Sigur Rós – Skel

Compromise in a relationship often means living with small, strategic half-truths about ourselves—seemingly necessary lies that help maintain a sense of unity. Yet beneath these polite deceptions lies something far more unsettling: the chaotic, out-of-control influences we exert on others long before we have paused to reflect on whether we should indulge our fleeting desires for every kind of sin. What we imagine to be private, insignificant impulses are actually laid bare to those around us—whole truths that others see more clearly than we do ourselves. Our “goodness,” then, too easily becomes an illusion we try to maintain, even though it strains against these deeper, often darker realities.

On a broader scale, this predicament resonates in spiritual work as well. Consider missionaries: how many of them truly see double-digit converts each year? And in what contexts do such fruitful labors happen? Is it the Spirit genuinely convicting hearts, or is it the force of a personality deemed authoritative? A certain education, combined with a particular temperament, might make conversion more probable—but providentially, entire people groups sometimes remain closed off to the Gospel. Culture, history, and social patterns can create barriers that, from our viewpoint, seem unassailable. Yet the same query applies to prayer: if we measure success by the tangible outcomes we desire, we miss the deeper truth. It is not about tallying responses or quantifying conversions.

The frustration emerges when we contrast our own meager results with the New Testament church—where conversions came in great waves, so frequently that the Spirit’s hand was undeniable. Is it truly the same Spirit now? Why does His work seem subtler, even elusive? The answer, though unsettling, also sets us free. When we realize everything is to God’s glory, the pressure lifts. Even if our words go unheard by the masses, God is still glorified when we speak His truth. This is the essence of soli Deo gloria.

Paradoxically, this same tension surfaces when we think of the “great books”—those storied tomes we finally read, only to discover that countless commentaries and centuries of secondary literature have overshadowed the original core. Millennia of theological debate and cultural disputes have created storms on the surface of these truths. We want detail, we invent more details, and soon lose sight of the profound simplicity at the heart of Christ reconciling the world to the Father. It is as though fleeting desires—like fleeting intellectual quarrels—mount up and obscure the fundamental answers that generations have sought.

In the midst of this, remember: “De studio theologiae non rixis disputationum sed exercitiis pietatis potius calendo”—the study of theology isn’t meant to be fueled by quarrels but by piety. Don’t overestimate your influence. Our debates and disagreements are surface-level tempests, overshadowing the greater reality of God’s redemptive work. This awareness can bring both humility and relief. It shows us why we ought not to overestimate our impact, while still recognizing how truly helpless we can be when our faults—and the hidden impulses behind them—are sinful and inflict sometimes unseen harm. Ultimately, humility in facing our chaotic depths, coupled with trust in God’s sovereign grace, brings us back to the simple hope we so often bury beneath complexity: Christ alone reconciling us, our fractured relationships, and our world to the Father. God’s glory is eternal, reliable, constant. We are to acknowledge the limits of our influence, the subtlety of our self-deception, and the grandeur of God’s sovereign grace. When we do so, we find the freedom to rest in the unshakeable reality that Christ alone reconciles us to the Father—even when our complexities and hidden impulses threaten to undo us.

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The above pairs well, I hope, with what follows (from one of the masters):

P.T. Forsyth:

