The Facilitative Layer

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: (Eph 2:8 KJV)

We love him, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19 KJV)


I like big words, even though my wife is always telling me to avoid them. Blogs provide an excellent opportunity to show off one's vocabulary. So what do I mean by the title 'facilitative layer?' I mean 'empowering foundation'. Is that clearer??

What I want to get across is that Christianity, correctly understood, is more about enabling us than it is about making demands on us. We will always require God as our source, and God wants people who know it and are happy to acknowledge it. Our inflated sense of pride and originality must die.

We cannot invent ourselves. God already decided who we are. We cannot first love. We must first be loved. We cannot first forgive. We must be forgiven. We cannot first bless. We must first be blessed.

In other words, we need the supernatural reality of God to break in to our natural lives with blessing, enabling and power. Christianity as dead precepts apart from the power and reality of the living God is misleading, disappointing and empty, if not quite totally useless.

The disciples were first instructed to wait and receive. We need to get this basic level of dependancy sorted out within us. We need to be children properly before we can really grow up, indeed before we will really want to grow up, rather than just look grown up. We need to expect, and to allow, God to lavish good things on us. If we ask for an egg, we will not get a scorpion.