{"id":2418,"date":"2012-11-27T07:49:33","date_gmt":"2012-11-27T11:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oldsandals.net\/?p=2418"},"modified":"2012-11-27T09:46:26","modified_gmt":"2012-11-27T13:46:26","slug":"the-gift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/?p=2418","title":{"rendered":"Give and take"},"content":{"rendered":"

This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope.\u00a0 Through\u00a0 the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not.\u00a0 They are\u00a0 new every morning. Great\u00a0 is Your faithfulness. The Lord\u00a0 is\u00a0 my portion…therefore I hope in Him! The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul\u00a0 who\u00a0 seeks Him.\u00a0 It is\u00a0 good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord….For the Lord will not cast off forever. Though He causes grief, yet He will show compassion according to the multitude of His mercies. For He does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men….Who is\u00a0 he who\u00a0 speaks and it comes to pass,\u00a0 when the Lord has not commanded it?\u00a0\u00a0 Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that woe and well-being proceed?\u00a0\u00a0 Lamentations 3:21-26, 31-33, 37-38<\/em><\/p>\n

Salvation is the gracious gift of God, but it is not altogether one-sided. There is a give and take to it.\u00a0 The Lord gives and we take, we receive.\u00a0 The gift is not something we can counterfeit.\u00a0 If He doesn’t give, there is nothing for us to receive.\u00a0 His giving, then, is paramount.\u00a0 But our receiving is indispensable.\u00a0 Our refusing the gift doesn’t negate the gift.\u00a0 Our receiving the gift is an act of faith, but that doesn’t make it a “work”.\u00a0 We are saved by His<\/em> grace, through our<\/em> faith.\u00a0 And even our faith is His<\/em> gift to us, another gift for us to receive.<\/p>\n

This give and take is perhaps (perhaps)\u00a0best summed up by an Eastern Orthodox Bishop, Kallistos Ware, who put it this way:<\/p>\n

“What God does [in saving us] is incomparably more important than what we humans do; yet our voluntary participation in God\u2019s saving action is altogether indispensable. Our cooperation with God is genuinely free, but there is nothing in our good actions that is exclusively our own. At every point our human cooperation is itself the work of the Holy Spirit. The inter-relationship between divine grace and human freedom remains always a mystery beyond our comprehension.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope.\u00a0 Through\u00a0 the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not.\u00a0 They are\u00a0 new every morning. Great\u00a0 is Your faithfulness. The Lord\u00a0 is\u00a0 my portion…therefore I hope in Him! The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul\u00a0 who\u00a0 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Give and take”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2418"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2422,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418\/revisions\/2422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oldsandals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}