Real Intimacy With God
The proportion in which I know my Lord is the proportion in which I am prepared to serve Him. Is it not certain that when I know as I am known I shall be more perfectly prepared to serve?
—G. Campbell Morgan in The Best of G. Campbell Morgan (from The Westminster Booklets)
Fountain of youth
You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt, as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair. So long as your heart receives messages of beauty, cheer, courage, grandeur and power from the earth, from man and from the infinite, so long are you young. When the wires are all down and all the central place of your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then you are grown old indeed and may God have mercy on your soul.
Author unknown, quoted in Riches for the Mind and Spirit (ed. John Marks Templeton)
The danger of knowing God
If there were no obscurity man would not feel his corruption: if there were no light man could not hope for a cure. Thus it is not only right but useful for us that God should be partly concealed and partly revealed, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness as to know his wretchedness without knowing God.
—Blaise Pascal in Pensées
Life’s “Hey!”
Experiencing God is like saying “Hey!” Sometimes we experience the mystery of God in a flower, in another person, in ourselves. The mystery expresses itself in everything. When we recognize it and try to put a word on it, it’s “Hey!”
—Fr. Daniel Martin in What Do We Mean When We Say God?
Enormous barrier
A feeble, nominal Christianity is the great obstacle to the conversion of the world.
—Henry Venn in an address to the Islington clerical meeting on January 10, 1865
The real cultural invaders
People protest that missionaries have no right to force their religion down another’s throat. On the other hand, when someone is willing to dedicate his life to spreading ideas in whose worth one does believe—such as modern medicine, democracy, modern methods and views of education, technology and the like—one tends to approve the changes in another society that this work brings about. As a matter of fact, the Christian religion has not been nearly so destructive of the patterns of life in traditional cultures as has the introduction of industrialism, the natural and social sciences, universal and modern education, democratic and socialist concepts, and medicine. The purveyors of these latter commodities are as truly “missionaries” of the West as the Christian evangelists are.
—From Langdon Gilkey’s Shantung Compound, paraphrased in Adventure in Africa, by Charles Partee
