"Thanks and thanks again to him who proffers to the man whom the sorrows of life have assaulted and left naked--proffers to him the fig leaf of the word with which he can cover his wretchedness." Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
My pastor has asked me to speak on suffering for about five minutes on Sunday. The next few posts will be excerpts from that longer testimony (which would take much more than five minutes to read in its entirety).
Some of this will be redundant for those of you who have been following along with me for the past few months. I pray, nonetheless, that it will bless you again and that it will stir up my heart and yours to fresh faith and fresh faithfulness.
This blog is one element of my attempt to 1) take every thought captive to obey Christ and 2) to rejoice in the sufferings that are producing endurance, character, and hope in me.
May the Lord be glorified in these, the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart.
At the time I set it down to some idiosyncratic personal distaste and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms, but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Who am I? What is my 'self'? The answer is that I am a Jekyll and Hyde, a mixed-up kid, having both dignity, because I was created and have been re-created in the image of God, and depravity, because I still have a fallen and rebellious nature. I am both noble and ignoble, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, upright and twisted, image and child of God, and yet sometimes yielding obsequious homage to the devil from whose clutches Christ has rescued me. My true self is what I am by creation, which Christ came to redeem, and by calling. My false self is what I am by the fall, which Christ came to destroy.John Stott
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