Exhortation

If you stop breathing for a few minutes, you’ll die. If you don’t eat or drink for a time, you’ll die. You are porous. Bits of the world go in and out of you all the time. If they stop, you can’t last long.

This physical fact is a clue to what it means to be human. We are dependent creatures ultimately dependent on God. Man does not live by bread alone. We live only because the Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, continuously gives life.

It’s humbling to realize we need something outside us to stay alive. But it it’s also our glory, a trace of God’s own life in us.

God doesn’t depend on anything outside Himself, but the Persons of the Trinity are dependent on one another. The Father is Father only because He has a Son, the Son is Son because of the Father. Both live by the eternal breath of the Spirit, who proceeds dependently from the Father and Son.

Our original sin is pride. We think and act as if our ideal state is to be free from God and one another. Husbands act as if they don’t need wives; children think they don’t need parents; families withdraw into isolated compounds where they believe they can be truly free. In all this, we refuse to acknowledge we are hungry beings who live by bread from the hand of God. We deny our glory, that are porous creatures made in the image of a porous God.