Wednesday with Words: On Christ's Sacrifice

I recently finished reading Surprised by Oxford, the story of Carolyn Weber's discovery of Christ during her first year as a graduate student in English literature at Oxford University.   Wonderful, thought provoking book.  You'll have to pardon me if I actually spend the next several weeks quoting from it, as I highlighted more than I could share in one post (at least if I expect anyone to actually read it!)   Today's collection of quotes all relate to Christ and His sacrifice for us – snippets from her thoughts and conversations as she began to explore the truth of Christianity.

 

"You say that you can't believe in a God who would sacrifice His only perfect Child for all of His imperfect ones.  I used to think the same thing.  But reading the Bible has required me to consider how, in extending us grace, God not only sacrificed Himself, but something even dearer than Himself.  He went for the whole nine yards and then some.  Not a precise and petty measure, Mom, but an overflow, an outpouring of abundance, as I've seen you do for us."

 

"And yet…something kept fluttering beneath its surface, anchored by the undeniable authority of the final line: 'Take off the grave clothes and let him go."  There was no other way to put it than to say that I detected something bigger happening here:  A love that turns back to a place of danger to retrieve its beloved.  A love that illustrates itself in acts and words and trust.  A love at work in the seen and the unseen.  A love that weeps over us, releases us, raises us, removes our grave clothes, and tells us we are free to go.

Do you believe this?

An upstart love.  A radical love.  An uncontainable, indefinable, incomprehensible

  love.  A love that invites and defies and eternally transforms."

 

"Christ offered a bridge over the gap I felt, sitting there on the floor, between myself and my own soul.  Between my God and me.  I wanted to know God and to be known by Him – a relationship so intimate that there was no space between Him and my soul."

 

"Suffering.  Emotion.  Love.  Devotion.  That passion could hold all these meanings in the confines of one word.  And God would take my passions and use them as a means to fill me with His true passion.  As He can and will do for all of us, if we allow Him."

 

            ~Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

 

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