To be near unto God - pagina 358
be for this faithful Father, who is not moved to ask in despair, whether constant, inward, tender, ever-in-grace increasing piety has not become impossible for us? This question can only in part be answered in the affirmative. Sin works effects which enervate and weaken, so that even in the most godly circles true religion is most of the time at low ebb, and only in rare moments of spiritual tension does it rise to the fullness of flood-tide.
The
result
is
disheartening.
God
looks
down upon
world morning by morning and evening by evening, and continues his Fatherly care over his fourteen hundred million of children of men, but only here and there does the psalm of worship and pure love arise before him from a tender, this
devout heart. But age upon age God continues in everlasting love to entice us by his Word, to call us and to draw us to this full, true and unshakable religion, which finds its terse expression in the supreme command that we shall cleave unto the Lord our God (Deut. 30:20). It is the image of the child
who literally cleaves to her, her, fosters himself in the warmth of the mother-life, feeds himself at the fountain of mother's breast, and cries when he feels himAnd this supreme self separated from mother. at mother's breast,
and hangs on
that we must depend on God, and cleave to him, protests in the name of the Triune God against all mechanical religion, and against every endeavor to reduce it to mere formalism. It does not exclude thinking on God, but declares that intellectual activity with God is not religion. It includes the confes.sion of God, but denies the
command,
S54
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Bekijk de hele uitgave van dinsdag 1 januari 1918
Abraham Kuyper Collection | 620 Pagina's
Bekijk de hele uitgave van dinsdag 1 januari 1918
Abraham Kuyper Collection | 620 Pagina's