A Poem of Personal Doubt by Adam Lambdin
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
– Matthew 6:26
We may represent behavior as static, a state of being,
But God is self-sufficient, not transient, as we are finite and do fail.
Not far from us, God is near, though we grope for Him with untrained ear.
But like sparrows, we ebb and flow in nature’s circuits.
The Spirit moves in wider fullness, bringing life and light
to us, His creatures, finite and bound.
Are we ever free again, at large, never brought down?
I will ask it plainly…
“Does God care more for Sparrows but not as much for me?”
I am drowned by my own impudence, and I lack consistency.
So where is my own life, so I can lose it now to gain a new one,
The prize being found in Him, and towards His perfections alone?
I find a principle from God’s sure testimony:
If I identify as “dead in sin,” must I then trespass again?
For by these thoughts of mine, am I thus crowned an
Inaugurate in “suspended purgatory,” finding not the truest Edenic rest.
How am I blessed herein? …being unimpressed with all that’s in me?
I also nit-pick, all-the-time, my own contrived sincerity!
But recovering here, a dismissive thought, I accept it now as new again:
“It’s just the guilt that draws me ‘neath His tree.”
What?! No grander thing to see!?
I could not scale the highest walls nor plumb the deepest seas!
I entered no discipline nor scholastic halls. It is only I,
With a Father, who was pleased to crush the one pure man instead of me.
Such grave dictums are likewise directed to those who would believe:
“Would we choose His favor, owe Him all to gain this deathly prize?”
But not to condescend in penitence as if obliging Him,
nor can you keep the law as well, as if you ne’er needed Him!
But coming candidly to the Great Physician, He cuts with skill those festered wounds
So He can heal your maladies, both physical and spiritual.
So, I daily seek Edenic rest, not in might, but by His Spirit alone.
He bore the burden we could not! So I can humbly bow,
For He provides entirely for us, knowing one day His true holistic call.
To repeat! I have done nothing at all! He has done it all for me
In an ancient world at “the place of the skull.”
Leaving many there with fullest awe, He quells our fears, and wipes away our tears.
None truly knows by experience a quality that loves as this, being excluded by all.
I guess a common Sparrow might die for several reasons while caged.
But this is what we feel when singled out, feeling at once
Both scapegoat and priestly reign. For neither causes though, in fact,
Can any of us claim our Lord’s perfections, of heart nor His great authentic worth.
For He has done it all! Though we His creatures, as if stimulus-response,
we downwards falter ad infinitum, falling further and faster,
As we fester, displacing ourselves from Eden’s Maker.
Though you excuse yourself with building cities and great projected feats,
These just curtail your fight with personal worth and self-fulfilling girth.
Yet Jesus is the author and perfector of a greater call.
He created all, and He will judge you and I, both great in heart and small!
Nor is a Father’s sovereign grace found questionable,
Though you excuse your lack as, by necessity, just “my natural fault.”
But I will look on Christ, who is the antitype to the serpent lifted up.
Take up your cross, then, follow Him! For The Lord Himself has echoed
a prophet of “unclean-lips” who said, “A bruised reed he will not break!”
Until we rise again to walk with Him, in His presence, made fully whole.
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