RICH SPIRITUAL INSIGHT
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of
God, have mercy on me, a sinner. (The Jesus prayer)
Ministry that costs
nothing accomplishes nothing. (
I'm using
my Bible as a road map
There'll be no detours along the way
My last stop is in heaven some day
You have come down to the lake shore
Seeking neither the wise or the wealthy
But only asking for me to follow
You know full well what I
have, Lord
Neither treasure nor weapons of
conquest,
Just these fish nets and will for
working
You need my hands, my
exhaustion
Working love for the rest of the weary
A love that's willing to go on loving
You who have fished other
waters
You the longing of souls that are
yearning
O loving Friend, you have come to call
me
Sweet Lord, you have
looked into my eyes
Kindly smiling, you've called out my
name
On the sand I have abandoned my small
boat
Now with you, I will seek other seas
(Cesareo Gabarain)
Preach the
gospel. Use words if necessary. (St. Francis of
Prayer helps
us become what God wants us to be.
Every act of worship is an
act of participating in an eternal worship service, in the service of all souls
of all ages.
(Abraham Heshel)
Our purpose is not to discover what we
are, but to refuse what we are. (Michael
Foucault)
Two thousand years and half a world
away
Dying trees still grow greener when
you pray (Bruce Cockburn)
What is the alternative to changing
Jesus into something we can understand?
It’s to change us into something that can understand Him.
(Frederica Mathewes-Green)
Know that only after
sorrow's hand has bowed your head will life become truly real to you. For
only then will you acquire the noble spirituality that intensifies the reality
of life. I know that I go toward an all powerful God whomever he may be.
I know that he is a personality who created man in his image. Beyond that I
have no knowledge, no fear--only faith. (Samuel Palmer Brooks)
You call me master and
obey me not. You call me light and see me not. You call me way and
walk me not. You call me life and choose me not. You call me wise
and follow me not. You call me fair and love me not. You call me
rich and ask me not. You call me eternal and seek me not. You call
me noble and serve me not. You call me gracious and trust me not.
You call me mighty and honor me not. You call me just and fear me
not. If I condemn you, blame me not. (Inscription on the cathedral in
When
I have no books or when my thoughts, torturing me like thorns, do not let me
enjoy reading, I go to church, which is the cure for every disease of the
soul. The freshness of the images draws my attention, captivates my eyes,
and slowly leads my soul to divine praise. (John of
I , the Lord of sea and
sky
I have heard my people cry
All who dwell in deepest sin
My hand will save
Here I am, Lord
is it I, Lord
I have heard you calling in the night
I will go, Lord, if you lead me
I will hold your people in my heart
I, the Lord of snow and
rain
I have borne my people's pain
I have wept for love of them
They turn away
I will break their of stone
Give them hearts of love alone
I will speak my word to them
Whom shall I send
Here I am, Lord
is it I, Lord
I have heard you calling in the night
I will go, Lord, if you lead me
I will hold your people in my heart
I, the Lord of wind of
flame
I will tend to the poor and the lame
I will set a feast for them
My hand will save
Finest bread will I provide
Till three hearts be satisfied
I will give my life to them
Whom shall I send?
Here I am, Lord
is it I, Lord
I have heard you calling in the night
I will go, Lord, if you lead me
I will hold your people in my heart
(Daniel Schutte)
Time like
an ever rolling stream
Soon bears us all away
We fly forgotten as a dream
Dies at opening day
O God our help in ages
past
Our hope for years to come
Be our guard while troubles last
And our eternal home
(Isaac Watt)
The
greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him. The one aim
of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for
Him. (Oswald Chambers)
Instead
of, “you are what you do,” God’s calling says: “Do what you are.”
(Os Guinness)
The worship is over, the
service begins.
Win
an argument, lose a soul. (J. Fulton Sheen)
For all the saints who from their
labors rest
All who by faith before the world
confessed
Your name, oh Jesus, be forever
blessed
You were their rock, their fortress
and their might
You, Lord, their captain in the
well-fought fight
Oh, may your soldiers, faithful, true,
and bold
Fight as the saints who nobly fought
of old
And win with them the victor’s crown
of gold
Oh, blessed communion, fellowship
divine
We feebly struggle, they in glory
shine
Yet all are one within your great
design
And when the strife is fierce, the
warfare long
Steals on the ear the distance triumph
song
And hearts are brave again and arms
are strong
The golden evening brightens in the
west
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes
their rest
Sweet is the calm of paradise the
blessed
But then there breaks a yet more
glorious day
The saints triumphant rise in bright
array
The king of glory passes on his way
From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s
farthest coast
Through gates of pearl streams in the
countless host
Singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost
(William W. How)
I
live before the Audience of One. Before others I have nothing to prove,
nothing to gain, nothing to lose.
(General Charles Gordon)
Passing
from a biological life into the spiritual life is as big a change as though a
statue carved from stone changed into a real man. We are statues and
there is a rumor going around the sculptor’s shop that some of us are someday
going to come to life. (C. S. Lewis)
The
central message of Christianity is light out of darkness, life out of death,
life by means of death.
(Philip. H. Pfatteicher)
Whenever
I meet a Buddist leader, I meet a holy man.
Whenever I meet a Christian leaders, I meet a manager. (quoted by Os
Guinness)
Lord,
I pray that you would bring Jews to know Jesus Christ. I pray that you
would bring Muslims to know Jesus Christ. Finally, Lord, I pray that you
would bring Christians to know Jesus Christ. Amen. (Arthur Burns)
It is tragedy that when people reject
our approach or attitude, we conclude that they’re rejecting Christ and His
message. (Erwin Rafael McManus)
Through
centuries, Christians have cunningly sought little by little to cheat God out
of Christianity. (Soren Kierkegaard)
You
don’t find God; you lose yourself until God finds you. (jazz musician Lester
Young)
Lord,
help safeguard us against the slippage from Christ to Christian to
Christianity. (Os Guinness)
The
Eucharist or Holy Communion is a taste of God. How God is present in the
bread and wine of this central Christian sacrament is less important than that
God is present. Belief is needed to fully embrace the presence of God in
any sacrament, official or informal. (Chris Glaser)
Midway on
our life’s journey I found myself in a dark wood. (Dante)
The
Daily
prayer lifts us out of our selfish concerns to a grander view of the purpose
and will and work of God. It invites us to let God work in us as God wills.
(Philip. H. Pfatteicher)
The
true city of the saints is in heaven. Here on earth Christians travel as
on a pilgrimage through time looking for the
Just
imagine what we might have been without Christ. (Os Guinness)
Lord,
you have given so much to me. Give me one thing more—a grateful
heart. (George Herbert)
Lord,
you show us love's true measure
Yet we hoard as private treasure
all that you so freely give. (Jeffery Rowthorn)
The
liturgy of the church provides a framework within which the deepest mysteries
of Christianity await discovery. (Philip Pfatteicher)
With mighty arm you dash
the proud, their scheming hearts expose
The ruthless you have
cast aside, the lowly throned instead
The hungry filled with
all good things, the rich sent off unfed.
(From the hymn, My Soul Proclaims Your Greatness)
The dominant script of
our time is therapeutic consumerism. It
has been adopted by liberals and conservatives alike. The script has failed and the health of
society depends on society’s disengagement from that script. An alternate script is rooted in the Bible
and the key character is God. This
alternate script is ragged and cannot be made seamless; it is not about
certitude. The entry into this counter-script is by baptism. Pastors need to demonstrate that the church
is a safe place for people with uncertainties.
