December 31st, 2024
Hi Friends,
As this year began to wind down, I set a literary challenge for myself — to read some novels by the Scottish author, George MacDonald, in his original 19th century English. Having completed one novel and commenced the second, I make these observations. First, there is a reason that Michael Philipps was inspired to translate the books for a modern reader. If you think I am long winded as a preacher, you should read this guy! Second, there is a reason that men like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton were so influenced by this man. His insight into life with God as a disciple of Jesus is profound.
In his Annals Of A Quiet Neighbourhood (published in 1867), MacDonald presents an elderly pastor who reflects on the first years of his life as a pastor in a rural parish called Marshmallows. As we come to the end of 2024, let me share a few quotes that have set me to thinking deeply, while encouraging me to press on in faith into the year ahead.
“I am now getting old—faster and faster. I cannot help my gray hairs, nor the wrinkles that gather so slowly yet ruthlessly; no, nor the quaver that will come in my voice, not the sense of being feeble in the knees, even when I walk only across the floor of my study. But I have not got used to age yet. I do not feel one atom older than I did at three-and twenty. Nay, to tell all the truth, I feel a good deal younger.—For then I only felt that a man had to take up his cross; whereas now I feel that a man has to follow Him; and that makes an unspeakable difference.”
“… there is no now—only a past of which we know a little, and a future of which we know far less and far more.”
“Ah! if any man's work is not with God, its results shall be burned, ruthlessly burned, because poor and bad.”
“You cannot expect people to accept before they have had a chance of seeing what the offered gift really is.”
“All reading of the Book is not reading of the Word. And many that are first shall be last and the last first. I know now that it was Jesus Christ and not theology that filled the hearts of the men that wrote those epistles—Jesus Christ, the living, loving God-Man, whom I found—not in the Epistles, but in the Gospels. The Gospels contain what the apostles preached—the Epistles what they wrote after the preaching. And until we understand the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ our brother-king—until we understand Him, until we have His Spirit, promised so freely to them that ask it—all the Epistles, the words of men who were full of Him, and wrote out of that fulness, who loved Him so utterly that by that very love they were lifted into the air of pure reason and right, and would die for Him, and did die for Him, without two thoughts about it, in the very simplicity of no choice—the Letters, I say, of such men are to us a sealed book.” “Until we love the Lord so as to do what He tells us, we have no right to have an opinion about what one of those men meant; for all they wrote is about things beyond us.”
Thank you for walking with me in 2024 and may God guide us, together, into his good and perfect will in 2025. May he guide us into a deeper knowing of him, “our brother-king!”
Blessings!
Doug