The Odds & Ends that Redefine

Faith

MacDonald did not want you to think as he thought, or act as he acted, but to meet who he met! Faith is not a quality you generate, possess, or measure, but a relationship you live. It is trusting in the faithfulness of God! Can we believe in God Himself? Faith is trusting in HIM!

We draw near with our human response, our abandonment of self in the faith of Jesus. He gives himself to us—shall not we give ourselves to him? Faith is not based on promises, deals, or contracts we try and hold Them to. We need to come out of the bondage of the legal to which we have given the name grace, for there is little gracious in it. Your system is not your faith. Your faith is simple obedience, your trusting in the living God. “Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will goes and does it! Or, not knowing it, stands and waits – trusting as content in ignorance as it is in knowledge. Its most excellent exercise is in acting with an uncertainty of the result.”

Fatherhood

Our childhood is born of His Fatherhood! No one called God Father before Jesus. When we awaken and know God as His children, as Abba Father, as Jesus taught us, we will know He is closer and more than any human father or mother could be or come. Our heavenly Father longed to create from the abundance of Life He shared with the Son and the Spirit. If this were not true, we would have been created from nothing and not from Them. God would have been only our maker, not our Father, not our origin! Their children who were destined to become sons and daughters in the image and likeness of God.

For MacDonald, Fatherhood is only the last and highest stair from which our understanding can see Him from here, where our hearts can know that He is near, even in us! This Fatherhood is but a step towards the Life in the Trinity for those who can receive it. Brothers and sisters, we cannot rest until His Fatherhood is fully revealed in love to all of humanity, to all of His children. He cannot be truly understood to be our Father unless and until we see Him as their Father! If we cannot see and feel Him as their Father? We cannot know Him as ours! We must rejoice for all of our race, that He is THE Father!

Forgiveness

It is the nature of the Divine to forgive! “Jesus Christ is God’s forgiveness!” The issue is not sin now, but unforgiveness. However, when we do not forgive others. This unforgiveness exposes our lack of understanding and recognition of what is given to us in Christ. Forgiveness is love towards the unlovely! It is given not according to merit, but according to need.

It is, according to MacDonald, not just love, but love given as love to the wrongdoer. So, establishing peace with God and our neighbor. Forgiveness takes up the wrongs, both small and great, along with our hurts, sadness, and sorrows and removes them from between God, others, and ourselves. “Honestly, we can say God’s love precedes His forgiveness, and His forgiveness precedes our repentance!” Unforgiveness then is a refusal to give to another what we have freely received from God! The shutting out of another from our mercies, love, and world as far as it is possible for us. Therefore, the murdering, as it were of our neighbor. It is probably an infinitely less evil to murder someone than to refuse to forgive them! Who of us can judge his neighbor correctly, except the one whose love refuses to judge him at all!

Individuality

The Trinity created our individuality as a far more sweeping miracle than dependency. They made us distinct from Themselves that our freedom would give an opening for us to join in union with Them. So, humanity, at the core of its being, has a personal and individual bond and relationship with their Father! For MacDonald, we could only be sons and daughters in the maturity of this individuality and the freedom of our wills! As soon as we surrender ourselves, this truth reveals itself in us. Our actions become our response to our Maker’s design and our cooperation in the creation of our true selves.

This individuality, however, gives us a sense of separation from God and others. It is here that we find the fatal mistake in our thinking. We suppose a duality that does not exist, our individuality judged as separation! You see, there can be no unity where there is only one — no relationship or oneness without at least two. God has never been alone, but always as Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Their shared abundance, life, and love the source of all creation. Therefore, what begins and seems like separation to us, starts, and has its bases in individuality. This union is impossible without distinction, and humanity can find no harmony without returning to its source!

Kingdom

For MacDonald, Jesus needed no government, no rule, no sovereign power to express, only service! God came washing feet! Sovereignty, would not serve the ends of His Father or fill His own heart to the full. The perfect empire for the Son was that He might teach one human being to love his neighbor and be good like His Father! No more looking down on people, but elevating, serving, and persuading them of who they are in Him! The King and His kingdom would be the servants of all! This kingdom is in the now, only expressed in the moments before us! It is not a time or place to come, but a condition of heart.

Jesus’ kingdom runs parallel to the kingdoms of this world, but from a totally different Life! For this God, gives Himself for His children! For the Divine are humble like little children, and no other thinking or heart can see or enter this kingdom but Theirs! The Trinity speaks Child, the language of kingdom, for those who have ears to hear. “How terribly have the theologians misrepresented the Divine! Nearly all of them represent Him as a great king on a grand throne; God thinking how great He is; making it the business of His being and the end of His universe the keeping up of His glory, wielding the lightning bolts of Jupiter against those that take His name in vain.” Dear brothers, have you found our king? There He is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. Jesus’ kingdom is like this!

