The Advent Part 60
The Psalm that Peter quotes is beautiful to say the least. It reveals the life of Christ, the person of Christ, and the divinity of Christ. It likewise reveals the ever elusive secret of fulfillment, unifying the spirit, the soul and the body putting them under the submission and authority of God the Father.
Countless books have been written, countless courses have been presented, countless sums of money have been spent by men and women seeking the fulfillment God freely offers to all those who would humble themselves and seek the things of the Kingdom of God.
When we see the Lord always before our face, our hearts rejoice, and our tongues are glad, and our souls rest in hope. This is the secret to joy, this is the secret to peace, this is the secret to gladness and to fulfillment, and try as we might to substitute it with other things, such as positive thinking, self-esteem, positive affirmations, transcendental meditations or a myriad of other things, we will fall short of our goal.
Dependence upon the Father, and fellowship with Him might seem burdensome when viewed through the prism of the flesh, they might seem as time consuming and frivolous, but if we truly understood what it is to be dependent upon God and have fellowship with Him, if we truly understood that only by practicing these things will we have true peace and true rest, we would realize that if it is a labor, than it is a labor of love, and of joy.
Fellowship with God and having a relationship with God are reciprocal. The more time we spend with God, the more He reveals Himself to us, and the more He reveals Himself to us the more we fall in love with Him. We dedicate ourselves, we dedicate our time and even our resources to worthless things, we pursue hobbies and distractions with fervor and passion, yet when it comes to knowing God, when it comes to having fellowship with Him, when it comes to building a relationship with Him we are slow to the task, grudgingly praying a prayer once in a while, thinking ourselves spiritually superior to our brethren for having done so.
It’s not God’s fault that you do not know Him, it’s not God’s fault that you have so little fellowship with Him, He is there, ever present, ready to open when we knock, ready to answer when we ask, ready to come and dine with us when we receive Him.
God is only a mystery to the godless, and those who refuse to submit themselves to His authority. He is not unknowable, He is not untenable, He is not unreachable, He promised that if we sought Him we would find Him, and if we desired Him, He would fill us with His grace, and if we humbled ourselves in His sight, He would use us as vessels of honor to further His Kingdom.
Gladness of heart and resting in hope are the fruit of trusting in God, and having fellowship with Him, and true joy is the fruit of the presence of God in the hearts of men. There is nothing that can take the place of God, there is nothing that can replace Him, and try as men might they will fail time and again in their pursuit of finding a suitable surrogate.
Colossians 1:27, “To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
God did not will that His grace remain a mystery in perpetuity, He did not will that we remain in ignorance concerning Christ in us the hope of glory, but rather He willed to make known the riches of the glory of this singular mystery that gives us rest in a restless world, and fills us with hope regardless of our present circumstances.
The hope we have in Christ transcends the trials and travails of this life, and as such the hope we have is not subject to the material world that surrounds us. It is Christ that must be our all in all; it is Christ that we must hope in, not mansions and cars, not boats and planes, not doctors and therapists. When our hope is firmly rooted in Christ, then we are at peace not because of our circumstances but in spite of them, not in our excess but in our lack.
If we remove Christ from the equation everything falls apart. If we hope in anything other than Christ, then the time will come when that in which we hope, that in which we have placed our faith and our trust will fail us, and monumentally so.
It is the pinnacle of folly to place our hope and our trust in something without permanence, when we can readily place our hope and trust in the One who is eternal and everlasting.
We need to be reminded, and constantly so, that the form of this world is passing away, the world itself and the lust thereof is passing away, and only that which is in God abides or has continuity and permanence. It is when we lose sight of this truth, and start believing the soothsayers who say that God intended for us to have it all, have it here, and have it now, materially speaking of course, that we begin to place our trust in things that are as a morning mist or a summer drizzle, passing, fleeting and inconstant.
God’s will, God’s desire, is that we hope in Him, that we rest in Him, that we find our peace and our joy in Him, that we know Him and fellowship with Him, and form a relationship with Him, and that we see the things of this world and the trappings thereof for the rubbish and refuse that they are.
1 John 2:17, “And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.”
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.
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