“The Way of Life, 1897 A sermon preached especially to students, and more particularly to the freshmen (and women),at Emmanuel Congregational Church, Cambridge,on October 18, 1896. “The wicked have waited for me to destroy me: but I will consider Thy testimonies. I have seen an end of all perfection: but Thy commandment is exceeding broad.” —Psalm 119:95, 96 What the psalmist means is this: all earthly perfection is limited; but God’s law is limitless. It is set in the heavens. It is rooted in the earth. It is higher than the sphere of the sky; beyond the solid dome of the firmament. It is deeper than the depths of earth; none can dig through and pass beyond it. It is deeper even than Sheol which is under the earth—“If I make my bed in hell, Thou art there.”309 It is broader than the sea; beyond the horizon the reign of this law goes. The whole passage is like a piece from a modern scientific poem, glorifying the universality of law, or the majesty of cosmic order and stability. Beyond all the forms of power that we see there is a world of power unseen, inexhaustible—a realm of law complete and infinite, embracing all the finite and partial laws which seem to us to clash and break. No sooner does a thing come to perfection than it begins to succumb to decay and death. No sooner do we reach one goal than another range rises on our sight. But there is a perfection that does not wither, and a law that succumbs to no other law. It is the perfection of the Eternal, who is above all change and embraces it. It is the law of the Almighty, which limits all law and itself is limited by none and cut short by none. That is a great inspiration of the psalmist. What is the inference he draws from it? That which lay in his heart next to the law of God was Israel. He writes anxiously, though inspiredly, faithfully. Israel was in peril. “I am Thine, save me.”310 “The wicked have waited for me to destroy me.” That was Israel speaking in him. He was speaking for Israel. He was thinking, hoping for Israel! And the inference he drew from his inspiration was this: Would the law, the order of God, be so infinitely perfect if He allowed Israel to be destroyed, the Israel who honoured and prized that law in their worship and in all their national hopes and dreams? Well, we have the history behind us and clear, which for the psalmist was still future and dark. We read centuries of national doom, and centuries of scientific progress. We know from the science and thought that the law and order of God are vaster than the psalmist dreamed, more stable and more broad. And we also know that Israel fell, and fell by its very worship of that law which the psalmist trusted for its endless security. He thought it linked Israel with all the stabilities of nature, conscience, and soul. I. Inspiration and Inference I beg you to notice, then, as the first suggestion from the text, the difference there may be in the Bible itself between inspiration and inference. It is an important thing when we come to interpret the Bible. The psalmist’s inspiration was right. The law, order, plan, and purpose of God is infinitely broad. And because infinitely broad it is eternally stable. Being so broad, it includes under its control every power which could possibly rise up against it. And being master of every hostile power, of course it is eternally stable and sure. It was the spirit and law of God that taught the psalmist this certainty about itself. The inspiration of the Almighty gave him understanding. But when it came to inference he was on different ground. His inference was that Israel’s law and Israel’s constitution were for ever indispensable to the vast designs and infinite purposes of God. He thought, like any Anglican or Roman Judaist, that his Church, his ritual, his priesthood was for ever bound up with the well-being and continuance of the world, material and spiritual. That is an inference which history has upset. Not only does the world get on very well without Judaism, but Judaism has to be destroyed that the world may get on, that the law of God may be made truly spiritual and infinite, and the soul redeemed to feel its greatness and its eternity. Do not forget that in the Bible we have a mixture of inspiration and inference. And it is the great task laid on us in its study today to distinguish and separate these two. The great contribution which God has demanded from our age to the Bible is that we save its inspiration from its inferences. And the great contribution which He is making to our age by the Bible is to save us from its inferences by its inspiration. For instance, the writers of the Bible believed that God made the world in six days. It was inspiration to believe with their power and glory that God made the world. It was inference (poetic inference if you like) to believe that the world was made in six days without any evolution at all. We have learned on the strength of the inspiration to discard the inference. God has taught us in redeeming the world that He made it. He has taught us that He is Creator by the New Testament in a way that Genesis could not. But He has also taught us by a newer testament still how exceeding broad His making of the world was. It was a limited idea of perfection that supposed it to be done by six successive sweeps of creative power in as many successive days. God’s way with the world was larger. His commanding word was broader. His time and patience