Asking does not mean receiving
Some things are proved by the unbroken uniformity of our experiences. The law of gravitation is established by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies without exception obey it. Now even if all the things that people prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not prove what Christians mean by the efficacy of prayer. For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
—C. S. Lewis in
The World’s Last Night
Ethical absurdity
The initial act of eliminating our Creator God from our thinking is so immoral and unethical in itself as to render the following concern with ethical fine points quite absurd. It’s as if students were to murder the teacher and then sit down to have serious discussions about proper manners in the classroom.
—Steven J. Keillor in
Prisoners of Hope
Soft heart or soft drinks?
Jesus said that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also (Matt. 6:21). If our spending patterns, then, are an indicator of where our heart is hot and where it is not, at what level would missions register compared to soft drinks?
—John and Sylvia Ronsvalle in
“Can We Afford the Salt Anymore?” (Covenant Companion, Nov. 1992)
Lord of the now
It is generally much less difficult for us to commit the keeping of our future to the Lord than it is to commit our present. We know we are helpless as regards the future, but we feel as if the present was in our own hands, and must be carried on our own shoulders; and most of us have an unconfessed idea that it is a great deal to ask the Lord to carry ourselves, and that we cannot think of asking him to carry our burdens too.
—Hannah Whitall Smith in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life
Freed by our bonds
We have not advanced very far in our spiritual lives if we have not encountered the basic paradox of freedom, to the effect that we are most free when we are bound.
—Elton Trueblood in The New Man for Our Time
True peace
What if the rain be falling, and the wind blowing? What if we stand alone, or, more painful still, have some dear one beside us, sharing our outness? What even if the window be not shining, because of the curtains of good inscrutable drawn across it? Let us think to ourselves, or say to our friend, “God is; Jesus is not dead. Nothing can be going wrong, however it may look so to hearts unfinished in childness.”
—George MacDonald in
Creation in Christ
Dead giveaway
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
—Norman Douglas, quoted in
Glory (Summer 1992)
