Patience and Advent
Christian realism---Patience. James 5:7-10 JI Packer is his book Knowing God says this in his chapter, “ These inward trials”: “…. Unreality in religion is an accursed thing. ….Unreality towards God is the wasting disease of much modern Christianity. We need God to make us realists about both ourselves and Him. Perhaps there is a word for us in the famous hymn in which John Newton describes the passage into the kind of realism that we have been seeking to induce, ‘ I asked the Lord, that I might grow In faith, and love, and every grace; Much more of His salvation know, And seek more earnestly His face. I hoped that in some favoured hour At once He’d answer my request, And by His love’s constraining power Subdue my sins, and give me rest. Instead of this, He made me feel The hidden evils of my heart; A