Reflecting On Our New Nature

I’m planning to start sharing a quote, picture, video, or other media on Mondays for reflection.  These will simply be something that I’ve come across that stood out to me as being worth sharing.  I will also suggest some questions for you to consider and answer in the comment section (see questions below).

So here’s the first set of quotes:

In one of his sermons, Phillips Brooks pictures the great Michelangelo standing outside a home while peering through a window where he sees all the tools an artist uses: brushes and paint, canvas and easel, the glow of light and the privacy of space. Upon seeing the opportunity existing there, the great artist then says, “If only I were inside, what a beautiful picture I could paint.” Today, Jesus, the Master Artist is looking into human hearts filled and felled with mistakes and neglect, and he says, “If only I were inside, what a beautiful life I could create – a life greater than all the best qualities of all the best people who ever lived.

Just as the life of the Father perfectly intersected and saturated the life of Jesus-wherein both were mysteriously the same and yet somehow distinct – so this same phenomenon is now at work in believers.

Through the new birth we become bona fide members of the original cosmic family (Ephesians 3:15), actual generated sons of God, (I John 3:2), “partakers of the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4), begotten by him, impregnated with his “genes,” called the seed or “sperma” of God (I John 5:1, 18 and I Peter 1:3, 23), and bearing his heredity.

~ J.W. Phillips in Pursuing the Divine Life: A Study of the New Nature

Questions for Discussion:

What do these quotes mean to you?

What do you think is meant by the phrase “what a beautiful life I could create”?

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Follow the Life!

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Photo Credit

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