a mere outline of a human being
I found this insightful quotation in preparation for a sermon I am preaching in chapel on January 12th. It is a powerful reminder of my profound need of the gospel.
"All idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile. Human desire, deep and restless and seemingly unfulfillable, keeps stuffing itself with finite goods, but these cannot satisfy. If we try to fill our hearts with anything besides the God of the universe, we find that we are overfed but undernourished, and we find that day by day, week by week, year after year, we are thinning down to a mere outline of a human being" (Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It's Suposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, pp. 122-123).
It reminds me of the words of Bilbo: "I feel thin--sort of stretched like butter scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday, a very long holiday, and I don't expect I shall return. In fact, I mean not to!" I would just change one thing in Bilbo's statement of need: "I need the Gospel, all of it, and I don't mean to stop feeding upon it!"
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After all, Gospel and holiday are not so unrelated.
Today I was overwhelmed by the pervasivness of idolatry in my life. My constant struggle for control keeps on coming back and I forgot the reality of God's sovereignty. Then the Gospel coupled by a true friend shepherds me back, like today-demonstration of Romans 1:12 and I Thess. 5:11. Already, not yet...and I want to be cuz it's frustrating and painful.