Continued from yesterday's post, sort of, with some thoughts from yesterday afternoon and last night:
We also, of course, fail to fully grasp the nature of God and of God's love. We think too often in terms of what God wants from us, as if that is some sort of need of God, forgetting that God is fully self-sufficient and is never surprised by anything we do, for he sees everything we're going to do as we do it just as we see everything we have done in the past, except with true clarity of vision unlimited by our restrictions of perception. (Of course, even that plays fast and loose with the concepts of time and eternity, for which we lack the language, which may just be a way of saying that I don't have time right now to consider how better to express eternity. But enough of this eternal tangent.)
So much of our experience of love is wrapped up in having needs that must be met. God loves us without having needs. Therefore, what God asks of us is always about what he wants for us (and the rest of his beloved ones) rather than what he wants from us. So when someone says that God has everything for us but wants (or even demands) everything from us, they are only partly right. Rather, we are incapable of receiving everything from God while clinging to what we don't want to release to him.
But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. - Eph 2:4-7
Really, I just want to draw attention to 6b. Our Lord, whose Body we are, has ascended and is seated at the right hand of the Father. So while God's kingdom is something for which we hope to experience in its fullness at the conclusion of our lives, we also partake of it now, because Christ is with the Father and we are in Christ by the Holy Spirit. The sacraments of our initiation have brought us into a relational union with God in which we grow throughout our lives, and through faith and by the Holy Spirit we are welcomed as fellow participants in the relational nature of God.
And people think that the Ascension isn't so important!
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