The more and more I study and read, the more and more I see how sin has completely twisted and warped God's creation, and his intentions for the way things should have been.
Tonight I was reading about how mankind settles for far less than God's intended best. Though we see and know that God promises good to us, we so often settle for less. We know that if we deny ourselves here on earth so as to do God's will, then there will be a far greater reward for us in heaven. So why do we not lay down all that keeps us from God's best, and work to please Him and do His will? Because we are sinful! How great will heaven be that we will see God's best, and not settle anymore for the mundane.
Here are a couple of passages for your good pleasure:
Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy has been offered to us. We are far too easily pleased, like an ignorant child who goes on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea.C.S. Lewis
If there be so certain and glorious a rest for the saints, why is there no more industrious seeking after it? One would think, if a man did once hear of such unspeakable glory to be obtained, and believed what he heard to be true, he should be transported with the vehemency of his desire after it, and should almost forget to eat and drink, and should care for nothing else, and speak and inquire of nothing else, but how to get his treasure. And yet people who hear of it daily, and profess to believe it as a fundamental article of their faith, do as little mind it, or labour for it, as if they had never heard of any such thing, or did not believe in the word they hear.
Richard Baxter
How many of the "Great is your reward in Heavens" do we forget, and never act on because we are too busy settling for sess than God's best?
Hopper painted things that he saw everyday. He painted them in a way to draw interest to them. He saw ordinary things as extrordinary. He painted everything in sort of a "white-washed" fashion. Everything is sterile and clean.
