The Saturday Stoke #22

The Saturday Stoke

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Listen to The Saturday Stoke

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Welcome to this week’s Saturday Stoke, a short inspirational podcast designed to encourage and challenge you on the path ahead—it’s a place where, if I’m doing my job right, I’m spurring us all on toward love and good deeds.

It’s a podcast that feels like warm slippers on cold feet and sounds like winter rain on a tin roof. If you're new to the Stoke, welcome! Feel free to poke around my blog The Edges.

If you find some inspiration, sign up for my newsletter called Further Up. You’ll get updates when the next episode of The Stoke drops and exclusive articles and community discussions. This week’s stoke is all about re-centering our love for God.

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I want to open up with a question.

What is that you are loving when you say you love God? Just think about it for a minute. I find that in order to answer this question, I must ask myself, “Who is God to me?” It’s an important question, the answer of which filters into different aspects of my life.

And don’t worry, I’m not going to try and unpack this question over the next ten minutes. I just want you to think about it.

The next question I want you to think about is this: “What is the object of my love?” Think about this in a spiritual sense. If you say that you love God, then what is the object of that love?

“Well Tim, of course the object is God himself,” you say.

“Ah yes,” I reply, “but is it possible that we can sometimes say that we love God, and show our love for him by busying ourselves with to-do lists for the common good? Or showing how faithful we are in our church attendance? Or well, we can all fill in the blank here can’t we?”

C.S. Lewis, in his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” said that too often we mistake the beautiful things of this world for the “thing itself.” The “thing itself,” of course being God.

I want to read to you a short snippet from perhaps my favourite book of all time, The Confessions by St. Augustine. He asks these same questions and his answer intrigues and enchants.

Not with doubting, but with assured consciousness, do I love Thee, Lord. Thou hast stricken my heart with Thy word, and I loved Thee. Yea also heaven, and earth, and all that therein is, behold, on every side they bid me love Thee; nor cease to say so unto all, that they may be without excuse. But more deeply wilt Thou have mercy on whom Thou wilt have mercy, and wilt have compassion on whom Thou hast had compassion: else in deaf ears do the heaven and the earth speak Thy praises.

But what do I love, when I love Thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of flesh.

None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement when I love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain, and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not, and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love when I love my God.

And what is this? I asked the earth, and it answered me, “I am not He”; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, “We are not thy God, seek above us.” I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, “Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God. “ I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, “Nor (say they) are we the God whom thou seekest.” And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: “Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him.” And they cried out with a loud voice, “He made us.“

My questioning them, was my thoughts on them: and their form of beauty gave the answer. And I turned myself unto myself, and said to myself, “Who art thou?” And I answered, “A man.” And behold, in me there present themselves to me soul, and body, one without, the other within.

By which of these ought I to seek my God? I had sought Him in the body from earth to heaven, so far as I could send messengers, the beams of mine eyes. But the better is the inner, for to it as presiding and judging, all the bodily messengers reported the answers of heaven and earth, and all things therein, who said, “We are not God, but He made us.”

These things did my inner man know by the ministry of the outer: I the inner knew them; I, the mind, through the senses of my body. I asked the whole frame of the world about my God; and it answered me, “I am not He, but He made me.

{A note if you’re reading The Stoke: I took this version of the passage that I read on the podcast from an earlier translation of The Confessions found on the CCEL website. If you want to get a hold of a copy of the translation I’ve used for many years, the one from which I read, you can find it HERE.}

The spiritual pursuit of knowing God can sometimes be detoured with the things of this world. We can get sidetracked by beautiful things, by the rewards of power and status, we can fall into the trap of spiritual superiority, and we can replace God with the trappings of this world.

Later on, Augustine answers his own question of, “Who is the God that I seek?” He says, “God is for you the life of your life.” All the beautiful things Augustine encountered in nature pointed to the one who made them. God gave every living thing and creature life. He is quite literally for us, the “life of our life.”

And so it is this divine life, the life within our life, that he seeks and pursues. It is the joy that comes, not from a happy circumstance, but from the contentment that can only be found in the spiritual food of loving and worshipping God.

Here’s a quick hack for discovering the life of your life.

Name the things that have replaced the joy you experience from worshipping God with your whole heart. Augustine says that there is a joy found in worshipping God for no other reason, no other reward except for the joy that God is to them—the life of their life. So, ask yourself, “What has replaced my joy of worshipping God?”

And this will be hard for some of us. Because we don’t like to admit it when we’ve been detoured in our faith journey. We don’t like to admit that we really don’t find joy in worshipping God anymore.

But do not despair my friends. We all fall prey to the trappings of this world from time to time and at varying levels. There is no one who is good, Jesus said.

But this does not give us a spiritual get out of jail free card. God loves us, and pursues us. He is worthy of our praise and worship. Happy is the person who finds life in their life, who finds joy in the simple act of worshipping God alone.

So, take a moment before your worship service and if you need to, take a spiritual breath of air and reorient your gaze away from the detours of this world back to the face of God himself, the life of your life.

Stay stoked my friends.