ONLY GOD CAN DEAL WITH GOD

"Only God can deal with God. Thus there is a battle. It is God against God. The abstract God (the God of the Law) cannot be removed but must be dethroned, overcome, 'for you' in concrete actuality. The clothed God must conquer the naked God for us. We can never escape on our own. The revealed God must conquer the hidden God for you in the living present. Faith is precisely the ever-renewed flight from God to God: from God naked and hidden to God clothed and revealed [in Jesus Christ]. Thus Luther insisted that we must cling to the God at his mother's breasts, the God who hung on the cross and was raised from the tomb in the face of the desperate attack launched from the hidden God/Satan. There is no other way.
The question at stake is whether one will believe God in the face of God."
p. 22 - Theology Is for Proclamation - Gerhard O. Forde (Fortress 1990)

A PRAYER
Oh that I might rest in You, my Lord and my God!
Oh! that You would enter into my heart, and so fill it, that I may let go of my pride and embrace You, my sole good!
What are You to me?
In Your pity, work this embrace in me.
What am I to You that You demand my love, and, if I give it not, You are justly angry with me, and threaten me with grievous woes?
Is it then a slight woe to love myself more than You?
For the sake of Your mercies, which are new every morning, tell me, O Lord my God, what You are to me.
Say unto my soul, I am Your salvation.
So speak, that I may hear.
Behold, Lord, my heart is before You; open my ears and say to my soul, I am Your salvation.
After this voice let me quickly flee from myself and my pride, and take hold of You.
Let nothing hide Your face from me.
Let me die to what my pride would make of me, lest I die without what You in Jesus Christ has made of me.
Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge my soul so that You may enter it and fill it, so that there is no room or reason for pride to live within me.
My heart is ruined,
Create in me a clean heart.
My heart has pride within it that would keep me from You and offends You.
I confess it to You as You alone can cleanse my sin within.
Lord, cleanse me from my secret faults, spare Your servant from the power of my enemy within.
I believe, and therefore I have confessed against myself my transgressions to You.
And You, my God, have forgiven the iniquity of my heart.
I will argue against Your judgment for You alone are true.
Yet, my Lord, I fear that my sin of pride might deceive me and I begin to deceive myself.
O Gracious God, who can never be deceived, let me ever remember that all men are like grass, and even if I be like the flower of the grass in all its glory, the grass always withers and the flower ever falls. But Your Word, the Word given to me in my Baptism – stand forever. Amen.