Midway through my life, I lost my faith. The denomination I was in didn’t help. Eventually, after a dark time, I had a dramatic conversion experience/encounter with the Lord. He picked me up and basically changed not only my religious believing but my life. I started searching for similar experiences in others and encountered CS Lewis. I found that I agreed with him most of the time. And he attributed where he was to George MacDonald’s Phantastes. I got hard copies of Discovering the Character of God and Knowing the Heart of God edited by Michael Phillips. Marked them up and basically memorized passages!!
Eventually I found the George MacDonald Society Facebook group. They steered me to the Unspoken Sermons, which I copied into Word documents. I’ve since written eight books—quoting some GMD in all of them! My website address is http://www.yieldingtochristianity.com.
Have you ever wondered what God’s intention is for humankind?
If you haven’t wondered about His intention, a study of religious history shows that many others have. And they’ve constructed a wide range of conclusions! One end of the spectrum views God as involved and selective, creating man and the universe but limiting the salvation process to an elected few. The other end of the spectrum views God as disinterested and distant, creating man and the universe but leaving them to their own fate without any direct involvement.
God’s intent appears to be something other than either of these extremes…As George MacDonald wrote: “For God is the heritage of the soul of origin. Man is the offspring of his making will, of his very life. God himself is man’s birthplace. God is the self that makes the soul able to say, I too, am. (Unspoken Sermons, “The Truth in Jesus”)
Rather than being a distant, disinterested creator, God “loved the world” (John 3:16). In fact, our Creator “owes” us something. That’s MacDonald’s astounding thought and one I wholly agree with. He writes, “...God owes himself to the creature he has made in his image, for so God has made him incapable of living without him” (Unspoken Sermons, “The Voice of Job”).
God, the Father of us all, didn’t draw back from this obligation into some impersonal, unknowable place. He gave us Christ, His “only begotten Son” (KJ John 3:16) … We began in the birthplace of God’s heart, and the blessing of eternal joy is that we shall end there as well. We will find at last what we yearn for, fully embraced in the Spirit of God. As MacDonald writes, “His whole desire and labor is to make us capable of claiming, and induce us to claim of him the things whose rights he bestowed in creating us” (Unspoken Sermons, “The Voice of Job”). (www.yieldingtochristianity.com)