Two Sides Of The Same Coin
Every Christian should be both conservative and radical; conservative in preserving the faith and radical in applying it.
—John R. W. Stott in HIS (Oct. 1975)
Majoring On Minors
Sin arises when things that are a minor good are pursued as though they were the most important goals in life. If money or affection or power are sought in disproportionate, obsessive ways, then sin occurs. And that sin is magnified when, for these lesser goals, we fail to pursue the highest good and the finest goals.
So when we ask ourselves why, in a given situation, we committed a sin, the answer is usually one of two things. Either we wanted to obtain something we didn’t have, or we feared losing something we had.
—Augustine in The Confessions of St. Augustine (Christian Classics in Modern English)
A Christian Mandate
Do all the good
you can
By all the means
you can
In all the ways
you can
In all the places
you can
To all the people
you can
As long as ever
you can.
—John Wesley’s Rule of Conduct
Tea Parties, Not Riots
Where are our wounds? Is there nothing to fight for? How complacent are we about the world’s causes, both great and small? Have we accepted with weak resignation that nothing can change, and that to try isn’t worth the effort? Perhaps the call to comfort rings louder than the call to bear a cross….
If the church is the body of Christ, as Paul claims, shouldn’t it also have some wounds? Yet too often, churches avoid controversy. A pastor at mid-life wrote, “Wherever the Apostle Paul went, there was a riot. Wherever I go, they serve tea.”
—Craig V. Anderson in the Christian Century (Jan. 29, 1992)
Religious Faith Is No Secret Vice
Church and state would not be such a difficult subject if religion were, as the Court apparently thinks it to be, some purely personal avocation that can be indulged entirely in secret, like pornography, in the privacy of one’s room. For most believers it is not that, and has never been. Religious men and women of almost all denominations have felt it necessary to acknowledge and beseech the blessing of God as a people, and not just as individuals, because they believe in the “protection of divine Providence,” as the Declaration of Independence put it, not just for individuals but for societies.
—Justice Antonin Scalia in Lee v. Weisman
Wealth Doesn’T Equal Blessing
There is no way, if you take the whole counsel of God’s Word, that you can equate riches or material things as a sign of God’s blessing.
—Former televangelist Jim Bakker in a letter written to his followers from prison
No Miracles
Too many times we miss so much because we live on the low level of the natural, the ordinary, the explainable. We leave no room for God to do the exceeding abundant thing above all that we can ask or think.
Vance Havner im the Vance Havner Quote Book
