COMMITMENT – AN ACT OF THE WILL

[A few years ago there was] a caricature of commitment in that of a haughty grande dame, looking sternly through her spectacles, saying, “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts.” In a culture in which open-mindedness is the greatest virtue, the corresponding vice is, of course, “closed-mindedness.” And this has become confused with commitment. Yet, actually, far from being closed, committed thinking is the product of intellectual vigor. Very often, the lack of commitment indicates the wishy-washiness of intellectual laziness. It is the uncommitted person who lacks the rigor and discipline to really examine, really decide, really make up his mind.

Without commitment, one can acquire knowledge. It is only through commitment that one can apply that knowledge to life and gain Solomon’s desire, an understanding heart. Far from being a retreat from reason, commitment is the most rational thing a person can do. Recognizing the brevity of life, it makes the best sense to survey the options and then make choices; to choose and exercise a set of beliefs that will pattern and give meaning to life; to choose a person with whom a lasting, deepening, and truly intimate relationship can be established; to answer to a vocation with dedication…

Commitment is an act of the will, based on both reason and faith. As such, acts of commitment mark us as most fully human.

“Choose this day whom you will serve,… but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”  (Joshua 24:15 NRSV) 

-- Maxine Hancock in “Re-evaluating Your Commitments: How to Strength the Permanent and Reassess the Temporary”

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LOVE BEYOND REASON

“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the LORD's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge -- that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”  (Ephesians 3:17b-19 NIV)

There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation. This is love beyond reason. This is the love of God.

-- John Ortberg


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DIVINE REVELATION

"Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path." (Psalm 119:105 NLT)


You meet a thousand times in life with those who, in dealing with any religious question, make at once their appeal to reason, and insist on… rejecting [what] lies beyond its sphere -- without, however, being able to render any clear account of the nature and proper limits of the knowledge thus derived,… I would invite you, therefore, to inquire seriously whether such persons are not really bowing down before an idol of the mind, which, while itself of very questionable worth, demands as much implicit faith from its worshipers as divine revelation itself.


-- Theodor Christlieb




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