Lent with the Early Church Fathers Day 7

Day 7

Lent with the Early Church Fathers

A daily post from Tom Bandy 

Based on Day by Day with the Early Church Fathers (Eds. Christopher D. Hudson, J. Alan Sharrer, and Lindsay Vanker: Hendrickson Press, 1999) 

God Knows Us 

Augustine 

You, Lord, are the one who judges me. For although “no one knows [one’s heart], save the spirit … [within them]”, there is something in a person that [his or her own heart] doesn’t know about itself. But you, Lord, who made us, know us completely.  

Although I despise who I am in your sight and consider myself but “dust and ashes” I undeniably know something about you that I do not know about myself. To be sure, “now we see through a glass darkly” and not yet “face-to-face.” So, as long as I am absent from you, I am more present with my body than with you.  

I know that you cannot sin, but I do not know what temptations I can resist and which ones I can’t. But there is hope because you are faithful. You won’t allow us to be tempted beyond what we are able to endure but will always make a way to escape the temptations so that we can bear it.  

Therefore, I will confess what I know about myself. I will also confess what I do not know about myself. What I do know about myself, I know by your enlightenment. And what I do not know about myself, I won’t know until the time when you will see my “darkness as the new day.”  

TGB: We do not really know ourselves … our weaknesses and limitations … and our self-confidence often leads us astray. Yet we do have good reason to hope, because within our nature we see, albeit dimly, the nature of God. God may be beyond reason, but God includes reason. “Now we know in part, and then we shall understand fully, even as we have already been understood.”