God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best

Let no one undervalue the difficulty of God

George MacDonald

Let no soul think that to say God undertook a hard labor in willing that many sons and daughters should be sharers of the divine nature, is to abate His glory!

The greater the difficulty, the greater is the glory of Him who does the thing He has undertaken — without shadow of compromise, with no half-success, but with a triumph of absolute satisfaction to innumerable radiant souls! He knew what it would cost! — not energy of will alone, or merely that utterance and separation from himself which is but the first of creation, though that may well itself be pain — but sore suffering such as we cannot imagine, and could only be God’s, in the bringing out, call it birth or development, of the God-life in the individual soul — a suffering still renewed, a labor thwarted ever by that soul itself, compelling Him to take, still at the cost of suffering, the not absolutely best, only the best possible means left him by the resistance of His creature.

Humans find it hard to get what they want, because they do not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and humans will not take it.

His wounds bring sons and daughters to glory

How deep the Father's love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure
How great the pain of searing loss
the Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to Glory!

Selah.

A human contradiction and divine constancy

To a place of delight and joy

It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things; but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.

C.S. Lewis

One can easily understand a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when grown men and women are afraid of the light.

Plato

Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.

Psalm 37:4

Why is it that we so often flee what is good for us... quietly avoiding that place were our true selves meet true intention? If our original rebellion cost God crucifixion, is it also true that the return to our true selves costs us an inner agreement with crucifixion, on a personal level that we unconsciously flee?

And yet, such agreement is good for us -- that which we flee is our best interest! It is light for darkness, clarity for greyness, abundance for barrenness...

Thankfully, as George MacDonald says, "God is easy to please but hard to satisfy."

He will bring us to the place were our desires are His desires, and in that place, the desires of our heart will be known...

True meaning, undying Joy!

Selah.

Obedience as the other side of the Creative will

George MacDonald

When a man can and does entirely say, Not my will, but Thine be done – when he so wills the will of God as to do it – then he is one with God, one as a true son with a true father.

God’s life within him is the causing and bearing of his life. It is therefore absolutely and only of its kind, one with it more and deeper than words or figures can say. It is the life which is itself, only more of itself, and, more than that, which causes itself. When a man wills that his being is conformed to that Being of his origin, which is the life in his life, when a man thus accepts his own causing Life, and sets himself to live the will of that causing Life, humbly eager after the privileges of his origin, he thus receives God’s life into himself. He becomes, in the act, a partaker of the divine nature, a true son of the Living God, and an heir of all He possesses. By the obedience of a son, he receives into himself the very life of the Father.

Obedience is the joining of the links of the eternal round. Obedience is but the other side of the Creative will: Will is God's will, obedience is man’s will. The two make one. The root Life, knowing well the thousand troubles it would bring upon Him, has created, and goes on creating, other lives, that though incapable of self-being they may, by willed obedience, share in the bliss of His essential self-ordained being.

If we do the will of God, eternal life is ours – no mere continuity of existence, for that in itself is worthless as hell, but a being that is one with the essential Life.

George MacDonald, Your Life in Christ: The Nature of God and His Work in Human Hearts, 80.