Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

The uncomfortable nature of acknowledging
how Good God is

and how what Good we are capable of
is by his Grace and Hand

The Lord is at Work Today in our Hearts.

Centuries of Quaker Christian experience confirms this fact.
Yet there are so few who seem free to acknowledge their debt
much less express any heart-felt gratitude.

It has become a strange burden to try to insist that God receive all credit and glory.

Either the world pities me for having no self-esteem or the world denies anyone can actually discern God's will, and hence, it becomes a sort of arrogance for me to say that God willed with this Good thing or with that Helpful thing, God used me as an instrument to accomplish. The world uses strange lenses to distort Truth into a burden and assert that God is a philosophy and not an experience. Christian lives that have preached, among them Quakers, both ancient and modern, testify to the Truth and to whom all Glory must go for any Good and Compassionate actions we take in this world.

But the very saddest part of this difficulty can be not only the social pressure to just pretend the whole thing was just another good idea from the great and glorious *me* but also the part of us that seeks to be commended, that seeks to be admired, that thinks perhaps the way I was so able to (1) discern God's will, and then the great difficulties of (2) actually submitting in obedience, then (3) I really do deserve some credit after all, so might as well not upset anyone. Not so. Thee knows when it is God's work. Give him the credit and the glory. Thee will live and remain under a shadow and a cloud for as long as thee refuses to acknowledge the sunlight God has brought into the doing and being.

Tools for Daily Guidance in the Truth and the Way

1. The Fruit of the Spirit as Guiding Principle.
2. The Greatest of these is Love.
3. The Truth of God's Great and Worthy Actions in this world.
4. God's Will Can be Known and we are Capable of Being Obedient.
5. The Difficulties of Submission and Obedience.
6. Giving Credit Where Credit is Due.
7. Needful and Necessary.
8. Our Moral Compass.