Classic and contemporary excerpts.
“Squeezed like a lemon”
We must strive for sanctity, for holiness, to the point that we show up at Heaven’s gates “squeezed out like a lemon.” This image is vivid and challenging—at once heroic, romantic, and intimidating. Indeed, it is in striking, almost shocking, contrast to the consumerist, hedonist, and materialist deliriums of our decadent society.
—From an editorial in the New Oxford Review (July–Aug. 1988)
Words, words, words
The Bible tells us that the most vital and yet the most difficult thing to master is our words.
It is not so much what goes in one ear and comes out the other that bothers us, it is what goes in one ear, gets garbled in the process, and then comes out the mouth!
—Fay Angus in Running Around in Spiritual Circles
Leaving the comfort zone
If we would be enlarged, we must accept all that God sends us to develop and expand our spiritual life. We are so content to abide at the old level that God often has to compel us to rise higher by bringing us face to face with situations that we cannot meet without much greater measures of His grace. It is as though He had to send a tidal wave to flood the lowlands where we dwell to compel us to move into the hills beyond. God, like the mother bird, sometimes has to break up the comfortable, downy nest, letting us drop into empty space. There we must either learn to use an entirely new and higher method of support or sink into failure and loss. We must do or die, fly or fall to our destruction.
—A. B. Simpson in A Larger Christian Life
Worship begins at home
In early America, home was a sanctuary of worship; the father was the priest of his own household; the open Bible was the sourcebook for Christian worship, the textbook for his education, and the inspiration for the establishment of his political institutions. We have not outlived the need for the open Book, for the message of God in and through the family, and for the spiritual discipline of prayer. Perhaps we would be better people now if the home were still honored as a sanctuary of worship.
—Edward L. R. Elson in Wide Was His Parish
No freedom without discipline
Freedom and discipline have come to be regarded as mutually exclusive, when in fact freedom is not at all the opposite, but the final reward, of discipline. It is to be bought with a high price, not merely claimed.… The [professional] skater and [race]horse are free to perform as they do only because they have been subjected to countless hours of grueling work, rigidly prescribed, faithfully carried out. Men are free to soar into space because they have willingly confined themselves in a tiny capsule designed and produced by highly trained scientists and craftsmen, have meticulously followed instructions and submitted themselves to rules which others defined.
—Elisabeth Elliot in All That Was Ever Ours
Prayer for understanding
Grant me, O Lord, an understanding heart, that I may see into the hearts of thy people, and know their strengths and weaknesses, their hopes and their despairs, their efforts and their failures, their need of love and their need to love. Through my touch with them grant comfort and hope and the assurance that now life begins at any age and on any day, redeeming the past, sanctifying the present and brightening the future with the assurance of thy unfailing love and grace brought to us in Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord.
—George Appleton in the Oxford Book of Prayer
A significant breakdown
To say what is untrue, what is unkind, or to say it unkindly, constitutes failure in Christian living and Christian witness.
—George Duncan in Every Day with Jesus
Unavoidable choices
The higher a man’s call and vision, the more choices are given him. This is our work in creation: to decide. And what we decide is woven into the thread of time and being forever. Choose wisely, then, but you must choose.
—Stephen R. Lawhead in Merlin