We’re not primarily in the growth industry, but rather in little
communities of obedience. We all hunger
for certitude, but the problem is that God is not about certitude; God is about
fidelity. (Walter Brueggemann)
In the evangelical world,
I think there’s been a sense that the purpose of the church is to extract as
many people from the world as possible, so you can warehouse them and keep them
pure. (Brian McLaren)
If on our daily course our
mind
Beset to hallow all we find
New treasures still, of countless price
God will provide for a sacrifice.
Old friends, old scenes,
will lovelier be,
As more of heaven in each we see;
Some softening gleam of love and prayer
Shall dawn on every cross and care.
The trivial round, the
common task,
Will furnish all we ought to ask;
Room to deny ourselves, a road
To bring us daily nearer God.
(John Keble)
I could no
more make someone else a Christian by my own influence
than I turn a sawdust doll into a
pretty child of six.
(J. Fulton
Sheen)
To be a Christian means becoming a
xenophiliac. Your love people who think
differently, You promote people who don’t use your familiar jargon; you hire an
outsider to be your pastor; and you throw parties at which many languages are
spoken, many flavors tasted, many stories are told, and many color smile and
laugh and learn one another’s dances and ways in a foretaste of another party
called “heaven.” (Leonard Sweet, Bryan
D. McLaren, Jerry Haselmayer)
We never pray as
individuals set apart from the rest of the world. The liturgy is an order
which we can enter only as a part of the community. Every act of worship
is an act of participating in an eternal service in the service of all souls of
all ages. Every act of adoration is done in union with all of history,
and with beings above and below. (Abraham Heschel)
In praying the Psalter we
participate in the sacred story, we appropriate it as our own. (Philip
Pfatteicher)
Only the man whose final standard is not
his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who
is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible
action in faith and exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man who tries
to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
The big challenge for all
denominations is the growing number of people who see themselves as religious
but have very little to do with any organized religious community. (Robert Bacher
and Kenneth Inskeep)
Churches should strive to create an
alternative community, deeply placed in risk, summoned in baptism to a world in
which God is a pivotal player. (Walter
Brueggemann and Patrick Miller)
If safe is what you want, forget religion
and find yourself a conservative investment counselor. The religious sense of life has to do with
exposing one’s self to the radical uncertainly and the open-endedness of life,
with what we are calling the absolute future, which is meaning-giving, salt-giving,
risk taking. The absolute future is a
risky business, which is why faith, hope, and love have to kick in. (John Caputo)
Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness
without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is
the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal
confession. Cheap grace is grace without
disciplineship, grace without the cross, grace without the living incarnate
living Christ. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
Postmodernism
is the culture in which Sesame Street is considered educational; sexy is the
term for everything from jeans to doctoral theses; watching sitcoms together is
called family time; abortion is considered choice; and a barrage of images and
sound bites selected for their entertainment and commercial value is called
news. (Michael Horton)
Beyond the
lines of steel and stone
Beneath the thorns of flesh and bone
Beyond the curve of time and space
Show us the wonder of your face.
(Royce Scherf)
Immortal,
invisible God only wise
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes
Most blessed, most glorious, the
Ancient of Days
Almighty, victorious, thy great name we
praise!
Unresting, unhasting, and
silent as night
Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest
in might
Thy justice like mountains, high
soaring above
They clouds which are fountains of
goodness and love.
To all, life thou givest
to both great and small
In all life thou livest, the true life
of all.
We blossom and flourish
like leaves on the tree
And wither and perish, but naught
changeth thee.
Thou reignest in glory, thy dwellest in
light
Thine angels adore thee, all veiling
their sight
All laud we would render; oh, help us
to see
‘Tis only the splendor of light hideth
thee!
(W. Chalmers Smith)
Come down, O, Love divine
Seek thou this soul of mine.
And visit it with thine own ardor
glowing
O Comforter, draw near
Within my heart appear
And kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing
Oh, let it freely burn
Til worldly passions turn
To dust and ashes in its heat consuming
And let thy glorious light
Shine ever on my sight
And clothe me round, the while my path
illuming
Let holy charity
Mine outward vesture be
And lowliness become mine inner
clothing
True lowliness of heart
Which takes the humbler part
And o’er its own shortcomings weeps
with loathing.
And so the yearning strong
With which the soul will long
Shall far out pass the power of human
telling
No soul can guess his grace
Til it become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes his
dwelling. (Bianco da Siena)
Many
Christians like to think that they take the Bible as it stands, but in reality
they take the Bible as they understand it.
What we get out of the Bible often has as much to do with what we bring
to the text as with the text itself.
Differing biblical interpretations often arise from the different
theological grids that are imposed on scripture. (The Christian Century magazine)
To
reach satisfaction in all, desire its possession in nothing. To come to
possess all, desire the possession of nothing. To arrive at being all,
desire to be nothing. To come to the knowledge of all, desire the
knowledge of nothing.
(John of the Cross)
Prayer
is continual abandonment to God. (Sadhu Sundar Singh)
When you start thinking about it, the
poverty of our goodness is truly appalling.
We spend our intellect and energies shoring up our own financial
security and give only a pittance away to those who do not have enough food to
keep their children alive. We say we care
about corporate justice, but continue to buy cheap goods even though we have no
idea who might have been grossly underpaid to make or grow them. We use each other socially by maneuvering to
sit with the successful people at a conference, asking after their family when
honestly we only care about selling the deal.
We use another person sexually in the name of self-expression and a
shallow-temporary intimacy. We avoid
even our own friends and family when they need us because helping them might
interrupt our all-important work schedule.
(Debra Rienstra in So Much More:
An Invitation to Christian Spirituality, Jossey-Bass)
A
Christian worker never touches reality until he touches a soul. (J. Fulton
Sheen)
Evangelicals have seen
social action as a distraction from evangelism.
Mainline Protestants have viewed evangelism almost as an embarrassment
until it is taken up for sake of institutional survival. (Brian McLaren)
Thomas Merton linked
consumerism to what he saw as a feeding of the false self, the self of ego
gratification, rather than the true self, which has very few needs and very
simple needs. People purchase goods that
they do not need as a way to divert themselves from experiencing the presence
of God. Even religion can be turned into
a way to seek gratification. (Albert
Raboteau)
The most important difference between
churches is not their doctrinal statements, liturgies, structures, or
architecture, it’s the way they treat people.
(Leonard Sweet, Bryan D. McLaren, Jerry Haselmayer)
Jesus
died to gather into one family all the scattered children of God. (The Liturgy
of the Hours)
May
our lives be bread for the hungry and streams in the wilderness, signs of the
abundance of your grace in Jesus Christ.
Live
near to God, and so all things will appear to you little in comparison with
eternal realities.
(Robert Murray M’Cheyne)
The will can do
all—except one thing: undo that which it has done. The power of undoing is of another order: the
order of grace. (Vladimir Jankelevitch)
We live with cultural
pressures unrelentingly focused upon free market competition and consumption,
as if the meaning of life is compete, consume, and die. (Catherine Wallace)
The dark existential
truth is that the fate of men and women is to live absurdly, flogged by
categorical imperatives of their own shallow imagining, and to die insanely,
grasping for hands that are not there.
(H.L. Mencken)
Our
crimes and our sins weigh us down; me are rotting away because of them.
