George Macdonald

Made For Love
For we are made for love, not for self. Our neighbour is our refuge; self is our demon-foe

Losing of Things
We, too, dull our understandings with trifles, fill the heavenly spaces with phantoms, waste the heavenly time with hurry. When I trouble myself over a trifle, even a trifle confessed – the loss of some little article, say – spurring my memory, and hunting the house, not from immediate need, but from dislike of loss; when a book has been borrowed of me and not returned, and I have forgotten the borrower, and fret over the missing volumes… Is it not time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is of the mercy of God; it comes to teach us to let them go. Or have I forgotten a though that came to me, which seemed of the truth? … I keep trying and trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till that though be recovered to be far more lost, perhaps, in a notebook, into which I shall never look again to find it! I forgot it is live things God cares about.

Appealing to God in your deepest need
With every haunting trouble then, great or small, the loss of thousands or the lack of a shilling, go to God … If your trouble is such that you cannot appeal to Him, the more need you should appeal to Him!

Love needs no reason
Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can he given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons are always from above downwards. A man must just feel this necessity, and then questioning is over. It justifies itself. But he who has not felt has it not to argue about. He has but its phantom, which he created himself in a vain effort to understand, and which he supposes to be it. – George Macdonald

Self is our enemy
For we are made for love, not for self. Our neighbour is our refuge; self is our demon-foe.

It is with the holiest fear that we should approach the terrible fact of the sufferings of our Lord. Let no one think that those were less because he was more. The more delicate the nature, the more alive to all that is lovely and true, lawful and right, the more does it feel the antagonism of pain, the inroad of death upon life; the more dreadful is that breach of the harmony of things whose sound is torture. He felt more than man could feel, because he had a larger feeling. He was even therefore worn out sooner than another man would have been. These sufferings were awful indeed when they began to invade the region about the will; when the struggle to keep consciously trusting in God began to sink in darkness; when the Will of The Man put forth its last determined effort in that cry after the vanishing vision of the Father: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Never had it been so with him before. Never before had he been unable to see God beside him. Yet never was God nearer him than now. For never was Jesus more divine. He could not see, could not feel him near; and yet it is “My God” that he cries.

Perfected Faith
Thus the Will of Jesus, in the very moment when his faith seems about to yield, is finally triumphant. It has no feeling now to support it, no beatific vision to absorb it. It stands naked in his soul and tortured, as he stood naked and scourged before Pilate. Pure and simple and surrounded by fire, it declares for God. The sacrifice ascends in the cry, My God. The cry comes not out of happiness, out of peace, out of hope. Not even out of suffering comes that cry. It was a cry in desolation, but it came out of Faith. It is the last voice of Truth, speaking when it can but cry. The divine horror of that moment is unfathomable by human soul. It was blackness of darkness. And yet he would believe. Yet he would hold fast. God was his God yet. My God— and in the cry came forth the Victory, and all was over soon. Of the peace that followed that cry, the peace of a perfect soul, large as the universe, pure as light, ardent as life, victorious for God and his brethren, he himself alone can ever know the breadth and length, and depth and height.

Obedience
Will is God’s will, obedience is man’s will; the two make one

No room for ambition
Here there is no room for ambition. Ambition is the desire to be above one’s neighbour; and here there is no possibility of comparison with one’s neighbour: no one knows what the white stone contains except the man who receives it… Relative worth is not only unknown – to the children of the Kingdom it is unknowable.

Do not Worry
The next hour, the next moment is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years—in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything.

Over-analysing
The greatest obscuration of the words of the Lord as of all true teachers comes from those who give themselves to interpret rather than do them. Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ any of it’s adversaries

Love your neighbour
A man must not choose his neighbour; he must take the neighbour that God sends him … The neighbour is just the man next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact

Romans 12:2
‘Be not conformed to this world,’ without once perceiving that what they call Society and bow to as supreme, is the World and nothing else, or that those who mind what people think, and what people will say, are conformed to—that is, take the shape of—the world. The true man feels he has nothing to do with Society as judge or lawgiver: he is under the law of Jesus Christ, and it sets him free from the law of the World.

True Victory
True victory over self is the victory of God in the man, not of the man alone. It is not subjugation that is enough, but subjugation by God. In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably—or succeed more miserably

Love is inexorable
Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but it’s alloy…. For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love it’s fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more, it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected – not in itself, but in the object … Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved , all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.

Spiritual Passivity
When he thinks he has attained, then is he in danger; when he finds the mountain he has so long been climbing show suddenly a distant peak, radiant in eternal whiteness, and all but lost in heavenly places, a peak whose glory- crowned apex it seems as if no human foot could ever reach—then is there hope for him; proof there is then that he has been climbing, for he beholds the yet unclimbed.