SCRIPTURE: Acts 17:24-25 MSG The God who made the world and everything in it, this Master of sky and land, doesn’t live in custom-made shrines or need the human race to run errands for him, as if he couldn’t take care of himself.
THOUGHT: Paul first positions God rightfully, telling the Athenians that this God they don’t know reigns outside and above all the gods they have created and tried so hard to keep happy. As the creator of everything they see, God doesn’t need anything from them except an acknowledgement of the truth of who he is. An agreement that, as the maker of everything, he is the maker of them. He doesn’t need a happy dance; he doesn’t need their money; he doesn’t need a shrine. He needs their worship. He desires their seeking minds to seek him, to pursue him as he has been pursuing them.
One night in 1929, a young rationalist and atheist finally, unwillingly capitulates to God’s relentless pursuit: “I gave in,” writes C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy, “and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” He goes on to conclude, “a young atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side,” including what Lewis tongue-in-cheek refers to as our “unscrupulous God.”
The brilliant, reluctant convert casts Jesus as a lion in his Chronicles of Narnia – good and majestic, gentle and terrible, always pursuing for the purpose of embracing.
PRAYER: For every human, you have a strategy, Great God. Your love is unstoppable, leaking in through the cracks in the hardest of human hearts. Thank you that nothing is too hard for you. Increase our faith!
Amy released a full-length book in early 2021, Walking When You’d Rather Fly: Meditations on Faith After the Fall. Maybe you’d like to check it out here.
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