Under the Wings of God by Cornelius PlantingaSample

Day Four: Spiritual Momentum

Scripture: Mark 4:21–25, Hebrews 12:1-3, 2 John 1:6

The setting for Mark 4 is a discussion of the right hearing of Jesus’s teaching in parables, and the point is that either we make good use of God’s revelation or else it may slip away. Either we use the revelation or else, like an unexercised muscle, it will start to atrophy. Use it or lose it! That’s why athletes train. That’s why musicians practice.

So we have to pay attention to what we hear about Jesus. Either you and I grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord—or else our knowledge dims, our vision of God clouds over, and our love grows cold.

This second option is bad spiritual momentum. Prayer begins to mean less and less to you. It feels like a chore. The Bible starts to look dull to you. You look at the Christian church and you see hypocrites. You begin to wonder, really, what good human living is. All because “to those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away” (Mark 4:25).

The strange thing is that when we recover from bad momentum, we discover that it is not God who has been off duty. We ourselves have been wandering in some far country where there is no one to bring rest to our terrible restlessness.

Always we are on the move—from pride to restlessness to the shipwreck of our hope. Or else from strength to strength and from grace to grace, sometimes in ways we don’t see till years later. Grace is amazing in part because it’s so mysterious.

At the end of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, the converted Christian has withstood demonic temptations and has entered glory. Angels welcome him. And when he sees them, he understands that he has always known them, and he realizes what part each of them has played at hours in his life when he thought he was alone. They intervened for him. So now he can say to these angels of grace not “Who are you?” but “So it was you all along.”

“For to those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.

Prayer: Establish us, faithful God, in Your word and in Your purposes. Plant and cultivate and tend in us the fruit of the Spirit, letting us grow and blossom for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.