God’s unfathomable works
God, who is eternal, infinite, supremely mighty, does great and unfathomable things in heaven and in earth, and there is no understanding his wonderful works. If the works of God could easily be grasped by human understanding they could not be called wonderful or too great for words.
—Thomas a Kempis in
The Imitation of Christ
Worship tasting
Worship … fits right into the consumerism that so characterizes American religious life. Church-shopping has become common. A believer will compare First Presbyterian, St. John’s Lutheran, Epiphany Episcopal, Brookwood Methodist, and Bethany Baptist for the “best buy.” The church plant, programs, and personnel are carefully scrutinized, but the bottom line is, “How did it feel?” Worship must be sensational. “Start with an earthquake and work up from that,” advised one professor of homiletics. “Be sure you have the four prerequisites of a successful church,” urged another; “upbeat music, adequate parking, a warm welcome, and a dynamite sermon.” The slogan is, “Try it, you’ll like it.”
—Duane W. H. Arnold and C. George Fry in “Weothscrip”
(Eternity, Sept. 1986)
No worlds to conquer?
The twin aims that have animated mankind since the dawn of history are the conquest of nature and the conquest of drudgery. Now they seem in a fair way to be achieved. And the achievement seems destined, at the same time, to end in the trivialization of life.
—Robert M. Hutchins in
The Great Conversation
Picture of Advent
A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes, does various unessential things, and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison to his fiancée,
Maria von Wedemeyer
The paradox of pursuing God
What I am anxious to see in Christian believers is a beautiful paradox. I want to see in them the joy of finding God while at the same time they are blessedly pursuing Him. I want to see in them the great joy of having God and yet always wanting Him!
—A. W. Tozer in
Men Who Met God
Death is not the enemy
Let me underscore … an idea that human minds grasp while human hearts resist: Death is not the enemy. Just think: if people didn’t move on, who could move in? There would be no new poets, artists, or composers. It would be all Bach, Telemann, and Scarlatti—no Beethoven, Brahms, or Beatles. Church meetings would never adjourn, graduate students never graduate. Human beings would be as bored as the old Greek gods, and probably up to their same silly tricks. In other words, death cannot be the enemy if it is death that brings Christians to life. Just as without leave-taking, there can be no arrival; without growing old, no growing up; without grounds for despair, no reason for hope. So without death, there can be no life.
—William Sloane Coffin, “The Good News About the Brokenhearted Christian Blues,” in
U.S. Catholic (Aug. 1986)
Our throw-away society
In this society we save whales, we save timber wolves and bald eagles and Coke bottles. Yet, everyone wanted me to throw away my baby.
—David Boehi, quoting a pregnant woman, Victoria, in
Worldwide Challenge
(July/Aug. 1986)
