living the dangerous life
Ann Voskamp’s words from yesterday’s blog strike me to the bone –
There is nothing safe about the Christ who rent the veins and the veil to save us — He is Divine and He is Dangerous and He is Detonating. He is no tame lion.
What did Randy Alcorn say and in the most Scriptural sense? “It’s dangerous faith in our untamed Savior that leads us to the joy we crave.”
And there is so much we don’t understand though we steep ourselves in the infallible Word, that can’t be domesticated and entirely deduced by finite minds in a world where He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing.
You can only be marked as safe if you’ve fashioned for yourself a God small and tame.
And what the world desperately needs is more dangerous disciples of an unsafe God.
John Piper had said it like that:
“I think it is virtually impossible to honestly say that knowing God, as God intends to be known by his people in the new covenant, simply means mental awareness or understanding or acquaintance with God.
Not in a million years is that what “knowing God” means here.
This is the knowing of a lover, not a scholar. A scholar can be a lover. But a scholar—or a pastor—doesn’t know God until he is a lover.
You can know about God by research; but until the researcher is ravished by what he sees, he doesn’t know God for who he really is.
And that is one great reason why many pastors can become so impure. They don’t know God—the true, massive, glorious, gracious, biblical God.
The humble intimacy and brokenhearted ecstasy—giving fire to the facts—is not there.” – John Piper
Until we’re ravished by what we see, we don’t really know who God is? Ravished? It sounds so — terribly uncomfortable and wholly dangerous.
But maybe that is the thing? Does God ever make His people comfortable and hasn’t He always called His disciples to the dangerous? To say the uncomfortable, to speak to an inappropriately erotic culture with purely redemptive language, to take back the language that’s been hijacked and tainted by a fallen and direly needful culture and use it to speak of His own startling, ravishing, holy metaphor….
The heart recovers as it keeps walking dangerously ahead.
A heart recovers as it embraces the inherent risks of living. God met Moses on a mountaintop. Who ever said climbing mountains was safe? Where are those who are willing to be dangerous disciples of the unsafe God who is the safest of all?
And a heart recovering, beating strong and stronger –
It can sound as loud and dangerous as thunder in the desert, a resounding pounding for a straight pathway for the God who shatters the skies wide open with all His wild truth…
With all His holy, unmanageable love that scours the dirty brave right clean.
Ann Voskamp
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life: acoustic & amplified 