我感谢神对我这么小信又小心眼的罪人之中的罪魁不断地守约施慈爱。我感谢主耶稣了解我想要得到确据的奴仆心态。我在挣扎与痛苦之中被神引领开始看大卫鲍森的新旧约概览和他的书Normal Christian Birth。我高兴地发现原来圣经只给人“重生”的确据,却不给人得荣耀的确据。我们有了圣灵内住之后,就有做完全人的力量、智慧和自由,但我们仍然可以选择顺着圣灵散种还是顺从肉体散种,我们可以一直住在神爱子的国度里,过在地如同在天的生活,我们也可以仍然活在世俗之中,为了眼前的利益出卖神儿子的名分如同以扫一样。我们重生不是为了得救而是为了成圣。而成圣是一生一世的过程。原来那些自信的人是对神怜悯和慈爱的自信;不自信的人是对自己如何选择每一天生活来满足神心意的敬畏。这两种都是需要的,我们不能太自信以至于放纵了私欲,在重生之后仍做罪的奴仆;我们也不能太小信,不明白神对我们的爱是何等长阔高深,远超过一切智慧所能测度的。让我们常保守自己的心在基督的爱里,怀着对永生神的敬畏做成我们得救的功夫。救恩是白白赐下的,但我们要用信心去接受;成圣的力量和得胜的应许也是白白赐下的,但我们要用信心的行为去领受。正如迦南是神给以色列的应许之地,他们还是要在信心之中顺服神的带领去攻城掠地,高唱得胜的乐章。我感谢天父按他的形象造我们;我感谢主耶稣道成肉身来回收我们这些亏缺了神的荣耀变为无用的罪人;我感谢圣灵来赐给我们新的生命,有能力来荣神益人完全恢复成神起初要造我们的本意。我知道在今后的日子我也还会有各样的难处,有各种要学习的功课,但神与我们同在。最后用一首圣诗来勉励基督里的众圣徒:“生命交给主做王,日复一日年复一年,高唱得胜的乐章。”
sheenwei 发表评论于
We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others. What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean, first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others. The modern world is beginning to discover, more and more, that the quality and vitality of a man's life depend on his own secret will to go on living. There is a dark force for destruction within us, which someone has called the death instinct. It is a terribly powerful thing, this force generated by our own frustrated self-love battling with itself. It is the power of a self-love that has turned into self-hatred and which, in adoring itself, adores the monster by which it is consumed.
It is therefore of supreme importance that we face and accept our own limitations. As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be as gods. we will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives.It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.
Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and one body, will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the success but of the failures and accidents in our lives. My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. Nor are my failures my own. They may spring from failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another's achievement. Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my own achievements. It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time.
Only when this truth is absolutely central do other doctrines fit into their proper context. Solitude, humility, self-denial, action and contemplation, the sacraments, the monastic life, the family, war and peace - none of these make sense except in relation to the central reality which is God's love living and acting in those whom He has incorporated in His Christ. Nothing at all makes sense, unless we admit that" No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main".
sheenwei 发表评论于
This matter of salvation is, when seen intuitively, a very simple thing. But when we analyze it, it turns into a complex tangle of paradoxes. We become ourselves by dying to ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. Yet there is a sense in which we must hate others and leave them in order to find God. Jesus said:"If any man come to me and hate not his father and his mother and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26). As for this "finding" of God, we cannot even look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him, we will probably never begin.