2023-01-25 A Meditation on Healthsome Faith

“For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” (Jn 1:16 ESV)

The healthsome endeavor of the grace-based church speaks to a soft center of the soul, wherein we are not lascivious nor confused in speech, confusing sensuality or license with that gift and receipt from God: insofar as we are Grace, we lift up words encouraged and dutiful, mighty to save, because they originate in a place passed over, a soft center, an attitude towards our fellow or gal beside us that is freedom and light.

The light is to dwell in this throneroom of hearts reassessed: our hearts were errant and sinful, bloated and decrepit; God in His sovereignty heard our plea, a plea we could not have even made minus His firm leading, and God in His sovereignty put in us a New Spirit. New Grace to mimic our best ideas in this our soul today. We remain; we stay near; we cease to worry to lose our anointing. We who were formerly confused and in need of time and labor to self-censor, to avoid the fright of our actual subconscious embarrassingly on display, are no longer fearing that we be wicked; we are prolific now and prodigious, attending first to this and then to that, in certainty God has not only called uss but has gifted us with a duty towards the many who have gone before but with lesser opportunity to testify. The many who have died early or suffered injury and paralysis for the sake of the Gospel.

For it is still a Gospel-cause we announce: we are just like those first faithful and first martyrs, certain that our faith, with its soft center and its malleable personality, does attract a certain hatred and frustration. It does attract a wicked enemy. It does ape and cause consternation in a professional pundit, that is a professional preacher. So we go our dying way with a little bit of concern for their soul, the soul of our persecutor, but also with great bravado and courage regarding our own: we are ready to die, we might say, yet eager to serve another year in this mortal frame and cause.

And the prayer, lifted up, that we face all our confessional qualms squarely, to structure resurrection life around a soul decrepit and greedy, cynical and doubting, easily tempted to scenarios past where lust broke some tenuous and sensitive barrier. Truly, sin once indulged, is difficult to de-habituate, even if it is only in our minds that we worry and parry with that old flame. Yet we have seen remarkable progress, growth in Christ, membership in His Body. Remarkable for the sooth and the simple avoidance of that lust or temptation; we walk in exalted frame, almost accidentally, because so many tripping stones we’ve surmounted. And that by prayer and patient fast, perhaps, or by immediate forgiveness extended our way. We are presentable before the King when we’ve made just one mea culpa, because in that is our resurrection of a soft center, a soul engaged and situated towards our peer in an attitude of love. Love that reigns is love that softens, that de-lasciviates, that reckons with former passions of the flesh, giving us abundant passion of the soul, in all wondrous myriad sensation, in heaven felt in beckoning inner being.