How can we survive? As I live, says the Lord God, I take no pleasure in
the death of wicked men, but rather in the wicked man's conversion, that he may
live. (Ezekiel 33: 10-11) I said: Her I am! Here I am! to a nation that
did not call upon my name. I have stretched out my hands all the day to a
rebellious people who walk in evil paths and follow their own thoughts--people
who provoke me continually to my face. (Isaiah 65: 1-3)
The
devilishness of Pride is that it attacks us, not in our weakest points, but in
our strongest. It is the sin of the noble mind. (Dorothy Sayers)
Christianity is not for
people who think religion is a pleasant distraction, a nice alternative, or a
positive influence. Messy Christianity
is a good term for the place where desperation meets Jesus. More often than not, in Jesus’ day, desperate
people who tried to get to Jesus were surrounded by religious people who either
ignored or rejected those who were seeking to have their hunger for God
filled. Sadly, not much has changed over
the years. The church is the place where the incompetent, the unfinished, and
even the unhealthy are welcome. Once we admit how unlovely we are, how
unattractive we are, how lost we are, Jesus shows up unexpectedly. (Michael Yaconelli)
In the cross of Christ I
glory, towering over the wrecks of time. (John Bowring)
Hell is where sin eventually leads; it
is the endpoint of the path away from God—a state of being outside the presence
of God. When we see the worst of what
goes on in this world, we can see that hell is not only a place people might go
after death, but the condition of destruction and utter misery in which people
can find themselves here and now. (Debra Rienstra in So Much More: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality, Jossey-Bass)
Praise and honor to the
Father, praise and honor to the son, praise and honor to the Spirit, ever three
and ever one; one in might and one in glory while unending ages run! (7th
century Latin hymn)
Come, Holy
Ghost, Creator, Come
From thy
bright heavenly throne
Come, take
possession of our souls
And make
them all thy own.
Thou who
are called the Paraclete,
Best gift
of God above,
The living
spring, the living fire,
Sweet
unction and true love.
Thou who
art sevenfold in they grace,
Finger of
God’s right hand;
His
promise, teaching little ones
Who speak
and understand.
Oh guide
our minds with they blest light,
With love
our hearts in flame;
And with
thy strength, which ne’er decays,
Confirm
our mortal frame.
Far from
us drive our deadly foe;
True peace
unto us bring;
And from
all perils lead us safe
Beneath
thy sacred wing.
Through
thee may we Father know,
Through
thee the eternal Son,
And thee
the Spirit of them both,
Thrice-blessed
Three in One.
All glory
to the Father be,
With his
co-equal Son;
The same
to thee, great Paraclete,
While
endless ages run.
Veni,
creator Spiritus,
Mentes tuorum visita,
Imple superna gratia,
Quae tu creasti, pectora
Qui diceris Paraclitus,
Donum Dei altissimi,
Fons vivus, ignis, caritas
Et spiritalis unction.
Tu septiformis munere,
Dextrae Dei tu digitus,
Tu rite promissum Patris
Infunde
amorem cordibus,
Infirma
nostri corporis,
Virtute
firmans perpeti.
Hostem
repellas longius
Pacemque dones protinus;
Ductore sic te praevio
Vitemus omne noxium
Per te sciamus da Patrem
Noscamus atque Filium,
te utriusque Spiritum
Credamus omni tempore.
Amen.
In
accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. (George
Santayana)
Lord,
you make the common holy. (Jeffery Rowthorn)
Why
should God need our prayer? Why should God need our flattery? How come He is
not repulsed by that? God does not need our prayers. We need them.
We need to be able to pray in sincerity and beauty. And the prayer should not be against somebody
but always for somebody. That is a true
prayer, when it is for someone else, not for yourself. I would like my prayer to be turned into
stories. (Elie Wiesel)
You
have nothing to do in life except to live in union with Christ. (Rufus
Mosely)
Jesus
accepts you the way you are, but loves you too much to leave you that
way. (Lee Venden)
Loneliness
is a gnawing hunger while solitude is to have one’s hunger satisfied
without being stuffed. The more hungry we are, the less particular we may
be about what we eat. The more lonely we are, the less particular we may
be about how we connect with others. And, just as starving makes people
desperate, so loneliness brings out our desperation. We may act out of
our anxiety, seeking a quick fix to our hunger or our loneliness. This
may prompt us to exploit or manipulate others, or allow ourselves to be
exploited or manipulated. No matter what a televangelist or a pop guru
might tell you, the spiritual life is not a quick fix or drive-through. (Chris
Glaser)
Christianity, which once
pervaded the culture practiced by the nation, has slipped to the status of a
subculture—we might even say a counterculture. (Clifford Orwin)
The fate of mankind
depends upon the realization that the distinction between good and evil, right
and wrong, is superior to all other distinctions. The vision of the sacred has
all but died in the soul of man. All of
our life hangs by a thread—the faithfulness of man to the concern of God.
(Abraham Joshua Heschel)
My God-crazy friends
migrated from one teacher to another in the sixties and the seventies, donning
robes and hair styles in search of that indefinable something that’s still
driving people everywhere and nowhere but always away from wherever they came
from. (Andrei Codrescu)
I
take God the Father to be my God;
I take God the Son to be my Savior;
I take the Holy Ghost to be my
Sanctifier;
I take the Word of God to be my rule;
I take the people of God to be my
people;
And I do hereby dedicate and yield my
whole self to the Lord;
And I do this deliberately, freely, and
for ever. Amen.
(Act
of commitment taught to Matthew Henry by his father.)
I
am never better than when I am on the full stretch for God. (George
Whitefield)
Surely I
know the plans I have for you says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for
harm, to give you a future with hope. Then you will call upon me and come
pray to me and I will listen to you. (Jeremiah 29:11-12)
Prayer is
talking with Someone who’s already talking to you. (Robert Capon)
Truly, God’s
good and gracious will is accomplished without our prayer. But we pray in
this request that is
Prayer is
not about results. It’s about being faithful in circumstances beyond
our control. (Phil Heinze)
Pray and
let God worry. (Martin Luther)
To clasp
the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the
world. (Karl Barth)
We
are not made righteous by doing righteous deeds; but when we have been made
righteous we do righteous deeds. (Martin Luther)
No
man has a right to lead such a life of contemplation as to forget in his own
ease the service due to his neighbor; nor has any man a right to be so immersed
in active life as to neglect the contemplation of God. (Augustine of
Hippo)
Afflictions
are but the shadow of God’s wings. (George Macdonald)
When,
as a child, I laughed and wept, Time crept.
When, as a youth, I dreamed and talked,
Time walked.
When I became a full-grown man, Time
ran.
And later, as I older grew, Time flew.
Soon I shall find, while traveling on,
Time gone.
Will Christ have saved my soul by
then? Amen.
(Inscription
on clock in
Attempt
great things for God, expect great things from God. (William Carey)
If
you here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the early
Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through
ignorance nor through inability, but purely because you never thoroughly
intended it. (William Law)
May
I know thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
And follow thee more nearly,
Day by Day.
(Richard
of
Oh,
how great peace and quietness would he possess who should cut off all vain
anxiety and place all his confidence in God. (Thomas á Kempis)
A
Christ-centered life is like a good watch: open face, busy hands, pure gold,
and full of good works. (Author unknown)
Evil can never create or build, only
twist and destroy what already exists.
