Classic & Contemporary Excerpts from February 05, 1990

Classic and contemporary excerpts.

Prideful deceits

Let’s—all of us—decide to stop trying to convince the world that Christianity is true because Jesus makes us prettier, happier, thinner, wealthier, bigger, more successful, more popular, healthier, more powerful, brighter, stronger, and more influential than everyone else. Do we actually believe that the world is impressed with our fancy new churches, 12,000 in Sunday School, five services each morning, the “millions” who are watching on television, converted beauty queens and professional athletes, our book sales, or our crusades? The world is not impressed. The world is laughing at us—mocking us and the Jesus we supposedly are serving.

—Mike Yaconelli in The Door

(Sept./Oct. 1989)

No Gain Without Pain

The unconverted man says, “Conversion is easy tomorrow, but hard today. I’ll put it off.” Even so, prayer that now is difficult appears easy in the future. Alas, you will find it just as hard in the future as now.…

Reading a book about prayer, listening to lectures and talking about it is very good, but it won’t teach you to pray. You get nothing without exercise, without practice. I might listen for a year to a professor of music playing the most beautiful music, but that won’t teach me to play an instrument.

—Andrew Murray in

The Spiritual Life

Self-Destruction

Unbridled lust: A cannibal committing suicide By nibbling on himself.

—Calvin Miller in

A Requiem for Love

The Corn Doesn’T Matter

Adrian Rogers, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, tells about the man who made his sons work in the cornfields while their peers spent the afternoon at the swimming hole. Someone scolded the father saying, “Why do you make those boys work so hard? You don’t need all that corn.” The wise father replied, “Sir, I’m not raising corn. I’m raising boys.”

—Quoted by Marvin Hein in The

Christian Leader (Nov. 21, 1989)

The Light Of Being

Character is what a man is in the dark.

—D. L. Moody, quoted in The

Wycliffe Handbook of Preaching and Preachers

Casting Out Beams

The temper of mind that makes us lynx-eyed in seeing where others are wrong does not do them any good, because the effect of our criticism is to paralyse their powers, which proves that the criticism was not of the Holy Ghost.

—Oswald Chambers in Studies

In the Sermon on the Mount

Beyond Riches

At the beginning of his reign, King Solomon prayed one superior gift from God. Not wealth, not long life, but something far more valuable—he asked for “an understanding heart,” which may be translated, a hearing heart. He asked, we say, for wisdom. But the genius of wisdom … is the ability to open a room in one’s heart for the talk—and so for the presence—of another. Wisdom is none other than the ability to listen.

—Walter Wangerin, Jr., in

As for Me and My House

Perpetually Santa

Children have been excluded from death. Either they are not informed or they are told that their father has gone on a trip or that Jesus has taken him. Jesus has become a kind of Santa Claus whom adults use to tell children about death without believing in him themselves.

—Philippe Aries in

The Hour of Our Death

Where Are The Replacements?

There were great preachers in Washington thirty or forty years ago, but, with a few notable exceptions, their replacements have not arrived as yet. The social activist program of the church, wherein so many people thought they could change the world by resolutions, protests, and demonstrations, tended to diminish the development of articulate spokesmen who might really rally people. The idea that to formulate something in words makes it happen is really no substitute for the great minds who once heralded the gospel.

—Edward L. R. Elson in

Wide Was His Parish