For those of you who are sadly not in the Enison/Riley/Ciganek small group… Here’s an excerpt from our reference commentary on Genesis:
The Eden mandate calls us to the narrow way of self-sacrificing service, of purity, of practicing God’s presence minute by minute, of worship and adoration. It does not call for a method; it calls for a lifestyle. It does not call for establishing a devotional time to touch base with God before we go on with our day; it calls for an attitude that fills our day with God. Too often, our ‘devotional’ time with God serves as an excuse to neglect him the rest of the day. Instead, it should help us set the course for being continually mindful of him. Brother Lawrence again challenges us through his life:
“I have read many books on how to go to God and how to practice the spiritual life. It seems these methods serve more to puzzle me than to help, for what I sought after was simply how to become wholly God’s. So I resolved to give all for ALL. Then I gave myself wholly to God; I renounced everything that was not His. I did this to deal with my sins, and because of my love for Him. I began to live as if there was nothing, absolutely nothing but Him. So upon this earth I began to seek to live as though there were only the Lord and me in the whole world.”
What if we fail in this high ideal? What if godliness is fleeting and the presence of God is buried so deeply in our souls that we feel we wander the deserts of the Vanity Fairs of this world far from anything we can identify as sacred space in our lives? Then we must know that God calls us back, guides us, and helps our prayers as we seek to find our way home to the garden.
Master, they say that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
Since you make no replies, it’s all a dream
–One talker aping two.
They are half right, but not as they
Imagine, rather I
Seek in myself the things I mean to say,
And lo! The wells are dry.
Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
The Listener’s role, and through
My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew.
And thus you neither need reply
Nor can; thus, while we seem
Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
No dreamer, but thy dream.
Yet in the end, we must confess that we know less of Eden than of the lands east of Eden.
~
(From The NIV Application Commentary by Dr. John Walton, poem by CS Lewis, Brother Lawrence “Practicing the Presence of God”)
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