R.C. Sproul

There is something fearful about it.

As we continue our study of the holiness of God, we remember that in our first segment of this series that I recounted a personal experience that was a crisis moment for me in my life.

Back in the days when I was going to college and I had listened to a lecture

from the writings of Saint Augustine.

And if you recall, I mentioned how Augustine opened up for my understanding a whole new dimension of the character of God, and that I was awe-stricken as I listened to Augustine explain the power and the majesty and the holiness of God.

Well, Augustine himself wrote an interesting passage about his own personal experience with the presence of God.

Here is what he said, What is that which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it?

I am both a shudder

and a glow, a shudder insofar as I am unlike it, a glow insofar as I am like it.

Augustine had a tremendous gift for articulating his innermost thoughts and feelings, and here he talks about a question.

He asks, what is it that smites my heart?

without wounding it.

Do you see the contrast between those images?

Something that pierces him, something that strikes him, something that hits him with enormous force, yet doesn't harm him, doesn't wound him, leaves no scar.

But as Augustine reflects on this question, he expresses an attitude of ambivalence about it.

There is something that is at the same time attractive to him about this that smites his heart, and yet there is something that frightens him about it at the very same time.

He says, at the same moment, I feel a shudder and a glow.

What does he mean by a shudder?

That it's a shuddering experience, an experience that causes him to tremble.

We remember the old spiritual, were you there when they crucified my Lord?