Discovering Daily Who Christ Really Is

a poem by Bonnie Hain

Discovering daily who God really is,
Thanking Him daily He’s mine and I’m His,
Discovering daily God’s great love for me;
Such mercy, forgiveness, amazingly free.

Discovering daily that God really cares,
Discovering daily He does answer prayers,
Discovering daily what grace really means:
Unmerited favor beyond all my dreams.

Discovering daily God speaking to me;
He speaks through the Bible. Once blind, now I see.
Discovering, discovering each day that I live
That all that I need, He freely will give.

Discovering daily Christ working through me,
Accomplishing daily what never could be.
Discovering daily: I can’t, but He can;
Thanking Him daily for my place in His plan.

Discovering daily how real life can be
When I’m living in Christ and He’s living in me.
Discovering daily a song in my heart
With anticipation for each day to start.

Delighting and basking in love so divine,
Secure in the knowledge I’m His and He’s mine.
Besides mere contentment, excitement I see!
A daily adventure: Christ (alive) living in me!

Copyright © 2006 Bonnie Hain.

A little background about this poem that Major Ian Thomas quotes in his book - "The Indwelling Life of Christ."

Three months before she wrote this poem Bonnie attempted to take her life. When Bonnie and her husband returned from the hospital after this episode of their life, her husband placed a phone call to a local pastor (Bob Hobson) requesting help. Neither Bonnie nor her husband was a Christian.

Major Thomas tells the rest of the story.

Now, in response to this plea from a couple he did not know, Bob went to see them. He led them both to Christ, and he fully understood what that means. He did not just invite them to join his church or even simply to make a decision for Jesus so they could head toward heaven instead of hell. He led them to Christ. He invited them to receive Somebody, so that Somebody could live in them, Somebody living in somebody.

Such truth was revolutionary for this couple. From the moment of their genuine conversion, they fully grasped the implication of being born from above and becoming the recipients of the resurrection Life of the One who was crucified and then rose from the dead to share His Life with them on earth on their way to heaven. Life has held this same excitement for them ever since.

I Want to Be True, Part Four and Final

I believe it is here that George MacDonald gets into the "how" of it. How can a man/woman be true? See what he has to say.

When an individual is, with his whole nature, loving and willing the truth, he or she is then a live truth. This he has not originated in himself. He has seen it and striven for it, but not originated it.

The truth of every man, I say, is the perfected Christ in him. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him. The vital force of humanity working in him is Christ; He is his root--the generator and perfector of his individuality. The stronger the pure will of the man to be true, the freer and more active his choice, the more definite his individuality, even the more is the man and all that is his, Christ's. Without Him, he could not have truth, he could never have loved it, loving and desiring it, he could not have attained to it.

God gives us the willl wherewith to will, and the power to use it. But we, ourselves must will the truth, and for that the Lord is waiting. The work is his, but we must take our willing share. When the blossom breaks forth in us, the more it is ours, the more it is His. For the highest creation of the Father is the being that can like the Father and Son, of his own self will what is right. The groaning and travailing, the blossom and the joy, are the Father's and the Son's and ours. The will, the power of willing, may be created, but the willing is begotten. Because God wills first, man wills also.

When my being is consciously and willigly in the hands of him who called it to live and think and suffer and be glad--given back to him by a perfect obedience--I thenceforward breathe the breath, share the life of God himself. Then I am free, and in that I am true--which means one with the Father. And freedom knows itself to be freedom.

When a man is true, if he were in hell, he could not be miserable. He is right with himself, because right with Him from whom he came. To be right with God is to be right with the universe, one with the power, the love, the will of the mighty Father, the cherisher of joy, the Lord of laughter, whose are all glories, all hopes, who loves everything and hates nothing but selfishness, which he will not have in his kingdom.

Christ then is the Lord of life. His life is the light of men. The light mirrored in them changes them into the image of him, the Truth.

And thus the Truth, who is the Son, makes them free.

Fantastic, I say! What say you?

I Want to Be True, Part Three

Jesus, the Live Truth

The one originating, living, visible truth, embracing all truths in all relations, is Jesus Christ.

