Sunday, October 16, 2011

Grace

Contrary to nature, grace makes all sorrows sweet, and brings it about that a man no longer feels any relish for the things which formerly gave him great relish and delight.  On the other hand, what formerly disgusted him now delights him and is the desire of his heart-for instance weakness, sorrow, inwardness, humility, self-abandonment and detachment from all creatures.  All this is in the highest degree dear to him, when this visitation of the Holy Ghost, grace, has in truth come to him.
-Johannes Tauler(1300-1361)  Light, Life, and Love
This is an excerpt from The Library of AW Tozer.   It is a wonderful book, I picked it up at McKay's, one of our favorite places in town.  It has tiny, little, snippet biographies in the back.  I was trying to put the people in a timeline.  Tauler was German and proceeded Martin Luther by a hundred and fifty years and was well known for his sermons and writings and influenced Martin Luther. Meister Eckhart influenced Tauler, who was 40 years his junior.  Funny, I have never heard the names Tauler or Eckhart, but their lives impacted Luther.  And who hasn't heard of Martin Luther?

The ideas of grace, its theology, is central to how we view our faith.  Where is our faith centered?  What is its affect?  
Irresistible Grace is beautifully stated in Tauler's writing.

2 comments:

Onlythemanager said...

When I became a member of a Lutheran Church, the thing I loved most was Luther's emphasis on grace. We are truly only saved by the grace of God; we can not earn it.

EJN said...

Susan,
My husband had a calvinist teacher at our Armenian Bible College. When the meaning of the root of grace finally filtered down into my mind, then heart, I was so filled with joy that I didn't have to perform. It changed my thinking completely on why I wanted to love and serve God.
Thanks for your comment.
Have a great week -Jojo