Love

The highest truth is, “…that the devotion of God to us His creatures is perfect! He does not think about Himself, but about us! He wants nothing for Himself, but finds His fullest blessing in the overflowing giving of benefits! Found within this devotion and self-giving love is the life of the child. He is simply and altogether, our friend, father, mother, and our infinite love perfect God. Grand and strong beyond all the human imagination could conceive of poetic thinking and kingly actions. Delicate beyond all human tenderness could imagine between husband and wife. Comfortable and welcoming, exceeding all that the human heart could envision of father and mother.”

Because the Trinity gives Themselves, there is nothing good They will withhold. Love is not something God does, but the only perfection of His being. For perfection is love expressed! For MacDonald there is nothing eternal but love. “God is Love, all love, and nothing other than love.” There is nothing deeper in Their character and nature than love. The Father is not sentimental or permissive, but One who dies to set us free! In the end, anything that is not of love’s kind will be destroyed! This is not to appease His justice, but to accomplish our freedom!

Mist

For MacDonald, in the morning of his childhood, there was a mist through which light struggled to appear. It was as if a repellent presence, a phantom cloud, that seemed to require mature thoughts and more accurate insights to dissipate. In reality, it only needed awareness of the Father’s love and the beauty and oneness of creation all around him. This awareness MacDonald calls imagination. To think imaginatively is to think God’s thoughts after Him.When the Spirit moves within us, communicating to our hearts causing a new image or idea to arise, there is His Thought. This awareness is the image of the mist blown away. Then the ordinary which was only visible in shades of gray becomes extraordinary, full of color and vibrancy. Alive to our senses! These insights come to the humble, childlike heart of His children! In the end, imagination, clear vision is harmony with our Creator and all They have imagined in creation!

Sin

All sin is unpardonable! There is no accommodation to be made with it. God is against sin while we and sin are one. He loves the sinner so much that He cannot forgive him in any other way than to deliver him from the evil that possesses him. Therefore, God is against us, that is against our selfish desire, aims, and ambitions so that He can be always and altogether for us! Even though MacDonald never says it directly, he sees sowing and reaping as the educational principle for His creatures. All His judgments are redemptive. Sin is its own punishment.

Moses was thinking it was necessary to appease God by offering that his name be blotted out. Believing God was less tender than himself. Not seeing that God was the Reconciler and Redeemer and only desired the sacrifice of the heart. The Father did not need the sacrifice of one of His creatures. He did not need to satisfy His justice or support His dignity, but gave Himself for us! Jesus was doing His Father’s will. He was laying down His life, suffering death, not that we would not hurt. But that our suffering would lead us to the Father’s perfect love! The terrible heresy of the church is to divide the Father from the Son! Is to divide Them in thought, feeling, action, or intent, to represent the Son as being or doing something that the Father Himself does not do. “For God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.”

Time

What we call death is but an exterior change in form. Death is like the changing of clothes from our pajamas to our day clothes. Death looks final, an awful end, and like a total change of being. But for MacDonald, God sees us before we were born, making us beautifully unique, His “little ones” by birth! The Father is dealing with us not as children of a day, but as children of the eternal ages.

You see, “Absolute truth is hard to know. It may take centuries of ages, of struggle, effort, and aspiration before we see reality. Once we finally see it, it is so plain and simple. We wonder how we could have lived without seeing it before. That we did not understand it sooner, was simply that we could not see it. To see the truth, to know what it is, to understand it, are all one and the same!” Jesus said, “God is the God of the living.” “All live in Him.” In Him, there is no death. For God to let His creatures die would be for Him to change. He would become the God of the dead. Death does not seal our lives or choices forever! Time is on His side, our side! Given time and eternity, Love will win!

Transformation

The Father has no plans that do not include His Children. No design that does not include them being free and alive with His Life. The Father sees there is a need for room. Room for us to struggle out of our chrysalis’ or cocoons. The transformation that comes with the awaking of the will and being conformed into the image of His Son.

For MacDonald, we are twice-born children of our Father. First, as His children by birth, made in His image and likeness. Secondly, “…as we creep from our chrysalids and spread our great heaven-storming wings in the Life of God!” The metamorphosis that is the change of form, the Resurrection both spiritually and physically. Not as becoming what we are not, but being what we are in Christ! This is the beautiful image of the chrysalis. Of the caterpillar to the butterfly, the taker transformed into the giver of beauty and life! Jesus give us this Resurrection! A body like your own transfigured one. Transform us so we can see, hear, and know as You do.

Lord give us glorified bodies through which to reveal the glorified thoughts we now have. Our true selves that are expressing You Father, and Your Son Jesus! Finally, Lord Jesus come, the Child, the obedient one of the Father. We are One! One with You and every man, woman, child, and part of Your creation!