Pendulum

So I'm sitting in the CLICC lab two hours into my three hour shift, and I really don't want to study xD

I know I'm supposed to be a good steward of my time, in fact the Purpose Driven Life devotional today is "Do all your work in love. 1 Corinthians 16:14 (TEV)" . God definitely has a sense of humor.

Anyways, today was interesting Danny spoke about the "fear of God" at WHEC and Erick brought up an interesting idea of a pendulum in smallgroup. As Christians we are constantly swinging back from experienceing the fear of God and being totally destroyed like in Isaiah 6. This means epxeriecning your finiteness in comparison to God's infiniteness, and actually being afraid of God, like the Israelites in Deutoronomy 5:24-26. And the other side of the pendulum is approaching God as your friend and following in faith and experiecing His saving grace. In Luke 5:8 Peter says "Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!" and Jesus responds "Don't be afraid; from now on you will catch men." So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him."

For me this I think I'm constantly fighting against the pendulum. When I follow in grace and confidence, I question God why don't I experience you? And when God reveals himself and I get destoryed I am like "God have mercy help me, take away my sins and help me to experience grace." Haha, I never realized that God actually wants us to keep swinging back and forth to experience Him more fully. I thought my dual like nature was quite unstable, like if Christ is our rock, how come we constantly are rocked by our experiences of God and sometimes we go through dry times where we don't seem to fear God? Isn't swinging back and forth as a pendulum kind of unstable? But Juan reminded me that the pendulum is still connected to God, and by His grace we can still experience the fear of God and still given the grace to obey in faith. In fact as growing Christians our goal should be to swing back and forth in God's timing, instead of being stuck on one side or worse be stuck in the middle. If we are too crippled by the fear of God then we may never realize the redemption of Jesus Christ, and if we take grace for granted then in our obedience our we actually seeking out the fear of God and obeying? But in His grace, He allows us in His perfect timing to go back and forth in experienceing our sin and His saving grace.