Classic and contemporary excerpts.
When busy is too busy
We need to scrutinize the rush of our activities, because even venerable exertions may be keeping us from becoming and doing what God wants. A packed schedule may be detrimental not only to ourselves, but to those we seek to help.
A few years ago our neighbors were drawn to us, but when we talked to them about the Lord, their response was, “We couldn’t be Christians; we couldn’t live at your pace.” They had been attracted to Christ, but the busyness of our lives had scared them from a commitment.
—Jean Fleming, “How Busy Is Too Busy?” in Decision (March 1988)
Divine partnership
If God did not bless, not one hair, not a solitary wisp of straw, would grow; but there would be an end of everything. At the same time God wants me to take this stand: I would have nothing whatever if I did not plow and sow. God does not want to have success come without work, and yet I am not to achieve it by my work. He does not want me to sit at home, to loaf, to commit matters to God, and to wait till a fried chicken flies into my mouth. That would be tempting God.
—Martin Luther, quoted in
What Luther Says
Limits Of Evil
Evildoing has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evil-doing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our help. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result of either their own extreme degree or the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.
—Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn in
The Gulag Archipelago
Gumming up the works
We live out interesting paradoxes. We announce blatantly to the world that we have answers to the human sickness. Then we press for lifestyle conformity and doctrinal orthodoxy codified into stale axioms that stifle the very ideas we pronounce as divine. The creative Christian life and thought scares the jee-willingers out of Bible college deans and popes alike. Kenneth Scott Latourette says that once Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire the faithful got doctrinal, conformist, and creedal and sent the Church into 1,000 years of uncertainty.… Martin Luther got the movement unstuck when he rediscovered grace. Then conservatives codified God and liberals deified humans and gummed it up again.
—Lloyd H. Alhem in The Covenant Companion
(Aug. 1986)
Living in heavenly places
If you are a child of God and there is some part of your circumstances which is tearing you, if you are living in the heavenly places you will thank God for the tearing things; if you are not in the heavenly places you cry to God over and over again—“O Lord, remove this thing from me. If only I could live in golden streets and be surrounded with angels, and have the Spirit of God consciously indwelling me all the time and have everything wonderfully sweet, then I think I might be a Christian.” That is not being a Christian.
—Oswald Chambers in
The Love of God
Commodity traders
Jesus, in many ways, has been robbed of his glory and divinity by those who hawk him as if he were a commodity, with Jesus T-shirts and bumper stickers which proclaim such profound theology as “honk twice if you love Jesus.”
—Harry E. Farra, “The Closing of the Christian Mind” in Eternity (Jan. 1988)
