CREEDE HINSHAW: Living out the assurance of God’s ‘overplus’

Have you ever approached a situation, a crisis or a fateful decision from the standpoint that God might not be able to address your dilemma? Even those who have long been faithful disciples of Christ have sometimes succumbed to such doubts.

I have received a fresh dose of confidence after having begun to read one of the most enduring devotional classics of all time: St. Augustine’s Confessions, written some 1,700 years ago and easily obtainable. In addition to the many published versions for sale, the curious reader can find the book for free, too, copyrights being unknown when Augustine wrote. The internet offers many good versions of Confessions in PDF, allowing the interested reader to dip into the book and later make a purchase.

Augustine, a North African whose conversion story is dramatic and well known, begins the Confessions by humbly asking God questions about God’s presence. Some of his interrogations reminded me of the questions my own children once asked, “Daddy, if God is everywhere, does that mean God is in that traffic light?”

Augustine, citing the Jeremiah 23:24, (“I fill heaven and earth”) begins to muse on what this means. If God fills heaven and earth, does he fill everything? Does everything contain a part of God? Is God in even me, Augustine wonders?

Augustine is not moving toward the heresy of pantheism, that philosophy that God is completely equated with nature, reduced, for instance, to a tree or a river or a cloud. Instead he is musing on what it means that God fills the cosmos. Every created thing, he posits, must be filled in some fashion by God. Perhaps Augustine was also thinking of Colossians 3:11 where Paul writes in reference to humanity, “Christ is all and is in all.”

Using a word I have seldom seen used (and I don’t know what Latin word Augustine would have employed) the saint speculates that when God fills heaven and earth there is still an “overplus” of God. I love that word, though it sounds a little like that internet company that sells overstocked inventory.

Scripture is clear: With God there is an amazing “overplus.” As Paul writes in his letter to the church at Ephesus, God is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. (Ephesians 3:20)

My question is directed at me as much as at you. Are you living out of the assurance of the “overplus” of God? Are you approaching life out of the assurance that the God who fills heaven and earth, and who created heaven and earth, is also more than able to walk with you, ahead of you and behind you in every circumstance of life?

Augustine’s searching humility is just what I have needed this week. When a person begins to think great thoughts about God and to approach God’s divine holiness with awe and appreciation, life begins to be lived out of that same holy overplus.