restore those roots, through popular and witty but also powerfully philosophical works such as The Everlasting Man and St. Thomas Aquinas. In “A Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” a brilliant retrospective 1971 essay on Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge praised his dogged devotion to the truth but warned that “one of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only truth as enlightened expediency.”
Well, summer has arrived in the New River Valley, though I read that there are snowfalls out west and brushfires to the southwest! We have more cases of COVID in our extended family, and tomorrow I am filling a local pulpit where the speaker is also down with COVID. We're not out of the woods yet!
That's it for week 22!
Sandy
Image credit. Picture above is a detail of the bronze sculpture entitled, "Divine Servant," by Max Greiner Jr., and on display at Dallas Theological Seminary.