It's snowing again! And I have a three day weekend.A couple of days ago, I read The Great Divorce for the first time. Everytime I read him, fiction or non, I always come away with the feeling that my view of God and my desire for happiness in Him is much too small.
The Teacher says at one point:
'There is something in natural affection which will lead on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on, But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly...It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil."
We are commanded to honor our parents, and love our neighbors, for Christ's sake and glory. But at the same time, Jesus also said,
"Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. " Matthew 10:37-39
Matt reminded me of a Piper quotation the other day, saying, "Golgotha is not a suburb of Jerusalem!" As I have thought of the above Matthew verse in terms of the cross being a symbol of death, I am still not sure if I have a good idea of what that means living in an industrialized country in 2007. Several people have remarked to in recent years that we (in the American church) don't really know what suffering and persecution is. I am inclined to agree, but then how do we view passages like this rightly when our context is so removed?
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