09.04 The infinite claim of God

IV. THE INFINITE CLAIM OF GOD The sense of duty to be complete needs the recognition of the infinite claim of an infinite God. We come back to the old truth “The soul is made for God and can find its rest only in Him.” That quest of the inward ideal, that impatience with every stage of attainment, is God’s drawing of the soul into fellowship with Himself.

It may be that the spirit in its own inward journey realizes the need of God, and through the earnestness of that sense of need finds its way to Him. It may be that God Himself using some experience or influence of a man’s life, lays hold upon him and bids him go forth to follow His leading to the end. In either case, it is this recognition of the infinite claim of an infinite God which redeems and transforms the sense of duty. There can then be no danger of halting and stopping short, for God’s claims summon us to a never-ending progress towards union with Himself. There can be no danger of self-satisfaction, for God’s own perfection is the goal, and at every stage we realize how far short of it we come. The more we realize that God Himself is the End for which He has given us our being the more conscious we become of the presence of rival aims and of our manifold surrenders to them; and thus the sense of imperfection deepens into the sense of sin. It is our sin which entangles and impedes the soul in its true movement towards God and which bars the way to God’s gracious movement towards us, and thus prevents the union of God and man for which we were made. But there is nothing in the mere sense of sin which avails either to remove its burden from the conscience or to break its power over the will. It is here that one welcomes with ever renewed thankfulness the knowledge that One in whom God and man were perfectly at one obtained, by a “full and sufficient” sacrifice of obedience, forgiveness for all sin, and has brought into our life the strength of a victorious will of good; and that if only a man by faith and prayer and sacrament and selfsacrifice keeps hold upon Him, he is assured alike of that pardon and of that power. It is this encompassing security which brings into the long struggle out of self to God a sense of sureness and of peace. Being cleansed from sin we can serve God with a quiet mind.

TAGS: [Parables]