with the world were longer. His method was deeper. But His power was no less. There was profound inspiration in the great vision of these six creative words. The idea of a vast creative word is grander than the idea of a great wave of creative power. For a word is the act of a will, and a wave may be but the movement of a force. So the inspiration of Genesis is right. And we hold to it. And it saves us from being much troubled when the inference of Genesis is upset, and evolving ages of creative will take the place of six sudden steps crowded into a week. So in other parts of the Bible. Remember always the difference between passing inference and permanent inspiration, between the spirit of the age and the Spirit of Christ, between local and temporary belief and eternal, ageless faith. II. The Inadequacy of Perfection There is another point I ask you to notice, coming now to the ninety-sixth verse alone. It is an experimental verse. It expresses something the man had found out for himself—the inadequacy of perfection. He had observed, and experienced. He had observed in the course of his life that all visible perfection came to an end, that it was outgrown and left behind, that prosperity had its meridian and then its decline, that there was in all visible perfection some law which was its death sentence. But he had experienced the reality of a law which was final, perfect in itself, not to be outgrown, a complete, eternal, changeless whole, embracing all change, and inspiring all change. It was a law so perfect, that it could not be expressed in any earthly form or any human life. The forms of beauty burst or withered. The loveliest lives were checkered or brief. The finest health was not adequate to the whole power and destiny of the soul within. But the law of God was both perfect and eternal, broad beyond all the finished products of time, stable beyond all the chances of life, adequate to itself always. The loveliest, most perfect flower, statue, woman, or man was at the mercy of a brute with a hammer. But there was a perfection which could make that brute an angel and more. Earth’s perfection first blossoms, then dies. God’s perfection first dies, then blossoms and saves. The psalmist did not see the cross, but the cross was in what the psalmist saw. That was his experience. Now the same result has been borne home to the great human experience in history. There is a kind of perfection that soon perishes, and there is a kind so vast that it hardly seems perfection; but it saves from perishing for ever. There is the perfection of form, which soon reaches its limits and becomes inadequate. And there is the perfection of soul, which every form breaks down more or less in the effort to express. And I say we have this written large in the long experience called history. As soon as the real power and infinitude of God’s Spirit entered history in Jesus Christ all the existing ideals and forms of perfection became inadequate and imperfect. The soul broke through all possible forms of earthly expression, and triumphed in their very wreck, as it had always done in their perfection. If ever you think scholars are wrecking the Bible, recall this Christian relation of body and soul. And for illustration take two things. Take a Greek statue and a Christian picture. Take the Apollo Belvidere or the Venus of Milo. You have nothing in the world more perfect in form. They express the height of earthly perfection. Art in that way could no farther go. The spirit of Greece uttered itself perfectly in such finished things. Place either of them by the side of one of the great Italian pictures—a Christ, a crucifixion, a saint, a resurrection, a paradise—by one of the great religious masters. You have in the picture a volume of meaning and power which makes the correcter statue seem even poor. You have a wealth of spirit and suggestion which makes the expression on the face of the statue insipid. Perfect as the form of Greece was, it became imperfect when you reached the face. There is no expression there. Greece had no soul, no heart, to express. In the light of the broad new perfection of God’s Spirit the exquisiteness of human perfection soon came to an end. And the statue was too poverty stricken, with all its perfectness, too icily regular, too splendidly null, to express the vast spiritual wealth and infinite value of the human soul enriched with immortality by the Redeemer. These statues and philosophies, so finished, so imperishable! Growth came when, looking our last on them all, We turned our eyes inwardly one fine day And cried with a start—What if we so small Be greater and grander the while than they? Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? In both, of such lower types are we Precisely because of our wider nature; For time, theirs—ours, for eternity. To-day’s brief passion limits their range; It seethes with the morrow for us and more. They are perfect—how else? they shall never change: We are faulty—why not? we have time in store. The Artificer’s hand is not arrested With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished: They stand for our copy, and, once invested With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished. And these Christian painters, even when they painted broken saints with faulty drawing, Made new hopes shine through the flesh they fray, New fears aggrandise the rags and tatters: To bring the invisible full into play! Let the visible go to the dogs—what matters?311 These words are from a poem of Browning’s, “Old Pictures in Florence.” Take it down and try to make something of it. It is not simple. But it is not the simple things that make the soul. The greatest powers are those that break through language and escape. I cannot put into a sermon all I want to say on this text. But Browning has it. His reach mostly exceeds his grasp. And that is why he was so sure of heaven. Only think of the lordly Plato and the Lord-led Paul—the leisurely Plato and the passionate Paul—the splendid poet-thinker and the broken, tender, persecuted, mighty apostle. Which of them represents the true perfection of God, the final, real, universal perfection of the soul, the perfect action of the spirit in history? The perfection of Greece broke down. It broke from within. It was broken from without. So did the perfection of Judæa. The elaboration of law killed the soul. But the new law of faith and love triumphed. The infinite perfection, the unutterable love, of the miserable cross was the only thing capable of saving man and setting him on a new and nobler career. Modern history stands on the broad, deep law of Christ. “I understand more than the ancients, because I keep Thy precepts.” You are in this university, many of you, to learn the best pagan idea of perfection. You ought to know it and often pursue it. But you are here, in this and every church, to learn how limited, how worldly it is, how inadequate to the real greatness of the soul, how imperfect before the perfectness of Christ. You must learn how much more perfect is good heart than good form, and how much broader is the glory of the crucified Christ than the gleam of the radiant Apollo. Our perfection is not our inward harmony, our personal harmony; it is not in the exquisite relation of our parts to each other as in a statue. It is not a character in perfect taste. It is not a balanced nature; it is not self-contained. Art, even ethical art, is not perfection. Nor is it our social harmony. It is not in our kindly relations to each other; it is not in readjustment of conditions; it is not brotherly love and social peace. Socialism is not perfection. But our perfection is in our relation, our attitude to the Father. It is the harmony of reconciliation in Jesus Christ. It is faith. The man of faith with many faults and some shames is more perfect than the flawless man, the perfect gentleman, who has no relations with the unseen, no dealings with its God, no trust in its love, no sense of the unspeakableness of heavenly things by earth’s finest forms, chords, colours, or tongues. III. The Broad and the Narrow Lastly, I would speak of the final clause in the passage, “Thy commandment is exceeding broad.” And first as to the word “broad,” and next as to the word “commandment.” 1. The present time is one to which the word “broad,” appeals. Many people are escaping from narrow and rigid laws of religious truth. God is leading them out of Egypt. A new study of the Bible has made us feel in what a large, free world its writers moved. It is a world of imagination, of soul, of infinite spiritual range and power. Then science has opened to us world on world of the vast and the small. The universe has become an infinite thing. Politics have taken the note of freedom and enlargement in all parties. Society is undergoing a new emancipation. Two great hosts—women and workmen—have become conscious of new possibilities, a new career. The awakening of these two sections alone has made a vast change and will make a greater still. Even the young are infected with the like spirit. They are interested in many things they did not care for before. They form societies to discuss them. They are not content to take the traditional lines. They have their intelligence roused. They begin to feel that they were meant for better things than athletics and singsongs. They dimly perceive a new, great world breaking into view around them. They have more access than ever before to the world of knowledge and action. They are full of confidence, which it is easy to snub, but better to guide. It chiefly needs to be tempered by a deeper acquaintance with their world and with themselves. They are full of sympathy for things broad, free, genial. You come up here some of you, men and women of you, and you pass into a new world which is larger than you have yet known. You have lived at home, perhaps, up to now. It has been a dear world, but a smaller than you enter here. Perhaps it has even been a world of narrow interests, parochial interests, and you come into one of the great intellectual centres of the world. The religion in which you have been reared, though very genuine and very deep, has perhaps been of a narrow and timid kind. You have had no real preparation for the stir of new, vivid, and wide ideas which may meet you here. You cannot learn to fly in a hencoop. For you soon, if not already, the word “broad” will have a fascination. You will meet people, and make friends of people, perhaps, who may tempt you to despise and revolt from the circle of things and thoughts you have grown up in. The old creeds may seem antiquated in the light of new science. The old faith may seem perhaps good enough for those you leave behind, but not for you. The Bible of the apostles and prophets will suffer by comparison with the broad new science, and the broad new literature, and the