Knowing Jesus? Experiencing Him? What captures this life?
I've come back to a few quotes from Brennan Manning's Ragamuffin Gospel that are ruminating inside my heart. I hope to live them out and not merely think about them.
On being infected with Jesus' life:
"The contagious joy of Jesus (only carriers pass it on) infected and freed his followers" (pg. 63)
On the discipline and effects of reading the scriptures:
"The word we study must be the word we pray. My personal experience of the endless tenderness of God came not from exegetes, theologians, and spiritual writers [though Manning is well read], but from sitting still in the presence of the living word and beseeching Him to help me understand with my head and heart His written Word. Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or ideas to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing our brochures to places we have never visited." (pg. 44)
On prayer:
"In essence, there is only one thing God asks of us - that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything and for whom God is enough." (pg.46)
Are any of us at this level of devotion or experience with God? What a meaningful and purposeful pursuit to grow deeper towards it!
Thomas Merton said: His call to us - to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced.
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