He is true. He is the live truth. His truth, chosen and willed by him, the ripeness of his being, the flower of his sonship, which is his nature, the crown of his one topmost perfect relation acknowledged and gloried in, is his absolute obedience to his Father.

The obedient Jesus is Jesus, the Truth.

He is true and the root of all truth and development of truth in men. Their very being, however far from the true human, is the undeveloped Christ in them, and his likeness to Christ is the truth of a man, even as the perfect meaning of a flower is the truth of a flower.

I Want to Be True, Part Two

You should not read ahead unless you are willing to have your manhood or womanhood challenged a bit. Seriously...I was and am extremely convicted by the following, but I thank God for it...its life to me really. The language isn't easy to read, but just keep going and you will be rewarded, I promise. Keep going.

Moral Facts--The Doing of Truth

The moment that whatever goes by the name of truth comes into connection with man, the moment that, instead of merely mirroring itself in his intellect as a thing outside of him, it comes into contact with him as a being of action, the moment the knowledge of it affects or ought to affect his sense of duty, it becomes a thing of far nobler import.

The question of truth then enters upon a higher plane, looks out of a loftier window.

A fact, which in itself is of no value, becomes at once a matter of moral life and death when a man has the imperative choice of being true or false concerning it. When the truth, the heart, the summit, the crown of a thing is perceived by a man, he approaches the fountain of truth whence the thing came, and perceiving God by understanding what it is, becomes more of a man, more of the being he was meant to be. In virtue of this perceived truth, he has relations with the universe until then undeveloped in him. But far higher will the doing of the least, the most insignificant duty raise him.

There, in the obedience of his actions, he begins to be a true man. A man may delight in the vision and glory of a truth, and not himself be true. The man whose vision is weak, but who--as far as he sees, and wanting to see farther--does the thing he sees, is a true man. The man who recognized the turth of any human relation and neglects the duty involved is not a true man. The man who knows the laws of nature and does not heed them, the more he teaches them to others, the less he is a true man. The man who takes good care of himself and none of his brother and sister is false. A man may be a poet or preacher, student or teacher, aware of the highest truths of many things, aware of that beauty which is the final cause of existence; he may be a man who would not tell a lie, or steal, or slander; and yet he may not be a true man, inasmuch as the essentials of manhood are not his aim, he has not come into the flower of his own being.

There are relations closer than those of the facts around him that he is failing to see, or seeing, fails to acknowledge, or acknowledging, fails to fulfill. Man is man only in the doing of truth, perfect man, only in the doing of the highest truth, which is the fulfilling of his relations to his origin. Fulfilling them, he is himself a truth, a living truth. The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty. Relations, truths, duties are shown to the man away beyond him, that he may choose them and be a child of God, choosing righteousness like him. The man who regards duties only as facts, or even the man who regards them as essential truths, but goes no farther, is a man of untruth. He is a man indeed, but not a true man. He is a man in possibility, but not yet in reality. The recognition of these things is the imperative obligation to fulfill them. Not fulfilling these relations, these duties, a man is undoing the right of his own existence, destroying his raison d'etre.

When the soul or heart, or spirit, or whatever you please to call that which is the man himself and not his body, sooner or later becomes aware that he needs someone above him, whom to obey, in whom to rest, from whom to seek deliverance from what in himself is despicable, disappointing, and unworthy, then indeed is that man in the region of truth, and beginning to come true in himself. When a man bows down before a power that can account for him, a power that knows whence he came and whither he is going, who knows everything about him and can set him right, longs indeed to set him right, making of him a creature confident as a child whom his father is leading by the hand to the heights of happy-making truth-- then is that man bursting into his flower. Then the truth of his being, his real nature--born in God at first, and responsive to the truth, the being of God his origin--begins to show itself. Then is his nature coming into harmony with itself.

In obeying the will that is the cause of his being, he begins to stand on the apex of his being. He begins to feel himself free. The truth--not as known to his intellect, but as revealed in his own sense of being true--has made him free. No abstract truth held by purest insight can make a man free. But the truth done, the truth loved, the truth lived by the man, the truth of and not merely in the man himself--that is the truth that makes him free.

