Guinness: the believer's encounter

Wednesday, January 31, 2018
    Commemoration of John Bosco, Priest, Founder of the Salesian Teaching Order, 1888
Meditation:
    In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”
    At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
    “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”
    Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
    —Isaiah 6:1-7 (NIV)
Quotation:
    In his experience of God, a Christian has a strong sense of his individuality, never of his unity with God. Expressed more sharply, he has a strong sense of the Creator-creature distinction, never of merging or absorption. Or, to put it more sharply still, a Christian has a sense of his moral sin and not just of his metaphysical smallness in the face of the beyond. The dilemma for man is not who he is but what he has done. His predicament is not that he is small, but that he is sinful.
    ... Os Guinness (b. 1941), The Dust of Death, Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1973, p. 293 (see the book)
    See also Isa. 6:1-7; Zech. 3:1-7; Matt. 12:34-37; Jas. 3:1-2
Quiet time reflection:
    Purge my sin, Lord, that I may be in Your presence. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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