Classic and contemporary excerpts
Beyond happiness
The Bible nowhere speaks about a “happy” Christian; it talks plentifully of joy. Happiness depends on things that happen, and may sometimes be an insult; joyfulness is never touched by external conditions, and a joyful heart is never an insult.
—Oswald Chambers in The Shadow of an Agony
Social conundrum
The effects of virtue-free social policy have been devastating—but we don’t seem quite ready to accept the alternative. Few politicians are comfortable about using words like “right” and “wrong,” especially when the subject is sexual irresponsibility (which remains the surest predictor of criminality, ill health and welfare dependency among the poor).… In fact, it isn’t easy. It requires the fortitude to sometimes cast people into the outer darkness.… It has become near impossible for a polity as rights-conscious, and tolerant, as ours to admit that some people who behave badly, if not quite criminally, aren’t worthy of our support—to kick them off welfare, or out of schools and housing projects. But it is inescapable; the system can’t work without sanctions—even if they require the sort of stiff, humorless, un-American propriety that gave morality such a bad name.
—Joe Klein in Newsweek (July 26, 1993)
Live like Paul
God is no distant deity but a constant reality, a very present help whenever needs occur. So? So live like it. And laugh like it! The apostle] Paul did. While he lived, he drained every drop of joy out of every day that passed.
—Charles R. Swindoll in Laugh Again
Rule of faithfulness
To escape the distress caused by regret for the past or fear about the future, this is the rule to follow: leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to his good providence; give the present wholly to his love by being faithful to his grace.
—Jean-Pierre de Caussade in The Joy of the Saints
Overcoming discouragement
Everywhere the perpetual endeavour of the enemy of souls is to discourage. If he can get the soul “under the weather,” he wins. It is not really what we go through that matters, it is what we go under that breaks us. We can bear anything if only we are kept inwardly victorious.…
If God can make His birds to whistle in drenched and stormy darkness, if He can make His butterflies able to bear up under rain, what can He not do for the heart that trusts Him?
—Amy Carmichael in Learning of God
Rhetoric without works is dead
In our opinion, the greatest enemy of world evangelization is Christian rhetoric—the continual rhetorizing (playing the orator), discussing, arguing, the endless talking and preaching about evangelizing the world, without any of the crucial implementation.
—David V. Barrett and Todd M. Johnson in Our Globe and How to Reach It
Unexpected heresy
A man may be a heretic in the truth; … if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.
—John Milton in Aeropagitica
