The past few months have been an overwhelming experience of God’s kindness. Certainly, for the Christian, God’s kindness to us in Christ is constant. Yet there are seasons in this life where God’s kindness escapes the boundaries of fact and overflows in abundance into felt experience. This has been one of those seasons for me. Experiences of God’s kindness have so compounded that I broke down under their weight—in a coffee shop nonetheless.
I wrote these words as a sort of reflection turned devotion. The language may seem a bit excessive, but such is the language that stirs my soul. There is something about the language of the Puritans, of Spurgeon and Whitfield and Edwards that, though verbose, seems to reach humbly to into the heavens to lay hold of and give expression to the eternal. I have adopted it as a sort of devotional language, and I have found it works both to give expression to my delight in God and to call it forth. This is written out of the former, but as it can accomplish the latter, we can be glad together in the kindness of God.
This will be the final proof and final manifestation of God’s grace towards us in Christ—kindness.
How rich and bountiful the kindness of God. Surely it is coming in unabated, unveiled, unmediated abundance in the coming age. This, the Apostle tells us, will be the final proof and final manifestation of God’s grace towards us in Christ—kindness. The mind can scarcely comprehend it. Holy and divine kindness raining down incessantly—a rain from which we will not seek shelter but instead run out to greet with pure childlike joy. O, to have no need of shelter from the One whose holiness sets ablaze in judgement any trace and hint of sin. O, to feel no need to escape the torrent of His presence but rather be glad to be swept away by its current. O, to be invited near to Him dressed in the garments of heirship that we might be met only with the happy kindness of the Father. O, to enjoy forever the very experience we least deserve, the experience unrivaled and unmatched throughout all time and eternity, the experience of the eternal Son begotten of the Father, the experience of God’s kindness. And O, to enjoy this kindness even now. Though it is just a taste, it satisfies. Though it is just a glimpse, it excites. And when it seems but a flickering flame fighting to endure the darkness, it calls us Godward, lifting our weary head and stirring our weary soul with its quiet embrace that offers to hold us ever nearer, ever longer, until the day we know and experience nothing but God’s kindness.
