With the Eye of Faith: Meditations and Prayers

By Patrick Sookhdeo

This is a delightful collection of Christian mediations and prayers that will help the reader encounter God and His love in a variety of situations, whether in good times or bad and in particular in despair, loneliness, rejection, or imminent death. These are very personal and intimate reflections, in a variety of styles both Western and Eastern, with a major focus on finding hope and comfort in suffering and finding peace by resting in God's presence. This book would make an ideal gift.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781952450112

Book preview

2020

Introduction

What is the purpose of human existence?

God has created us in His own Divine image and although sin and rebellion have marred the image there still exists within us that fundamental desire for our Creator. This is the tragedy of the human race. We turned against Him who made us. We rebelled against the command of the One who gave us our very existence. We rejected the Source of all life in order to eat forbidden fruit, only to find it brought no satisfaction. We are left with a longing that will be satisfied with nothing but God Himself, a thirst that cannot be quenched except by immersing ourselves in Him.

Human beings’ primary desire is for happiness and fulfilment, but these can only truly be found in a relationship with Him who made us in His image. Augustine, writing from North Africa in the late fourth century, was right in affirming that God has made us for Himself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him. It can be stated further that our hearts will find no happiness until that broken relationship is restored and we live as it were in our primordial state in Eden. There our first parents existed in an unbroken relationship with their Maker. There they enjoyed an intimate communion with Him. There they experienced perfect bliss and a satisfaction that desired nothing else. What is it we seek but to return to Eden, which was closed to us when they embraced wrong desires and so created the emptiness and longing which all subsequent generations have experienced – the longing that nothing but God can satisfy, the emptiness which nothing but He can fill?

What is salvation but a return to Eden, a restoration of broken relationship, a renewal of the Divine image? The seed of the woman shall crush the serpent’s head – and so He did, on the cross. For in His death He defeated Satan, sin and death and thereby lifted death’s curse. Adam’s seed can now rise with Him to victory. Eden is again open to us. Intimacy with our Creator God is re-established. We can begin to experience the blissful blessedness of which Jesus spoke in the Beatitudes.

And yet the insatiable longing continues throughout our earthly lives, even after we have turned to God in repentance. For the more we have of Him, the more we want of Him.

More than twelve centuries after Augustine, on another continent, English and Scottish theologians and parliamentarians formulated a catechism for children that asserted: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.¹

So the God we love is not only our rest and peace but also our joy and delight.

Made in the image of God, imago dei, we have souls and consciences. We humans, alone in all creation, have been made with the capacity to know God and have a relationship with Him. It is only we who have restless hearts longing to find their rest in Him. While all creation can bring Him glory, only humans can enjoy God.

We are not only made by God, we are made for God. We are incomplete without Him. Hence our longing for our Beloved, a longing to fill ourselves with Him, delight ourselves in Him, refresh ourselves in Him, and rest our restless hearts in Him.

To spend time in His presence is the essence of meditative prayer. The more we do so, the more we find the peace and joy we are made for. As a cow slowly chews the cud, gradually extracting nutrition and goodness from the grass she grazed, so we chew again and again on God’s Word, on His Divine Logos who is His eternal Son, letting His Spirit feed our souls, as more and more depths are revealed to us. This meditation leads us to the contemplation and adoration of our Beloved, the Lord Jesus Christ, in Whom we find the ultimate bliss that satisfies all our desires. And the more we contemplate Him in silent love, the more we reflect Him.

The apostle Paul describes how the desire to know Christ was his driving motivation and passion:

I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord … I want to know Christ (Philippians 3:8,10)

We can find similar blessing by chewing on the words of other believers – their hymns and songs, their prayers and other writings. Human experience is richly diverse. Various Church traditions have opened to believers many ways of stilling their restless hearts and kindling their spiritual joy. Christians of different cultures naturally have different starting points in their encounter with God. As we grow in our Christian lives, and