Dr Paul Allen

We live in a culture that is quick. We want to become mature Christians in five easy lessons. We want to become saints by fifteen minutes a day. We want to have flat stomachs and strong abs by three workouts a week. That may work over a given period of time for your abs, but it's not going to work for your soul. Attending the school of God takes time and labor and energy and deeply committing oneself to prayer, to the study of Scripture, to fellowship with other believers, to ministry within the life of the church. We need to listen to Paul: "When I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror , dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:11-13). Paul was the most mature Christian alive in the world in his day, a man who had the equivalent of two doctorates in theology by the time he was twenty-one

Image via Wikipedia When Paul declared the mysterious and breathtaking promise that "all things work together for good to those who love God , to those who are called according to His purpose" ( Rom. 8: 28), he was musing in teleology . He was dealing with the realm of the remote rather than the proximate. This suggests that the proximate must be judged in light of the remote. Our problem is this: We do not yet possess the full light of the remote. We are still looking in a dark mirror. We are not utterly devoid of light, though. We have enough light to know that God has a good purpose even when we are ignorant of that good purpose. It is the good purpose of God that gives the final answer to the appearance of vanity and futility in this world. To trust in the good purpose of God is the very essence of godly faith. This is why no Christian can be an ultimate pessimist. The world in which we live is not a world of chance. Its beginn Image via Wikipedia ing was not an ac