It uses human brilliance and creativity as well as folly and ignorance
toward heinous ends. (Debra Rienstra in So
Much More: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality, Jossey-Bass)
No
punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the
punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own
diminishment. (Parker Palmer)
Forgiving
is forgetting in spite of remembering. (Dag Hammarskjold)
On spiritual
growth: Spiritual growth encompasses a lifetime of decisions; spiritual growth
looks different for each of us; reluctant growth is still growth; give God 60
percent. Sometimes giving a 60 percent
commitment is 100 percent of all we have to give. And God is there, in our meager 60 percent,
recognizing the seeds of growth in what we’re giving him. God will show up in whatever percentage we
give him, which motivates us to give even more. (Michael Yaconelli)
I believe
in the sun even when it is not shining.
I believe in love even when I am not feeling it. I believe in God even when He is silent.
(Jewish holocaust victim)
For I seek
not to understand in order that I may believe; but I believe in order that I
may understand, for I believe for this reason:
that unless I believe, I cannot understand. (Anselm of
If you
don’t believe it you won’t understand it.
(Augustine of Hippo)
Now in the
darkness, vanished away
See in
this space our fears and our dreamings
Brought
here to you in the light of this day
Gather in
us the lost and forsaken
Gather in
us the blind and the lame
Call to us
now and we shall awaken
We are the
young, our lives are a mystery
We are the
old who yearn for your face
We have
been sung throughout history
Called to
be light to the whole human race
Gather in
us the rich and the haughty
Gather in
us the proud and strong
Give us a
heart so meek, so lowly
Give us
the courage to enter the song
Here we will
take the wine and the water
Here we
will take the bread of new birth
Here you
shall call your sons and daughters
Call us
anew to be salt for the earth
Give us to
drink the wine of compassion
Give us to
eat the bread that is you
Nourish
well and teach us to fashion
Lives that
are holy and hearts that are true
Not in the
dark of buildings confining
Not is
some heaven light years away
Here in
this place, the new light is shining
Now is the
kingdom, now is the day
Gather us
in and hold us forever
Gather us
in and make us your own
Gather us
in all peoples together
Fire of
love in our flesh and bone
(Marty
Haugen)
Believe
your beliefs and doubt your doubts. (F.
F. Bosworth)
As the
body lives by breathing, so the soul lives by believing. (Thomas Brooks)
We have
not received the Spirit of God because we believe, but that we may
believe. (Fulgentius of Ruspe)
I believe
in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it
but because, by it, I see everything else.
(C. S. Lewis)
It is more
reverent to believe in the works of the Deity than to comprehend them. (Colnelius Tacitus)
It is not
the Word of God but rather modernity that stands in need of being
demythologized. (David F. Wells)
We often
pray for God to change others, the world, or our circumstance. As
Christians we feel called to convert others or change the world. When I
was young, I wanted to convert people, then I wanted to change the world,
converting people in a different way: I became involved in politics, the
civil rights movement, the peace movement, other movements seeking
justice. Then I decided maybe I could at least change my little part of the
world, the church, making it more inclusive, more just. Now, in middle
age, I feel blessed if I can change myself! (Chris Glaser)
In one
verse Luke (3:1) alludes to fifteen historical references which any classical
historian can verify. In the fifteen
year (one) of the reign of Tiberius Caesar (two) when Pontius Pilate (three)
was governor (four) of Judea (five), Herod (six) tetrarch (seven) of Galilee
(eight), his brother Philip (nine) tetrarch (ten) of Iturea (eleven) and
Traconitis, (twelve) and Lysanias (thirteen) tetrarch (fourteen) of Abilene
(fifteen). (Author unknown)
What a
world this would be if we could forget our troubles as easily as we forget our
blessings. (Author unknown)
A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors.
(Antonio Porchia)
How else
but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in. (Oscar Wilde)
O Lord!
Thou knowest how busy I must be this day; if I forget thee, do not thou forget
me. (Sir Jacob Astley)
When life has meaning, you can bear
almost anything; without it, nothing is bearable. Without God, life has no purpose, and without
purpose, life has no meaning. The
greatest tragedy is not death, but life without purpose. (Rick Warren)
Obedience
is a freely chosen death, a life without cares, danger without fears,
unshakable trust in God, no fear of death.
It is a voyage without perils, a journey in your sleep. (John Climacus)
Character
may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
(Phillip Brooks)
Realize
that you must lead a dying life; the more a man dies to himself; the more he
begins to live unto God. (Thomas á
Kempis)
The
greatness of the Christian lies in the fact that he is God’s. (William Barclay)
If the worship of God is a stream we
dip into, it is always the same stream but also always shifting and moving,
with different qualities of light playing on its surface. (Debra Rienstra in So Much More: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality,
Jossey-Bass)
You will
not stroll into Christlikeness with your hands in your pockets, shoving the
door open with a careless shoulder. This
is no hobby for one’s leisure moments, taken up at intervals when we have
nothing much to do, and put down and forgotten when our life grows full and
interesting. It takes all one’s
strength, and all one’s heart, and all one’s mind, and all one’s soul, given
freely and recklessly and without restraint.
This is a business for adventurous spirits: others would shrink out of
it. (A. J. Gossip)
What can I
give him, Poor as I am?
If I were
a shepherd, I would bring a lamb
If I were
a Wise Man, I would do my part
Yet what
can I give Him?
Give my
heart.
(Christina
Rossetti)
What did you do with your life—all the
gifts, talents, opportunities, energy, relationships, and resources God gave
you? Did you spend them on yourself, or
did you use them for the purposes God made for you? (Rick Warren)
The birth
of Jesus is the sunrise in the Bible
(Henry Van Dyke)
The Reformed gospel says that if
you’re the elect, you’re blessed, and if you’re not, too bad. The polite mainline gospel says—actually, no
one is quite sure what it says. (Leonard
Sweet, Bryan D. McLaren, Jerry Haselmayer)
The church
which is married to the Spirit of the Age will be a widow in the next. (Dean Inge)
Your enemy was neither
Nobody
worries about Christ as long as he can be kept shut up in churches. He is quite safe inside. But there is always trouble if you try and
let him out. (G. A. Studdert Kennedy)
The Church
is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of non-members. (William Temple)
Self-worth and net worth are not the
same thing. (Rick Warren)
Tell me
what the world is saying today, and I’ll tell you what the church will be
saying in seven years. (Francis
Schaeffer)
One church
growth marketer claims that the difference between “growth” and “evangelism”
and “marketing” is only semantics. He is
absolutely wrong. As historian David
Potter pointed out in his penetrating analysis of advertising: “Once marketing becomes dominant, the concern
is not with finding an audience to hear their message, but rather with finding
a message to hold their audience.”
God never
intended His Church to be a refrigerator in which to preserve perishable
piety. He intended it to be an incubator
in which to hatch out converts. (F.
Lincicome)
There is a
great light that now leads me on and directs me and guides me. That great
light is the light of this world. That great light is the light out of
this world, and into that better world. And I’m looking forward to
walking into it with that great light. (Johnny Cash)
WARNING: Do not attend a church which prefers science
to Scripture, reason to revelation, theories to Truth, culture to conversion,
benevolence to Blood, goodness to grace, sociability to spirituality, play to
praise, programs to power, reformation to regeneration, speculation to
salvation, jubilation to justification, feelings to faith, politics to
precepts. (Author unknown)
A
coincidence is a small miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous. (Author unknown.)
