Secrets of Our Lord

I think one of the most startling things about the stories coming in from our daughter’s trip is how everyone she meets has an almost unbelievable story they’ve lived through in this torn country;  those who lived through the Killing Fields, and the persecuted believers over the border  where to be a believer is a sentence of death, loss, bereavement. 

One thing I have been struck with continually in my life, and have often spoken with the children for them to understand in others, is how every person has a profound story, were it known.  We so seldom get below the surface to even know well the people we worship with every week.

The most important thing, however, is that we are known, and known perfectly, by God, and interceded for perfectly by the Son, and guided and led perfectly by the Holy Spirit.

I love this, from In the Secret Place:  

“The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him”.  Psalm 25:14

There is something individual and incommunicable about the blessings which the God of salvation gives my soul.  Not one of my sisters and brothers in the family has received a boon which is quite the same.

It is a secret at birth. The regeneration of hearts that were formerly far from Him is accomplished in innumerable modes.  At times it comes in the stillness, at other times in the storm.  It may be a gradual process, for which the preparation has been going forward through many years; or it may be an instantaneous revolution that has no preface and no explanation…as multiform as the sunsets of a golden summer that do not repeat themselves two evenings in succession…

It is a secret through life.  Because I have my special temperament, which regeneration marvelously ennobles but which even a change so radical cannot destroy, my Lord’s training of me assumes a certain form and pursues a certain course.  If I am a sanguine soul, He will teach me the patience and quietness that I need.  If I am dull and phlegmatic, He must rouse me into action and zeal.  If I am brooding and melancholy in my surmises and thoughts, He will bid me be of good cheer.  I may trust Him, who read my heart, to guide me, to chasten and sober me, to cleanse my sinfulness, to quicken my lethargy, after a fashion he does not observe with my neighbor, whose necessities are different from mine.

It is a secret in death…When I arrive at the brink of the River and feel its chill, the God who has led me thus far, will have His own revelation of helpful comfort and his own whisper of satisfying peace…--Alexander Smellie

And from Ann Voskamp, on the meaning of the Cross, as we come into Good Friday:

He stretches open His arms on that Cross and cries, “For you. For all your regrets and for all your impossibles, for all that will never be and for all that once was, for all that you can’t make right and for all that you got wrong, for your Judas failures and your Peter denials and your Lazarus griefs, I offer to take the nails, the sharp edge of everything, and offer you myself because I want you, to take you, you in your wild grief, you in your anger and your disappointment and your wounds and your not-yet-there, you, just as you are, not some improved version of you, but you – I came for you, to hold you, to carry you, to save you.”

Photo courtesy of Thistledown Cards