He is a man, born to poverty and hard work, weaned on nothing, fed on less, raised to make to do with least possible and make the most of that.”
–Jack Schaefer (“Stubby Pringle’s Christmas”)
“I counsel you to buy from Me gold refined in the fire; that you may be rich; and white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see.”
–Revelation 3:18 (NKJV)
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Greetings from Maryland! I have often thought, while looking up at the stars that friends and family would be looking up at those same stars. When the sun rises and sets, friends and family are looking at the same sunrise and sunset. The same is true, and this includes even those in the southern hemisphere. What men stand most in need of is the knowledge of God. The world is in a mess because man follows his own inclinations rather than seek the Creator.
Oh, some may have a knowledge of the Ten Commandments and some of the parables. Maybe a few of the psalms float through their minds and they may recall pieces from the Sermon on the Mount, but few seek and search for God. Some people try to be moral and through that think they might find God, rather than the other way around–the person who finds God will become moral.
God is wanting and waiting for man to seek Him. Ponder the words of the French theologian–Fenelon.
“He is, in all things, infinite–in wisdom power and love–and what wonder, if everything that comes from his hand should partake of the same infinite character and set at nought the efforts of human reason. When He works, His ways and His thought are declared by the prophet to be as far above our ways and our thoughts as the heavens are above the earth (Isaiah 55:9). He makes no effort when He would execute what He has decreed; for to Him all things are equally easy; He speaks and causes the heavens and the earth to be created out of nothing, with as little difficulty as he causes water to descend or a stone to fall to the ground. His power is co-extensive with His will; when He wills, the thing is already accomplished… His mercy, too, is but His pure will; He loved us before the creation of the world; He saw and knew us, and prepared His blessings for us; He loved and chose us from all Eternity. Every new blessing we received is derived from this Eternal origin; He forms no new will respecting us; it is not He that changes, but we. When we are righteous and good, we are conformable to His will and agreeable to Him; when we depart from well doing and cease to be good, we cease to be conformable to Him and to please Him…. Mercy is the goodness of God, beholding our wickedness and striving to make us good…. From Him alone proceeds true goodness; alas! for that presumptuous soul that seeks it in itself! It is God’s love towards us that gives us everything; but the richest of His gifts is that we may love Him with that love which is His due. When He is able by His love to produce that love in us, He reigns within; He constitutes there our life, our peace, our happiness, and we then already begin to taste that blissful existence which He enjoys. His love towards us is stamped with His own character of infinity: it is not like ours, bounded and constrained; when He loves, all the measures of His love are infinite…. He loves like a God, with a love utterly incomprehensible.”
We can only gain a glimpse of who God is. We only receive a bit of His infinite, boundless love that He showed on the Cross. Yet, we are to become more like Him. To do that we must be in His Word, we must seek Him through prayer, meditation, and living a sanctified life.