Faith
embraces many truths that seem to contradict each other. (Blaise Pascal)
Truth is the way God does things. (Calvin Seerveld)
Religion
is for people afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for people who
have already been there. (quoted by Chris Glaser)
If there was no God, we would all be
accidents. (Rick Warren)
Morning
has broken like the first morning
Blackbird
has spoken like the first bird
Praise
for the singing, praise for the morning!
Praise
for them springing fresh from the Word
Sweet
the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like
the first dew fall on the first grass
Praise
for the sweetness of the wet garden
God's
creation of the new day
Mine
is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born
of the one light
Praise
with elation, praise every morning
God's
recreation of the new day!
(Eleanor
Farjeon)
It
is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was
separated from worship. In former days the artist remained unknown and
his work was to the glory of God. Today the individual has become the
highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. (Ingmar Bergman)
Atheism
is the death of hope, the suicide of the soul. (Author unknown)
I
tried atheism for a while, but my faith just wasn’t strong enough.
(Author unknown)
An
atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support. (John Buchan)
If you tell me you do
not believe in God and then say to me that I should brake for animals, or pay
women equally, or help the poor, on what basis are you making such an appeal?
If no standard for objective truth, law, wisdom, justice, charity, kindness,
compassion and fidelity exists in the universe, then what you are asking me to
accept is an idea that has taken hold in your head but has all of the moral
compulsion of a bowl of cereal. You are
trying to persuade me to a point of view based on your feelings and not rooted
in the fear of God or some other unchanging earthly standard. (Cal Thomas)
We have to understand that the world
can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye. The hand is the cutting edge of the
mind. (Jacob Bronowski)
Here lies an Atheist
All dressed up
And no place to go.
(Epitaph in a Thurmont cemetery,
An atheist’s creed
There is no God.
There is no objective Truth.
There is no ground for Reason.
There is no absolute Morals.
There is no ultimate Value.
There is no ultimate Meaning.
There is no eternal Hope.
(Steve Kumar)
Atheism
is a disease of the soul before it is an error of the mind. (Plato)
Atheism
is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God. (Tom Stoppard)
Carlyle
was wrong in saying that "there is no life of a man faithfully
recorded." The life of my Master was! The ink used was blood, the
parchment was skin, the pen was a spear. (J. Fulton Sheen)
For all the saints who
from their labors rest
All who by faith before the world
confess
Your name, O Jesus be forever blessed
You were their rock, their
fortress and might
You, Lord, their captain in the well
fought fight
You, in the darkness drear, their one
true light
Oh, blessed communion,
fellowship divine
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine
Yet all are one within your great
design
The golden evening
brightens in the west
Soon to faithful warriors comes their
rest
Sweet is the calm of paradise the
blessed
But then their breaks a
yet more glorious day
The saints triumphant arise in bright
array
From the earth's wide bounds, from
ocean's farthest coast
Through gates of pearl
streams in the countless host
Singing to the Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost
(William W. How)
The world is not my home, I’m just
passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere
beyond the blue
The Savior beckons me from heaven’s
open door
And I can’t feel at home in this world
any more.
(Youth
Praise)
Think of truth as a person you would
really like to know. (Dave Tomlinson)
There is so much good in the worst of
us
And so much bad in the best of us
That it hardly behooves any of us
To talk about the rest of us
(Joaquin Miller)
The truth of Christ both convicts and
liberates. Truth makes all human beings
uncomfortable; it calls us into question; it makes demands of us that are
beyond our ordinary capabilities.
(Douglas John Paul)
We are products of our past, but we don’t
have to be prisoners of it. God’s
purpose is not limited by your past. God
specializes in giving people a fresh start.
(Rick Warren)
If you look at the world, you’ll be
distressed. If you look within, you’ll
be depressed. But if you look at Christ,
you’ll be at rest. (Corrie Ten Boom)
I
have learned that all people do not seek the same thing when they seek the will
of God. Some seek that they might become servants. Others seek that they may be
masters. Some want to know what they can do for God. Others want to know what
God can do for them. Some see the will of God as an inner seed to be grown.
Others see it as an outer prize to be grasped. Some see God’s will as a
destination; others experience it as a journey.
The ways by which people seek to know God’s will determine their
conclusions about his will. Those who have their eyes on certain aims,
achievements and products understand God’s will as being goal-centered. Those
who are concerned about behavior, means and process understand God’s will as
being conduct-centered. The goal-centered approach to God’s will focuses on
destination and destiny, twin ideas growing from the same root. If one has his
eyes fixed upon a definite destination, he may come to believe that it is
divine destiny that he reaches that goal. Further, he may believe that whatever
he can do toward accomplishing the divine goal is also in God’s will. This is the religious version of the
political maxim that the end justifies the means. If the desired end is
important enough, then any means to bring about that end is not only justified
but also obligatory. It is a fine line between seeing the end as God’s will,
and justifying any means to reach that end.
On the other hand, the conduct-centered approach to God’s will contends that
the means is the end. The goal that God has for us is Christ-like conduct in
every relationship and undertaking. His primary desire is for us to behave in
the right way, whether or not we accomplish a plan or win a victory. His end
(goal) is to get us to use the right means.
The treatment of our fellow man with justice and mercy, and a spirit of
humility before God comprises the total divine requirement for worship and
service. How we treat each other reveals how we really feel about God and his
will for our lives. The biblical understanding of the will of God was focused
less on achieving and more on behaving.
Many are familiar with stories of the pastor who began his ministry with
great expectations because everyone was so sure he was “God’s man” for the job.
Then the church was devastated through his arbitrary leadership or his personal
moral problems. A lot of dissention and disappointment may have been avoided if
God’s will had been discussed more in terms of doing the job instead of getting
the job. In Ephesians 5:17, the Apostle
Paul writes, “Understand what the will of the Lord is.” He uses the present
tense verb “is,” not the past tense “was.” Rather than debating if a past event
or action was the will of God, our task is to do the Christ-like thing in the
present situation. (Bill Austin)
A
university professor went to a master teacher to learn Zen. The master
poured him a cup of tea. Once full, he continues to pour until the
professor objects, saying, ”no more will go in!” The master
explains that, like this tea cup, the professor is full of his own ideas and
must empty his cup to receive. (Paraphrased Chris Glaser)
If Jesus
were visibly present today, he would be challenging Christianity today much as
he challenged the Judaism of his time. (Chris Glaser)
FRED ROGERS (“Mr.
Rogers”):
We have to allow ourselves room for
what we cannot see, hear, touch, or control.
God’s grace often comes to us in the
form of another person who tells us we have been of help, and what a blessing
that is.
Someone else’s action should not
determine your response.
The most essential element of the
development of any creation must be love—a love that begins in the simple care
for a little child, and goes on to maturity into responsible feelings about
ourselves and others.
We should pledge ourselves to remember
what life is really all about—not to be afraid that we’re less flashy than the next,
not to worry that our influence is not that of a tornado, but rather that of a
grain of sand in an oyster! Do we have
that kind of patience?
It’s really easy to fall into the trap
of believing that what we do is more important than what we are. What we are ultimately determines what we do.
We don’t get to be competent human
beings with a lot of different investments from others.
Someone once said that being able to
appreciate others is about as close as you can get to God.
