We should love God and we should find God in what he simply gives us. When it pleases God to allow us to enjoy an overwhelming earthly happiness, then we should not try to be more religious than God. Proud thoughts that arrogantly provoke God and wild religious fantasies that are never satisfied with the happiness that God gives! We should never let them eat away at our happiness like worms.
When a man finds God in his earthly happiness and thanks him for it, God will not fail to provide those times as well that remind him that everything earthly is only temporary, that it is good to tune one’s heart to eternity, and that finally the hours will not fail in which we can rightly say, “I wish that I were home” . . .
But this all has its time, and the main thing is that one keeps in step with God and doesn’t always try to rush on a step ahead, nor of course to wait a step behind him either. It is arrogance to want to have it all at once—the bliss of marriage and the cross and the heavenly Jerusalem in which there is no husband and wife. “He made everything beautiful in its time (Ecclesiastes 3).”
4b. More Religious than God?
Dec 18, 1943 to Eberhard Bethge (part 2 of 2)
