
Cribbed from CT.
The Holy Spirit uses a man with converting power when the people see in that man not demands of them but desires for them.
One can also do word analyses and various grammatical and syntactical searches of the New Testament or related writings with a speed, ease, and comprehensiveness previously undreamt of. Ease of access to reference works eliminates tedious book hunting and page turning. A downside is that every decade we move farther into computer technology, the greater the danger becomes that younger scholars will lack the hands-on intimacy with the text that pen and paper demanded, and the ingrained, deeply intuitive grasp of the text that a trained memory can arrive at. Voluminous information easily accessible can not only obscure but actually stunt creative and historically responsible scholarship.
The Beatitudes are normally misunderstood as a list of virtues. The Beatitudes are not, however, a virtue list: they are a list of the kinds of people in the society Jesus maps for his listeners. Those who are responding to his kingdom vision are the poor and the hungry, those who weep and those who are despised by the powerful - and those who are not responding are the rich, the well-fed, the party-prone and those who are approved by such powerful folks. No, this is not a virtue list but a sociopolitical statement:the work of God in Jesus and through the kingdom is to include the marginalized, to render judgement on the powerful, and to create around the marginalized (with Jesus at the centre) an alternative society where things are (finally, by God) put to rights. Here we come into a vision of the kingdom of God on the part of Jesus that is an extension of the Magnificat and the Benedictus and Jesus' inaugral address.
He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room. A high child's voice said, 'Jose.' He stared in a bewildered way around the patio. At a barred window opposite three children watched him with deep gravity. He turned his back and took a step or two towards his door, moving very slowly because of his bulk. 'Jose,' somebody squeaked again. 'Jose.' He looked back over his shoulder and caught the faces out in expressions of wild glee; his little pink eyes showed no anger - he had no right to be angry: he moved his mouth into a ragged, baffled, disintegrated smile, and as if that sign of weakness gave them all the licence they needed, they squealed back at him without disguise, 'Jose, Jose. Come to bed, Jose.' Their little shameless voices filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.
I think that I can safely say that the Judeo-Christian Bible is a self-help book that has probably enabled more people to make more extensive and intensive personality and behavioral changes than all professional therapists combined.
I have spent a good deal of my adult life trying to understand grace. Most of this has been through the routines of life - marriage, studying, prayer, parenting, worship, reading, and friendship. Many years ago I devoted some of my routine to writing a book about grace. No one has seen or heard of the book since, and though I have quite a knack for authoring books that no one ever hears of, there is a good explanation in this case. The book was never published. I sent my two-hundred-fifty-page manuscript to several different publishers, and each of them responded with a permutation of the standard "thanks, but no thanks" letter.
Fifteen years later, I am grateful that book was never published. It was a book produced by an overachieving young assistant professor who was committed to routine but had not yet had enough moments of insight to write about grace. It was a book written before I began to grasp the depth of brokenness and sin in our world and in my own heart. Understanding grace cannot be done without understanding sin. Sometimes I ponder what that unpublished book, with its anemic view of grace, would have been titled if it had been published. Perhaps, Grace Lite or Grace: Because I'm Worth It or Grace: I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me.
In the intervening fifteen years I have continued to experience occasional punctuating moments - windows of insight - that have brought fresh glimpses of grace. They are not altogether pleasant moments because they are always accompanied with a weighty, breath-stealing awareness of my sin and my desperate need for forgiveness. But they are motivating. It is the second of two such punctuating moments that finally gave me the courage to write this book.