SolaFire

Human thinking makes God’s grace out to be a puny thing.

God’s gracious forgiveness seems worthless to each of us when we do not know Christ. “After all,” each of us reasons, “I am already a pretty good person. If God is at all perceptive, He should be yearning for the chance to jump down from Heaven to love and accept me, just as I am. Indeed, if God does not do so, the fault lies with God’s inability to perceive my obvious virtue, not my own lack of it.”

Then we are  shown the truth of out own sinfulness and lack of merit before God. We reluctantly admit to needing God’s forgiveness after all. We come to seeing this need as satisfied only in what God can do and what He will do entirely apart from our efforts or merit. At this point, our natural reaction is to futher diminish God’s grace in forgiveness. What comes freely, we tend to regard lightly.

Life is a gift to each of us. There is no person alive who did anything to earn his own birth or bring it about. No one decided to be born. Not a one of us created the circumstances of his own conception or convinced his mother to carry him to term. Life was a gift that cost each of us nothing. Yet, even the dullest of us would admit that life is precious.

God’s grace is likewise a gift that none of us can earn or bring about. We cannot take it; by definition it is given. We cannot create the circumstances for it to be bestowed, for indeed the Giver decides that. God declares “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.” (Exodus 33:19, Romans 9:15). Even so, it is precious and beyond value.

Let us guard against any thought or inclination that takes grace for granted or esteems it as meager. Such concepts will intrude upon our understanding sooner or later, usually subtly and quietly. We must be vigilant in our thought and speech to always regard God’s grace as a spectacular and marvelous aspect of His character. It is clear that He does:

But God, being rich in mercy,  because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses,  made us alive together with Christ— by grace you have been saved—   and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,  so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable  riches of his grace in  kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 2:4-7, ESV)

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The electronic-super-highway-interweb world is subtle in its lures. On the internet, the whole purpose of having a website is to attract visitors who will buy your shoddy little goods or read your pathetic little thoughts. (This site, by the way, is completely free of the former, but is up to our metaphorical cheekbones with the latter.)

How do you get the shoddy goods buyers and pathetic thought readers to your electronic door?

Shameless self-promotion.

OK, content is also important. However, you can have the best content on the interweb and still not get the folks to come until you do the self-promotion. Google won’t help you, because Google works on the principle that your site is worth sending someone to if other web sites already have links going to your web site. You have to be known and liked by important people if you want other people to know and like you. It is all very much like high school. It’s also very much like THE WORLD.

Which brings me to why you see a link on our side-bar to Pyromaniacs. We like them. They are estute writers who always find interesting things to say in an insightful way. They have great graphics and do all sorts of satire as well as straight commentary. They have nice pictures to look at when you are tired of reading. We like pictures.

No doubt someday we would have linked to them when we got around to linking to other important sites that we like on the interweb. But we linked to them now because, on the interweb, they matter. A LOT. And, very generously, they are making a limited-time offer that they will link to us if we link to them. If we expect anyone but our best buddies to read anything on this site, we need to do that kind of self-promotion. At least for a while.

So why does it make us feel creepy? Because promoting ourselves is discouraged in Scripture. A LOT.

Now he told a parable to those who were invited, when he noticed how they chose the places of honor, saying to them, “When you are invited by someone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, and he who invited you both will come and say to you, ‘Give your place to this person, and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place.’ But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at table with you. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Luke 14:7-11, ESV)

This site is all about God’s glory, not ours. Our desire is to bring others to understand His marvelous grace and unsurpassible mercy. Our goal is to provide a forum for those who wish to praise His Son and defend the truth of His wonderful Word.

To attract folks to read and contribute, we need to do more than just provide people something inspiring to read or an opportunity to write. We need to let people know we are here. I hope that we will not do so in a way that detracts from God’s glory. Even so, while we do things to promote the site, we might feel just a bit sick to our stomachs.

It is not good to eat much honey,
nor is it glorious to seek one’s own glory.
Prov. 25:27 (ESV)

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