There is no greater paradox in the cosmos,” the deceased had written, “than the apparent contradiction of our helplessness (‘without me, you can do nothing’) alongside God’s ‘helplessness.’ Oh, I know, God is all-powerful, and so on; but he cannot undo what he has done, and what he once did was to make men free. This means that he ‘needs’ us in order to get us to Heaven as his lovers, and in order to do his will in the world. All we have to do in order to frustrate those wishes — to render God ‘helpless’ — is to say No. But God is not helpless, really, because he has mercy — himself. And what mercy does is convert, change our hearts. Which God never stops trying to do until we are dead. This means continued suffering for him, which is what Christ is all about.” Young
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In one sense there will be something difficult even for God — namely, that which He has not done — not because He could not, but because He would not, do it. For with God, to be willing is to be able, and to be unwilling is to be unable; all that He has willed, however, He has both been able to accomplish, and has displayed His ability.
Some people begin to feel that things are pointless, that they’re helpless or worthless, or that no matter what they try they’ll lose anyway. These are a set of beliefs that must never be indulged in if we ever expect to succeed and achieve in our lives. These beliefs strip us of our personal power and destroy our ability to act. In psychology, there is a name for this destructive mindset: learned helplessness. When people experience enough failure at something — and you’d be surprised how few times this is for some people — they perceive their efforts as futile and develop the terminal discouragement of learned helplessness.
Dear Child of God, I write these words because we all experience sadness, we all come at times to despair, and we all lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in the world will ever end. I want to share with you my faith and my understanding that this suffering can be transformed and redeemed. There is no such thing as a totally hopeless case. Our God is an expert at dealing with chaos, with brokenness, with all the worst that we can imagine. God created order out of disorder, cosmos out of chaos, and God can do so always, can do so now — in our personal lives and in our lives as nations, globally. ... Indeed, God is transforming the world now — through us — because God loves us.
You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry. . . . PSALM 10:17 OCTOBER 1 As long as you live, no situation is hopeless. As long as you have life and God, as long as you have Christ and your own intelligence, why should any situation be hopeless? It is because you don’t believe in yourself anymore, and you don’t really believe in God or in Jesus Christ. Actually, you don’t believe in life itself. Start believing and get strength, such as is promised you, from God, who is good. The statesman Mirabeau, whose clear thinking influenced the course of the French Revolution, once said, “Nothing is impossible to the man who can will.” I believe that. What is will? It is the determination, the commitment, that you will do something. “ Nothing is impossible to the man who can will.” To have strong will, it must be backed up by faith. So strengthen that will of yours by strengthening your faith. God is good. He is a tower of strength. And He listens to you. So instead of regarding an unsatisfactory situation as hopeless, face it with a will. Then you can change it.
A man who but rarely, and then only cursorily, concerns himself with his relationship to God, hardly thinks or dreams that he has so closely to do with God, or that God is so close to him, that there exists a reciprocal relationship between him and God, the stronger a man is, the weaker God is, the weaker a man is, the stronger God is in him. Every one who assumes that a God exists naturally thinks of Him as the strongest, as He eternally is, being the Almighty who creates out of nothing, and for whom all the creation is as nothing; but such a man hardly thinks of the possibility of a reciprocal relationship. And yet for God, the infinitely strongest, there is an obstacle; He has posited it Himself, yea, He has lovingly, with incomprehensible love posited it Himself; for He posited it and posits it every time a man comes into existence, when He in His love makes to be something directly in apposition to Himself. Oh, marvelous omnipotence of love! A man cannot bear that his ‘creations’ should be directly in apposition to Himself, and so he speaks of them in a tone of disparagement as his ‘creations’. But God who creates out of nothing, who almightily takes from nothing and says, ‘Be’, lovingly adjoins, ‘Be something even in apposition to me.’ Marvellous love, even His omnipotence is under the sway of love!
Why did God not immediately disappear into nothingness, if he wished to no longer be? One must ascribe omnipotence to God, for his power was unlimited; consequently, if he had willed to no longer be, he would have exterminated himself at once; instead, the universe of multiplicity arose, a universe of struggle, which is a manifest contradiction. How does one explain this? ... God existed alone, in absolute solitude and, consequently, it is correct to maintain that he was not limited by anything external; his power was, in this sense, omnipotent, since nothing outside of him limited it. However, his power was not omnipotent regarding himself, or in other words: his power could not destroy itself; the simple unity could not cease to exist by itself. God had the freedom to be as he willed; however, he was not free from his determinate essence.
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