A person can grow to his or her
fullest capacity only in mutual caring relationships with others.
There is a close relationship between
truth and trust.
Where would any of us be without
teachers who have a passion for what they’re teaching and love it right in
front of us?
What would any of us do without
teachers passing on to us what they know is essential about life?
I don’t think anyone can grow unless
he’s loved exactly as he is now, appreciated for what he is rather than what he
will be.
When you receive something, you’re
vulnerable.
The toughest thing is to love somebody
who has done something mean to you—especially when that somebody is yourself.
If you’re trusted, people will allow
you to share their inner garden.
I’m glad I was able to do what I’ve
done and not have been sidetracked along the way.
Sometimes it takes years and years of
experimentation to realize who we can be.
Try your best to make goodness
attractive.
THOMAS C. ODEN
Modernization since the Enlightenment
has had an insatiable fascination with change and has been bored by
stability. Modern news media do not know
how to report on continuities, only on changes.
Modern ideologues are fixated on what disaster is likely to happen next,
not how human cultures will survive and thrive through whatever crisis.
The most profound dilemma of modern
life is the uprootedness caused by the failure of secular ideologies.
Current culture seems capable of
undermining any claim to truth. Hence, a
decisive spiritual issue for Christian is whether the truth of Christianity can
be preserved through time. Classically,
this is know as the question of the perseverance of the elect people of God
amid proximate temporary apostacies.
The covenant of God with
The task of adhering to the teaching
of God’s eternal faithfulness is an urgent one for orthodox remembering in our
time. This confidence rests not on
empirical certainty, but rather on the certainty of faith in God’s sovereign
will.
The foundation is standing sure, and
the Lord knows who are His.
The future of belief is left not to
chance or human will, but to the electing love and grace of God. God wills to be known by rational creatures
that divine will does not depend upon our receptivity.
Faith alone remains the crucial
condition of participating in eternal security.
And where faith is weak, grace continues to awaken and sustain it. The Holy spirit is determined to prevail over
idolatry and disbelief in God’s own time.
God promises the preserve his people
from fundamental error in the long course of history—in fact, to the last
day. Insofar as the faithful are
sustained by pure Word and sacrament, adhering to the “faith once delivered,” God
receives their Eucharistic sacrifice—Christ’s own self – giving to redeem
sin—as faultless.
I—as
a believer that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, the Christ of the Greeks, was the
Anointed One of God (born of the seed of David, upon faith as Abraham has
faith, and accounted to him for righteousness)--am grafted onto the true vine
and am one of the heirs of God’s covenant with
Echoing from the fourth century, the
voice of Hilary of
Our imperfections call us to simple
obedience, to yield to consensual wisdom even when we do not grasp all its
reasons fully.
Those undergoing ordination in
seminaries are often surprised to find themselves steered away from scripture
toward gender studies, nihilistic deconstruction, uninhibited liturgical
experimentation, the ubiquitous (and speculative) historical criticism, and
counterproductive psychotherapies.
It is supremely ironic that today’s
laity are becoming the mentors of today’s clergy. It is the clergy into whose hands lay
believers have solemnly entrusted themselves and their faith. And yet, when the clergy have fallen further
away from faith than the laity, the laity are now taking the lead.
Professors can no longer be presumed
to have unlimited license to teach anything they please under the sullied
banner of academic freedom. When all
boundary issues are indiscriminately wrapped in the incontestable flag of
academic freedom, academic freedom loses its moral high ground.
Church bureaucracies have offered the
mainline churches an unsupervised playground for experimentation in political
messianism, utopianism, sexual liberation, and anti-market economics.
GERHARD O. FORDE
Ever since the time of the Reformation
people have been trying to remodel God.
Mostly they have done this because they did not like and could not cope
with an Almighty God. Pietists reduced
God to a mere offerer of salvation as though he were holding a piece of cake
which one was to make one’s decision for or against. Liberals made God into the kindly old man who
was the embodiment of a love little more than sentimentality. Today the God-remodelers are a dime a
dozen. Everyone, it seems, wants to do
God the favor of making his less objectionable.
Luther strived for the whole man, for
a completely restored man, for an entirely free man. We have bargained for only little bit—a
little bit of freedom but mostly bondage to legalistic codes; a little bit of
devotion but mostly despising life and human achievement; a little bit in the
collection plate on Sunday but mostly nothing for human justice and social
improvement.
We do not need grace because we are
“weak.” God has given us plenty of
strength by virtue of creation. What was
lost in the fall was not strength, but faith. Loss of faith leads to a misuse
and distortion of human powers through pride and spiritual pretension. Grace is the act of God which destroys pride
and pretension. Man is made new. He is reborn.
Far be it for the Christian to despise
human efforts, to despise human art and literature, human cultural and social
endeavor—a practice all too common in churches.
Grace does not compete with nature, it reveals it for what it is
supposed to be: God’s good creation in
which we should rejoice.
The gospel is the announcement and
realization of total freedom. It is not
a matter of little bits. God moves in
Christ to raise up a new man—a completely free man—not just to do a partial
repair job.
Luther said that the Christian is at
once a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none, and a perfectly dutiful
servant of all subject to all.
Our power cannot take us beyond this
world. We are called to repent, to turn
around and go back to take care of this world.
Man is stripped of his myths, his ideologies, and his utopia.
The line between this world and the
next is drawn by God’s grade. This
establishes the world as a place under the law in which man can live, work, and
hope. It should establish a sphere in
which law can be seen as a good thing rather than a bad thing.
Our religious, political, economic,
patriotic dreams, all the myths on which we feed and delude ourselves lead us
astray. We are never content to stay
here and take care of our fellow men and the good earth. Our religious dreams seduce us into despising
the earth; our political and patriotic dreams delude us so that we kill and
maim our brothers; our economic dreams entice us so that we let our fellow men
starve. We are always on the way
somewhere else, to some other kingdom, and we think we have found some magic
formula to get us there. We are
“climbing Jacob’s ladder.” Or we are
going to “make the world safe for democracy.”
Or we are going towards some capitalistic economic heaven of “free
enterprise and individual initiative.”
The principle of laissez faire and “the law of supply and demand”
are going to get us there automatically—no matter how many unfortunates are
ground to dust in the process.
It is not the care of people, human
beings, not the care of earth that matters.
We tyrannize and discriminate against our fellow men, shut out those who
are different, beat down the under-privileged, tear up the earth, deface it and
turn it into one vast garbage dump.
Why? Our myths and
ideologies. These are the things the
devil uses. He persuades us to leave the
earth and set off for our utopia.
The contemplative is not needy or
greedy for human contacts, but is guided by a vision of what he has seen beyond
the trivial concerns of a possessive world.
He does not bounce up and down with the fashions of the moment, because
he is in contact with what is basic, central and ultimate. He does not allow anybody to worship idols,
and he constantly invites his fellow man to ask real, often painful and
upsetting questions, to look behind the surface of smooth behavior, and to take
away all the obstacles that prevent him from getting to the heart of the
matter. The contemplative critic takes
away the illusory mask of the manipulative world and has the courage to show
what the true situation is. He knows
that he is considered by many as a fool, a madman, a danger to society and a
threat to mankind. But he is not afraid
to die, since his vision makes him transcend the difference between life and
death and makes him free to do what has to be done here and now,
notwithstanding the risks involved. More
than anything else, he will look for signs of hope and promise in the situation
in which he finds himself. The
contemplative critic has the sensibility to notice the small mustard seed. He knows that if there is hope for a better
world in the future the signs must be visible in the present, and he will never
curse the now in favor of the later. He
is not a naïve optimist who expects his frustrated desires to be satisfied in
the future, nor a bitter pessimist who keeps repeating that the past has taught
him that there is nothing new under the sun; he is rather a man of hope who
lives with the unshakable conviction that now he is seeing a dim reflection in
a mirror, but that one day he will see the future face to face. The Christian
leader who is able not only to articulate the movements of the spirit but also
to contemplate his world with a critical but compassionate eye, may expect that
the convulsive generation will not choose death as the ultimate desperate form
for protest, but instead the new life of which he has made visible the first
hopeful signs.