As I've said, I want to be true...and I want to be free. Stay tuned for part 3.

I Want to Be True, Part One

Probably, the biggest spiritual influence in my life is Major Ian Thomas. However, for some reason, lately I keep coming back to George MacDonald and keep getting blessed. In this post and the posts that immediately follow, I intend to share some of his thoughts that have deeply impacted me in the past week. Take it in and enjoy! I want all of you to know right now that I want to be true.

Truth, the Blossom

To love the truth is a far greater thing than to know it, for it is itself truth in the inward parts--act truth, as distinguished from fact-truth. IN the highest truth the knowledge and love of it are one, or, if not identical, then coincident. The very sight of the truth is the loving of it.

What is the truth of water?
Is it that it is formed of hydrogen and oxygen? Is it for the sake of the fact that hydrogen and oxygen combined form water that the precious thing exists? Or has God put the two together only that man might separate and find them out? He allows his child to pull his toys to pieces, but wast hat the purpose for which they were made? A schoolteacher might see therein the best use of a toy, but not a father!Find what in the constitution of the two gases makes them fit and capable to be thus honored in forming the lovely thing and you will give us a revelation about more than water, namely about the God who made oxygen and hydrogen. There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen. It comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier.

The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no meta physicist can analyze. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst--symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus--this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace, this live thing, which, if I could, I would have babbling through my room, this water is its own self, its own truth and is therein a truth of God. Let him who would know the love of the Maker become sorely athirst and drink of the brook beside his path--then lift up his heart to the inventor and mediator of thirst and water, that man might foresee a little of what his soul may find in God. If he become not then as a hart panting for the water brooks, let him go back to his science and its husks, for they will in the end make him thirsty.

Let a man go to the hillside and let the brook sing to him until he loves it, and he will find himself far nearer the fountain of truth than any triumphal chemist at the moment of a great discovery. He will draw from the brook the water of joyous tears, "and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountain of waters."

The truth of a thing, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing. Truth in a man's imagination is the power to recognize this truth of a thing. And wherever, in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky or flower or human face, we see the glory of God, there a true imagination is beholding a truth of God.

Okay, more to come concerning truth. Any thoughts about this? I'm particularly persuaded that the truth of a thing, indeed, is the blossom of it....its uttermost purpose, what God made it for, etc.

There's Just Something About a Wedding

On Saturday, I officiated my sister's wedding...what an awesome blessing! It's not often that weekends like this one come along, so I tried to soak it in as much as possible. There was so much to soak in! As I look back on the gathering of dear and genuinely missed family (near and distant) and the long-lasting celebration of love, the palpable touch of God's goodness makes me smile. At this point, there are two things that stick out in my mind as "favorite moments."

First, when my son (the ring bearer) made his way down the aisle and approached his spot next to me, I stuck out my hand and we spontaneously exchanged a subtle low-five...very fun. Of course, I also enjoyed watching my beautiful little girl willfully perform her duties as the flower girl (again, I know these moments are so rare).

Second, and perhaps the most memorable was the eye contact. While speaking during my sister's wedding, the only mode of discernible communication with me was eye contact. I so much enjoyed the facial expressions of the bride and groom as they encouraged, anticipated, delighted and rejoiced during different parts of the ceremony....all with their eyes. At one point or another, I was engaged by different wedding guests and even spurred on by one bridesmaid (Laura Lees) as I stumbled briefly over a sentence.

Through it all, God was faithful. I wasn't nervous at all....just excited at the opportunity to share what He wanted me to share. On Saturday I learned that I have a long way to go in learning to speak by His speaking, and not just reciting His words. Still, I believe that the Lord Jesus was there and it meant a lot that my dear friend and brother, Rishi, prayed for me just before the guests arrived. Finally, it meant so much to me to be so warmly received by my local brothers and sisters in Christ at the reception. To Ryan and Jennifer, may God richly bless your marriage and thanks so much for the overwhelming joy of being a part of its beginning.