Updated post on Endurance…
Patient endurance is the perfection of charity.
~Saint Ambrose (c. 340-397)
You will not stroll into Christlikeness with your hands in your pockets, shoving the door open with a careless shoulder. This is no hobby for one’s leisure moments, taken up at intervals when we have nothing much to do, and put down and forgotten when our life grows full and interesting… It takes all one’s strength, and all one’s heart, and all one’s mind, and all one’s soul, given freely and recklessly and without restraint. This pursuit has a way of pulling up would-be recruits with sobering and disconcerting questions, of meeting applicants – breathless and panting in their eagerness – by asking them if they really thought they had the grit, the stamina, the gallantry, required. For many, He explained, begin, but quickly become cowed, and slink away, leaving a thing unfinished as a pathetic monument of their own lack of courage and of staying power.
~Arthur John (A. J.) Gossip
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
~ Hebrews 12:1-2
Maybe this writer is the only one. Shortcuts keep showing themselves as potentially viable options to The Race Set Before Us. Relationships, jobs, pets, food, sex, chemicals, and other bright and shiny stuff simply scream out for my attention. It is almost like there is some system working against the knowledge of the holy.
It is called the world… Not the creation that even the only One who is really good, called good. But rather the cosmotic system that surrounds us. Everything has the potential to take us away from our calling to love the LORD our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
For me, it is often the anticipation of future relationship with a future someone with which to share my life. i don’t even know a person that fits this description yet, yet even this has been attempting to wedge itself like a wiggly and warm puppy between me and my Lord.
What is the deal here?
When walking in the flesh, we want what we want – when we want it! But the Bible and the One who speaks to us through it has an entirely different economy of time. He lives across all time, so it is always and only “now” for Him. A day – a thousand years – the units of time are irrelevant. He draws His hands across the ages as a master painter makes strokes on the canvas.
Sometimes the brush stroke is more like a dot, and we see things come about very quickly from our perspective. Sometimes the stroke takes a long time (even centuries) to be laid down on the painting of history.
We can’t take any of this into our own hands. The only way for everything to work as it should is for us all to look in one direction only (Can anyone say: Look at Jesus!), totally trust Him, and run towards The Light.
There are no shortcuts. We know it. We don’t always feel like we want to hear this. But we know it is true.
Difficulties and obstacles are God’s challenges to faith. When hindrances confront us in the path of duty, we are to recognize them as vessels for faith to fill with the fullness and all-sufficiency of Jesus.
~A. B. Simpson
