Implausible Love

“And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you.” 

Matthew 6:18

Do you ever think that God has a record book, and he puts down all our bad deeds and our good deeds? Sometimes I wish He had one, where everything is accounted for. But when I wish this, it’s usually for counting what corrupt politicians do in secret, and the ones who spread fake news, the ones who molest baby girls and kidnap them and make them sex slaves. 😭

But this verse in the 6th chapter of Matthew is about good deeds not bad. We should give alms, pray, and fast in secret, not show off. Then God will reward us. If we tell others about what we are doing, we have already been repaid, Jesus warns. Many have called praying privately, communing with God, “closet prayer”. Thomas Brooks said this was a “secret key to heaven”. Prayer is absolutely vital to a human being. We need to pray as much as we need to breathe! 

I love what St. Augustine wrote, “Prayer is the encounter of God's thirst with ours." Indeed God thirsts for us to be close to Him, hungers for our love, waits for our communication. We will never encounter a God like Him in other religions or in the atheistic mindset because He is implausible. How can we hold in our mind a God who is timeless but entered time, all powerful but allowed Himself to be weak and tortured by the very creatures He came to save? Implausible. 

This God can see everything hidden in our “tortuous hearts” as it says in Jeremiah 17:9. Our hearts are beyond remedy, because God in His love for us, gave us the free will to choose for Him or against Him! That same love inspired Francis Thompson to compare God to the hound of heaven, even though we flee from Him, “I am he whom Thou seekest!” 

St. Paul wrote the Romans, “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39) Thank You Father for Your implausible love!