The Sacred Journey. Christopher D Surber

The Sacred Journey is a collection of insights, thoughts, and personal experiences centered on and emanating from the Beatitudes of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. Within its pages we are invited to consider the radical love with which God pursues His creation. God in Jesus Christ was determined to make a way for sinners to be forgiven at the Cross. While man had sinned and caused a divide between himself and His creator, God has insisted that those who receive the grace and mercy offered in His Son shall be forgiven of sin and reconciled unto God in eternally secure love. God in salvation is singly focused on reconciling all who will place their trust, their faith, and their hope in that sacrifice. It is not we who make our way to God through good works, right belief, perfectly ordered creedal statements, or any other edifice of human composition. It is God who pursues us heatedly to receive the radical beauty of the violence of the Cross. God has pursued, forgiven, and reconciled us unto Himself. Through the wrath which was poured out upon Jesus, mercy was poured out on us. Salvation is purely the work of God's mercy and grace. We who have received Him have done so by faith when we have responded to the pull of God on our hearts. Grace rests upon us because God has loved us. What, in response to such a violent grace, should our reply to God be?