verse4today: "How great you are, O Sovereign Lord! There is no one like you. We have never even heard of another God like you." (II Samuel 7:22)
Posted on 2012-04-30 via Twitter
My worlds are converging. As pastor of the Living Hope Church, I have been searching for Advent meditations to share with my congregation. Last night, in my Church History class at Northern Seminary, I offered a brief introduction to German mysticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This morning my daily reading brought me to an Advent meditation by a German mystic named Joannes Tauler, a fourteenth-century Dominican priest. Those three streams converged leading me to reprint a portion of Tauler's meditation. Its a good word that invites us to reflect on Advent from the perspective of those who waited thousands of years for the birth of Jesus Christ and, then, to invites us to praie the Lord and receive the precious gifts he so freely offers. Here it is:
A precious time has begun for us... The season of Advent has a holiness and sweetness all its own. It is the time toward which the prophets and saints of the ancient covenant during four thousand years sighed with incomparable ardor, crying out to God: "O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down!" (Isaiah 64:1) to deliver those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. All the happenings, all the symbols of the Old Testament, had the one end of setting forth the grandeur of him who was to come, and who now has come. Let us, then, thank God and always praise him, that he has created us at this time and under this law of grace, that he has willed to give us his gifts and his riches in such abundance, if we will only take them.
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