By grace man is relieved of the burden
of climbing to heaven, so he gets earth back as a gift.
CARL BRAATEN
The relative social and political
impotence of churches is deeply rooted in the doctrinal controversies of the 16th
century, which disrupted the unity of
the medieval order. The rise of
secularism in modern culture, the neutrality of the state in matters of
religion, and the tendency to make faith a purely private thing are conditions
which arose and still continue because the fragmentation of the church drives
society to base its meaning and purpose on other than religious
foundations. The religious wars in
Christianity will not again become a
meaningful social force, checking the excesses of the ruling isms, until it
overcome the denominational conflicts of the past and constructs new forms in
which its own vision of life can once again become a resource for the common
good. The ecumenical movement for
Christian unity does not exist for its own sake, but for the good of the world.
We have received the gospel of the
reign of God in fragile earthen vessels—our Scriptures, our creeds, our
liturgies, and therefore our ecclesiastical offices. All of these earthen vessels conveys the
sufficiencies of God’s grace and the unfailing power of his promises.
The power of the
The story of Jesus is the key to God’s
autobiography.
Because of the real humanity of God in
Christ, the wall of separation between the holy and the common, the religious
and the secular, the soul and the body, the world and the one to come, history
and eschatology, the natural and the supernatural has been broken down.
The cocoon of religion, wrapped up in
its own ceremonies, could not hold Jesus Christ, and he summons his followers
into the world to breathe the fresh air of God’s creation, not stay closeted up
inhaling the holy smoke of stuffy religious ceremonies. The sacraments of the real presence dramatize
the bold and holy secularity expressed in the Christian doctrines of creation,
incarnation, and sanctification.
God not only foresees the salvation of
humanity but sees to it. He brings to
pass all that is needed, for which we are to thank, praise, and serve.
Our heart, as Calvin said, is a
“manufacturer of idols.” We create gods
we can control and in worshipping them, we are secretly worshipping
ourselves. While professing to love God,
we are actually loving a god-substitute created in our own image. Our natural human love to God becomes a
perverted form of self-love. But even
this we cannot do. We cannot even truly
love ourselves. One perversion follows
another.
God makes unwilling persons willing to
do the will of God.
Pharisaism reappears in the cloak of
pietism.
God’s grace does not waver like our
feelings. It definitely prevents us from grounding our hope in human potential.
God’s love is indifferent to “value.” His
love shows no partiality to the righteous and pious people. The most insidious
temptation of the righteous person is to believe that God will love me more if
only I become more spiritual, and that divine blessings are granted or withheld
in proportion to my performance, good or bad.
The biblical concept of grace as agape love is calculated to attack
every such notion of a bartering God and a bargain-counter religion.
ERIC W. GRITSCH
Like a snowplow, theology clears the
road so that one’s future with God can be discerned plainly. Proper theology does not explain or “prove”
the existence of God. It challenges
human pride, lays bare the ego, and opens the way to a childlike faith in what
God in Christ does for us.
The purpose of a Christian’s life is to
make the transition to another world containing no sin, evil or death; which
had its birth at Easter and is symbolized by an empty tomb.
The time between the first coming of
Jesus and his promised return has been a long and often mean time, filled with despair
rather than hope, with apathy rather than passion, with doubt rather than with
faith.
Living in this mean time between
Christ’s first and second coming, waiting for the new age, is difficult. It may be compared to waiting in a
physician’s office to hear one’s medical destiny. Many Christian traditions compete with each
other in the waiting room of history.
Much has been accumulated to bring comfort to people in their anxiety,
but these traditions need to be distilled, refined, and reformed through
Christ-centered minds aware of the difference between laws and promises,
between the law and the gospel, between the old age and the new age to come.
Faith is the holy spirit’s gift that
operates as the mind of Christ between his first and second coming. Once filled with this faith, believers no
longer need worry about how to please God or how to appease him with their own
efforts, and instead are free to turn sideways, along the cross’ horizontal bar
to extend their love to the world.
The freedom from self is a direct
result of bondage to God.
No Christian will ever lack the
occasion to exercise love and justice, for there will always be neighbors in
need. But reason is needed to determine
what should be done. Reason is therefore
the tool to discern what is faithful in the sight of God and the neighbor, to
read the signs of the times, and they to undertake action for the sake of love
and justice.
There are two realms, both ruled by
God. One is the realm of sin, death, and
evil, which is the realm of “God’s left hand,” and is the law which preserves
order so that fallen creation can survive until the new age. The other is the realm of faith, hope, and
love, which is the realm of God’s “right hand”
and is the promise of a life beyond death in a new creation. The two realms, with their different
realities, are like two circles that intersect to form the place and time
between the departure and return of the resurrected Jesus. Christians live in this intersection.
The church is a halfway house between
the two realms. “Now we are only halfway
pure and holy,” Luther told his congregation.
One must therefore remain vigilant and be able to distinguish properly
between sin and grace, law and gospel, and church and world.
Some charismatic Christians are under
the illusion that the holy spirit will spare them struggle, doubt and
confusion. Yet even they experience
temptation, doubt, and the need to be “born again” more than once.
A proper distinction between Spirit
and Word must be maintained. This should
give some comfort to the pastors who wish to have their faithfulness matched by
success. They need not emulate cattle
ranchers who rope, brand, and count their herds, nor need they be Lone Rangers
trying to please God by undertaking an individual spiritual marathon. They need only be faithful instruments of the
world of God, functioning as the communicators of law and gospel.
Servanthood rehumanizes what has been
dehumanized in the world and servanthood exorcises the legion of demons feeding
the inhumanity in the world. The church,
too, must be rehumanized. The church is
dehumanized when it deifies dogma, structure, morality, or any other human
invention.
FROM THE BOOK
OF COMMON PRAYER
O God, the King eternal,
drive far us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to keep thy law, and guide
our feet into the way of peace; that having done thy will with cheerfulness
while it was day, we may, when the night cometh, rejoice to give thee thanks.
We humbly pray thee so to
guide and govern us by thy Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations
of our life we may not forget thee, but may remember that we are ever walking
in thy sight.
Almighty God, Father of
all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks
for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men. We bless
thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but
above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord
Jesus Christ.
O God, who art the life of
all who live, the light of the faithful, the strength of those who labor, and
the repose of the dead, we thank thee for the timely blessings of the
day, and humble beseech thy merciful protection all through the night.
O gracious light, pure
brightness of the ever living, Father in heaven.
Now as we come to the setting sun, and
our eyes behold the vesper light, we sing your praises.
You are worthy at all times to be
praised by happy voices and to be glorified through all the worlds.
Lord Jesus, be our
companion in the way, kindle our hearts and awaken hope that we may know you as
you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread.
