Saturday 13 October 2012

Two more "Reformation in Kenya" papers

Sadly, we can have true experience of Christ, and yet it can decline. We can feed on him, a good, satisfying meal – a feast! – and yet then live off the memory of that feast, instead of coming to dine again. Through the difficulty of the spiritual warfare, through the deceitfulness of sin, and through the dullness of our own hearts, we can confuse our own outward activity, and perhaps success, in ministry, with inward Christian experience and progress. Terrifyingly, God can actually “bless” us with outward success to test if that was actually the thing our hearts desired. Or was it rather the case that we have the Spirit that amidst the ruins of outward disaster is content to sit, wait, rejoice in him and say, “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places” (Habakkuk 3:17-19).

I've just uploaded another couple of papers (this is taking rather too long) from my series on Reformation in Kenya - http://david.dw-perspective.org.uk/da/index.php/writings/reformation-for-kenya/. The above quote is from the opening paper.

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