God’s Power is our comfort

A Modern Paraphrase From DISCOURSES UPON THE EXISTENCE AND ATTRIBUTES OF GOD by Stephen Charnock
Chapter called “Discourse On the Power of God”

What can be too hard for Him who created heaven and earth?

God’s Power is always complemented by His perfect goodness and tempered by His infininte wisdom and Lovingkindness.

God’s Power comforts us during all our trouble and distresses. Hard times that fiercely subdue us are no match for His greater power to deliver us from our distress and move us cheerfully onward to His Kingdom. The Psalmist’s succor in his distress is ours: the Creative Power of God: “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth (Ps. 121:2).”

God’s Power is a comfort because He alone can guarantee all of His promises. Excellent men often can’t make good their promises because something unforeseen disrupts their honest plans. Loving intentions can make a promise, but power is necessary to perform it; and infinite power to guarantee it. No unexpected event can change His resolved decree, because to God alone, there is nothing unforeseen. His Great Power comforts us because nothing in this universe can oppose it.

We take comfort in God’s Power because no matter the condition of the church, God can all ways restore, empower, and make Her shine. What if the eaves of the Church shake under the underminings of hell? What if the church is pressed, distressed and divided? God’s Infinite Power can in a moment or a decade fortify His Bride to accomplish more than she can even imagine.

But perhaps our greatest comfort from God’s power is Jesus’s statement that “My Father is more powerful than all, and none is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hands.” (John 10:29) Our keeping is not in our own weak hands, but in the hands of the One who is All Mighty. God’s Power is resolved to guard our hearts as we are led via decree to His Kingdom. In all your fears of falling away, shelter yourselves in the knowledge that it is the unopposable power of God that carries you Home.

Oh what deep comfort there is in the Infinite, Sovereign Power of our Loving Creator.

The Undiminished Power of God

This is excerpted and paraphrased from a sermon by John Flavel, "The Righteous Man's Refuge"

The power of God is everlasting, always undiminished. It is set apart from all other beings in creation whose power waxes and wanes. "The Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, does not weaken or weary"(Isa 40:28). He has as much power now as ever. God's power exerted is not power depleted. Almighty power constantly delivers the people of God when things are looking desperate to men’s powers of perception. As recorded in 2 Corinthians 1:9,10 we find God’s choicest Christians of those times declaring themselves as lost and considering themselves dead men. But though they sentenced themselves to death, yet God’s power which was above all their thoughts and reasoned assumptions delivered them. As we speak, God’s omnipotent power is continually subduing all things to Himself in Christ. God’s sustaining Power guarantees that Light will all ways appear unexpectedly as men sulk around expecting circumstances to worsen. How wonderfully comprehensive is the power of God in all of its glorious operations! We can Trust and Adore His undiminished, everlasting Power.

The Wondrous Exchange

From GOD-ALL SUFFICIENT in Arthur Bennet's Valley of Vision.

At the Wondrous Cross, an EXCHANGE:
My unworthiness for Your Worthiness
My brokenness and emptiness for Your Fullness
My weakness for Your Strength
My continual vulnerability for Your Protections
My sinfulness for Your Sinlessness
My impurity for Your Purity
My self-deceit for Your Sincerity and Truth
My pride for Your Meekness and Humility
My self-exaltation for Your Lowliness
My natural ugliness for Your Essential Loveliness
My inconsistency for Your Steadfastness
My enmity and hostilities for Your Love
My lawlessness for Your Obedience
My lack of love for Your All-Encompassing Love
My dullness for Your Intense Devotion
My inabilities to love the Father for your moment-to-moment Love for Him
My natural enmity to God for Your Righteousness
My dead soul and dying flesh for Your Life
My former terrifying eternal state to be with You forever.

Another paraphrase from the James Alexander text

The history of a man is not just what can be seen by other mens’ five senses but more important is the ongoing, exciting history of his invisible, immortal part; the history of the heart. And God superintends the events of His people to ensure tested hearts.

Introducing this blog

Welcome to a new blog started in December, 2005.

This blog is an exaltation of God’s Infinite Wisdom, Christ’s Sovereign Power, and His giddy, eternal love for His homeward bound Bride. I am indebted to so many dead saints, but especially to two living ones; John Piper and Kris Lundgaard. John Piper because he reached back in time, as it were, and recovered and trumpeted Jonathan Edward’s affirmation that it is not enough to blandly acknowledge the attributes of God, but rather, we as His beloved are to relish and adore those attributes. To Kris Lundgaard because his books based on the works of John Owen inspired the format of this blog which is to take the writing of the English Puritans (and other dead, godly men) and bring them into the 21^st Century vernacular. May the Lord Jesus help me in this effort.

If you spend much time reading the English Puritans and other older writers, you will soon be struck by their reverence for and constant reference to the Providence of God. We can adore God’s sovereign power as we cultivate a low view of man in the little he can control and a high view of God acknowledging that He superintends all the events in time and works all things according to His pleasure and for the good of His own.

The following is my modern paraphrase from James Alexander’s CONSOLATION, written in 1852; it is from a chapter called “The Providence of God—in its application to the whole path of life.”

The course of God's providence toward His own people is inexplicable. It is not amazing that we are ignorant to these providences. Most of the pivotal events in our lives are contrary to our expectations.

God does not consult us concerning His wise, sovereign, and merciful arrangements on our behalf. We are comforted throughout Scripture as we are told to trust Him with our whole being. One who loves us better than we love ourselves is, as we speak, subjecting all things to Himself! All of our affairs including the number of hairs on our heads are under His superintendence.

With such limited knowledge of events and even of our own hearts, we cannot order our lives. We are currently in a “state of discipline” —a temporary state through which we are passing to fit us for another, more glorious eternal state.

As we journey Home, we know that Christ is our Way Home but we don’t know the details of our particular journey or what God intends to do with us. The horizon of our knowledge is very, very, very limited. The circle is tiny which encloses the legitimate boundaries for our planning and management. Our way is constrained more than we imagine; and the freedom with which we flatter ourselves is checked and controlled by arrangements beyond our extremely limited knowledge.

Intricate sequences of events which alter an entire life are often dependent on a trivial, unforeseen, even casual incident. By taking one subway train instead of another, a man may meet a person who changes the whole current of his life. We take little notice of the twists and turns of events happening in the midst of our lives each day which act as pivots on which God's providence reconfigures our subsequent histories.

Contrary to the arguments of haughty men, the world is not governed by the trifling wisdom of men! It is governed with infinite wisdom; God's infinite wisdom. Men fret about global warming and proliferating atomic bombs and host conferences to solve problems like these and others, and don’t acknowledge (let alone love and trust) the Infinite Wisdom of God, who superintends all things.

What if we did control our lives? What we consider prosperity and success often results in emptiness and vexation; and just as true, subsequent joy here on Earth often results from events which at the time are considered disastrous.

Suppose that men did control their destinies as is often implied as we trundle through our university days. Wouldn’t any man sitting down to map out his future life for himself exclude all distresses and trials. The jolly cup he would pour for himself would be smooth, pleasurable, and full of ease ? Nothing would discipline or distress his heart and thus he would not be conformed to the image of the Son. Men cannot choose that course which is best for him. Men do battle with their hearts so they don’t have to admit their foolishness and ignorance about what is best for them at any given junction.

But, thank God’s providence, that it is His prerogative to insert trials in due measure and at the proper points so a man of God can grow in grace and be brought to that state which God intends; not his continual ease and happiness, but being changed via trial and trouble into the lovely likeness of His precious Son.