Stir up thy power, O Lord,
and with great might come among us; and because we are sorely hindered by our
sins, let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us.
We beseech thee, Almighty
God, to purify our consciences by thy daily visitation, that when thy Son our
Lord cometh, he may find in us a mansion prepared for himself.
O most loving Father, who
willest us to give thanks for all things, to dread nothing but the loss of
thee, and to cast all our care on thee who carest for us, preserve us
from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, and grant that no clouds of this
mortal life may hide from us the light of that love of Christ which is
immortal.
Most merciful God, keep us
from all things that may hurt us, that we, being ready both in body and soul,
may with free hearts accomplish those things which belong to thy purpose.
O God, grant us the grace
of thy Holy Spirit, that we may be devoted to thee with our whole heart, and
united to one another with pure affection.
Grant us, O Lord, not to
mind earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are
place among things that are passing away, to cleave to those that shall abide.
Almighty and everlasting
God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give
more than either we desire or deserve: pour down upon us the abundance of thy
mercy, forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving
us those good those which we are not worth to ask, but through the merits and
mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son our Lord.
Almighty God, deliver us
form the service of self alone, that we may do the work which thou givest us to
do, in truth and beauty for the common good.
O God, mercifully accept
our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you,
give us the help of your grace.
Grant us so to glory in
the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of
your Son our Savior.
Grant, we pray, Almighty
God, that as we believe your only-begotton Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to have
ascended into heaven, so may we also in heart and mind there ascend, and with
him continually dwell.
Almighty God, have
compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our
unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask.
Grant us, Lord, not to be
anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly.
Almighty and everlasting
God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well beloved Son,
mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin,
may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule.
Lord God Almighty, help us
to use our liberty in accordance with your gracious will.
Almighty God, you have so
linked our lives one with another that all we do affects, for good or ill, all
other lives.
Holy God, heavenly Father,
you formed me from the dust in your image and likeness, and redeemed me from
sin and death by the cross of your Son Jesus Christ. Through the water of
baptism you clothed me with the shining garment of his righteousness, and
established me among your children in your kingdom. But I have squandered
the inheritance of your saints, and have wandered far in a land that is waste.
Lord Jesus Christ, by your
patience in suffering you hallowed earthly pain and gave us the example of
obedience to your Father's will. Be near me in my time of weakness and
pain. Sustain me by your grace, that my strength and courage may not
fail. Heal me according to your will and help me always to believe that
what happens to me is of little account if you hold me in eternal life, my Lord
and God.
O heavenly Father, you
give your children sleep for the refreshing of soul and body. Grant me
this gift, I pray: keep me in that perfect peace which you have promised to
those whose minds are fixed on you. Give me such a sense of your presence
that in the hours of silence I may enjoy the blessed assurance of your love.
O God, look with
compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which
infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us. Unite us in
bonds of love and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your
purposes on earth, that in your good time, all nations and races may serve you
in harmony around your heavenly throne.
Lord, make us instruments
of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is
injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is
sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to
console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For
it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and
it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Accept
O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you
for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the
wonder of life, and for the mystery of love.
FROM OUR
DAILY BREAD MAGAZINE
A good leader knows the
way, shows the way, and goes the way.
A little encouragement can spark a
great accomplishment.
An offense against your neighbor is a
fence between you and God.
Because Christ lives in us now, we will
live with Him forever.
Bible study is meant not merely to
inform but to transform.
Caring people are sharing people.
Christ removes our guilty past and
gives us a glorious future.
Christ showed His love by dying for us;
we show ours by living for Him.
Christ’s birth brought God to man, but
it took Christ’s death to bring man to God.
Contentment isn’t getting what we want
but being satisfied with what we have.
Conversion of a sinner takes only a
moment; growth of a saint takes a lifetime.
Don't grumble if you don’t have what
you want; be thankful you don’t get what you deserve.
Faith sees things that are out of
sight.
God always gives his best to those who
leave the choice to Him.
God doesn't tell us everything—just
everything we need to know.
God tells us to burden Him with
whatever burdens us.
God’s comfort compensates for life’s
losses.
God’s warranty: you’re covered
for a lifetime.
Grace: receiving what we don’t
deserve. Mercy: not receiving what we do deserve.
Great trials often precede great
triumphs.
Guard against evil or you’ll be
influenced by it.
Hate, like acid, damages the vessel in
which it is stored and the object on which it is poured.
He who has no money is poor; he who has
nothing but money is even poorer.
Heaven is prepared for people who are
prepared for Heaven.
If you fear God, you need fear nothing
else.
In a world that “couldn’t care less,”
we are to be people who couldn’t care more.
Keep a cool head and a warm heart.
Keep your eyes on God; He never takes
His eyes off you.
Many people store the Bible on the
shelf instead of in their heart.
Nothing is more costly than
loving—except not loving.
One plus God is always a majority.
Our afflictions are designed not to
break us but to bend us toward God.
Praise is the song of a soul set free.
Praising God turns burdens into
blessings.
Prayer is not a way to get what we want
but the way to become what God wants.
Religion may inform and reform, but
only Christ can transform.
Repentance not only rejects the wrong
but returns to the right.
Room for improvement is the largest
room in the world.
Salvation is free—but only to those who
ask for it.
Salvation is not what we achieve but
what we receive.
Seven days without church makes one
weak.
Some people have plenty to live on but
nothing to live for.
Sometimes it takes the dark to teach us
to walk in God’s light.
Talk to God about people before you
talk to people about God.
The best way to know God’s will is to
say, “I will” to God.
The Christian life is a battleground,
not a playground.
The first step to receiving God’s
forgiveness is to admit that we need it.
The God who holds the universe is the
God who is holding you.
The measure of our love for God is our
obedience.
The new birth creates a new appetite
and requires a new diet.
The one who lives for this life only
will have eternity to regret it.
The one who took great care to create
the universe knows how to care for you.
The only leader worth following is the
leader who is following Christ.
The presence of trouble does not mean
the absence of God.
The sins of others always seem greater
than our own.
The trouble with a little sin is that
it doesn’t stay little.
Those who give the gospel must live the
gospel.
To ease another’s heartache is to
forget one’s own.
To escape temptation, flee to God.
To stay youthful, stay useful.
Trials teach trust.
True freedom is found in captivity to
Christ.
Unless we rely on God’s power within
us, we will yield to the pressures around us.
We are not ready to live until we are
ready to die.
We are the only picture of Christ some
people will ever see.
We don’t need more of the spirit; the
spirit needs more of us.
We don’t really know the Bible until we
obey the Bible.
We never graduate from the school of
prayer.
We really live when we live to give.
What you worship determines what you
become.
When God puts you on hold, don’t hang
up!
When we have nothing left but God, we
find that God is enough.
When worry walks in, strength runs out,
but strength returns when we let God in.
When you can’t be there, you can help
through prayer.
When your will is God’s will, you will
have your will.
While you prepare a place for us, Lord,
prepare us for that place.
With God behind you, you can face
whatever is ahead of you.
You can have tons of religion without
one ounce of salvation.
You can never conquer sin with an
excuse.
You can’t put your sins behind you
until you are ready to face them.
You don’t need to know where you are
going if you know God is leading.
You need not be afraid of where you’re
going when you know God’s going with you.
Your life is God’s gift to you; what
you do with it is your gift to God.