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Gary G. Hoag
“I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.”— Psalm 63:2-4
“I wonder if there are twenty men alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there were twenty men who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of His graces. I don't believe that there are twenty such men alive in the world. But there must be one or two.
Everything you love for its own sake, outside of God alone, blinds your intellect and destroys your judgment of moral values. It vitiates your choices so that you cannot clearly distinguish good from evil and you do not truly know God's will. When you love and desire things for their own sakes, even though you may understand general moral principles, you do not know how to apply them.”
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) in New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1979) 203.
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Yesterday we explored making Christ the one thing we seek. But Merton suggests that very few people on earth do this. Why? Our problem is that everything we love apart from God ruins us.
When I teach on detachment, I use four “P’s” to describe the things we love that lead us away from God. We love people, pleasures, power, and/or possessions. Our love for these things gets us in trouble.
If we want to see the Real within all that is real, we need to focus on God. Only then can we see and relate to people, pleasures, power, and/or possessions rightly. But things are sticky. Let me explain.
I think the only way to detach from the things we love - people, pleasures, power, and/or possessions - is to focus on attachment to God. I think this was the secret to the prolific writing of David the psalmists.
He tasted the goodness of God. That’s my hope for everyone reading this week. When we do, we both want to abide with Him and we want to bless others generously as He blesses us.
Today, I facilitate Stations of Generosity with three others whom I have discipled. We will train about 40 people in Accra from all 16 regions of Ghana. Pray for transformation and replication across the nation.
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