Todd Burus has had a couple of interesting posts on depression and biblical counseling this week. The book he is reading is Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ book Spiritual Depression: It’s Causes and Cure.
Yesterday, Todd talked about the spirit of bondage and had some extended quotes from Lloyd-Jones that were quite good. one little piece of the second quote caught Todd’s eye. It was this:
[Now] to the second principle– the presence of the Holy Spirit in us reminds us of our relationship to God. . . . How does it do so? Well, it enables us to see that our object in living the Christian life is not simply to attain a certain standard, but is rather to please God because He is our Father– ‘the spirit of adoption whereby we cery, Abba, Father.’
the object of the Christian life is not to attain a certain standard, but rather to please God because he is our father.
Do you see the difference? Do you understand the beauty of the true goal?
How come we reduce the latter to the former in our daily lives?
Is it because we prefer to remain emotionally distant from the one before whom we will stand naked and exposed? Are we somehow like Adam and Eve covering ourselves with the leaves of fleshly performance instead of running to God our Abba Father for help in every situation?
just asking.
There is apparently more than one reason to this question. And I am certainly not the scholar to come up with them all. However, it seems to me that people around us are continually expecting us to perform, therefore it is difficult to get away from the concept of performance even from our heavenly Father. We (I) tend to think of Him too much like other human beings. I have to remind myself to think of Him like He says He is. And even when I remind myself of that, it seems too good to be true. But it is.