broad new thoughts of the age. The society of your native place may seem a poor, narrow clique compared with the freedom offered by the advanced society of the modern woman and the modern man. The Church you were reared in, converted in perhaps, may come to seem to you a little sect which you want to leave behind when you hear from your new companions of their no Church, or their old Church, their high Church, their broad Church. You may be invited to consider your Nonconformity a narrow affair compared with the imposing constitution and ritual of the Church most influential here and elsewhere. You may even be led to think (for there is no limit to their audacity) that there is more devotion in the services of the Established Church than in the worship of your own. You will forget that that rests with you. And, unlike many a simple great one gone, you will not “abide among your own people.” I sympathise with you greatly. I know the spell of things broad, great, boundless, free. It is a spell you ought to feel. Your education here will not do what it should for you if you do not feel that. Religion has suffered unspeakably from narrow notions and infinitely from narrow hearts. But it suffers so much because it is in its nature free. It is the eagle that suffers from captivity, and the lark; it is not the mole. In faith’s name let us be broad. It is God’s commandment. But remember this. Do not mistake breadth of view for breadth of soul. Faith is not a thing of views nor a thing of feelings. It is a thing of soul. It is greatness of soul that is the glorious liberty of the sons of God. There is a breadth which is very shallow. I have found it very common among people who were always talking of breadth of view. God is exceeding broad. The soul of Christ is broader than all the world and the great souls in it. But remember the breadth of God is deep and high. The ideal city was foursquare every way, equal in height, breadth, and depth. You gain little if you gain in breadth only to lose in depth, if you are broad and low, if you grow just as shallow as you grow wide. There is a breadth which is mere indifference. And a man may have very wide and free notions about life because he has no real notion of God or his soul at all. The breadth of God is deep, and it is intense. There is no religious narrowness more narrow than the breadth which outgrows all depth, intensity, reality of faith, all trust of the heart, all positive belief about things unseen or a world to come. To see broad is not to be broad. And the real broadening forces are not those that extend our vision, but those that enlarge ourselves, our souls, our manhood, womanhood, our faith. There is a saving narrowness. All the breadth of the world present and to come entered by a narrow way. It is narrowed down to Christ; narrowed down, down to the cross of Christ, to the soul, greatness and glory there. And if ever you grow cold to that, if ever you lose the sense of infinite greatness in that brief life and obscure death, you are growing into the narrowest narrowness of all—the smallness of the thin, shallow person whose ambition and whose speech aim at being thought broad, liberal, emancipated, advanced, rational before anything else. 2. So I come to the word “commandment.” The breadth of God is in His commandment. It is a focused breadth. It is moored, concentrated, a breadth gathered in intense centres and positive lines. It follows the lines of positive truth and positive law. It is a matter, first of all, of conscience and heart. It is not the vague freedom of the winds, but the rooted and grounded freedom of an established soul. Yes, that is what we want—not an established Church, but an established soul; not free thought at first, but a free soul. And a free soul is a good soul, a redeemed soul, vowed to the moral law of God, acquainted with repentance, full of faith, given up to the law of love in Jesus Christ. Let no broad notions lead you to think that you can trifle with God’s law in your conscience, or ignore His wide love concentrated for the world in the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross is a mere speck in the tract of time, but it is the living centre of broad and full eternity. The depth, intensity, height, and breadth of all spiritual being is there. The whole freedom of the soul is there. The largeness and hope of all the future are there. The obligation of the cross is the first commandment and the last. This is the one broad commandment, that we believe in Christ, live in Christ. This is the real condition of moral freedom, of soul freedom, of heart release and largeness, of human greatness and spiritual range. This plants us in infinity, breaks the one narrowing power of sin, brings life and immortality to light, unites us, redeemed, with God, who is the eternal amplitude of all we can be or know. You find all great things, broad, free, kindling things, thus. Christ is the Lord of them all and the Giver of them all. “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor height, nor depth, nor length, nor breadth, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”312 309. Ps 139:8. 310. Ps 119:94. 311. From Robert Browning’s poem, “Old Pictures in Florence” (1855). 312. Rom 8:38–39.”

Forsyth, P. T.; Goroncy, Jason. Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History: Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of P. T. Forsyth (pp. 169-177).