BEAUTY FOR ASHES
Circumstances may apppear to wreck our lives and God’s plans, but God is not helpless among the ruins. Our broken lives are not lost or useless. God’s love is still working. He comes in and takes the calamity and uses it victoriously, working out his wonderful plan of love.
– Eric Liddell in “Disciplines of the Christian Life”
PRAYER—THE BREATH OF LIFE
The air which our body requires envelops us on every hand. The air of itself seeks to enter our bodies and, for this reason, exerts pressure upon us. It is well known that it is more difficult to hold one’s breath than it is to breathe. We need but exercise our organs of respiration, and air will enter forthwith into our lungs and perform its life-giving function to the entire body. The air which our souls need also envelops all of us at all times and on all sides. God is round about us in Christ on every hand, with his many-sided and all-sufficient grace. All we need to do is to open our hearts.
– O. Hallesby in “Prayer”
JESUS AND “BAD PEOPLE”
It’s worth noting that Jesus didn’t condemn bad people. He condemned “stiff” people. We condemn the bad ones and affirm the stiff ones. Whether it was a prostitute or a tax collector or an outcast … Jesus reached out to them. It was a motley crew of riffraff that followed Him around, and it never embarrassed Him or made Him feel uncomfortable.
One of the most radical statements Jesus ever made is found in Matthew 9: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (vv. 12-13).
– Steve Brown in “Key Life” (Mar.-Apr. 1994)
LOOKING FOR VALUE
What we find at the start of a walk, a job, a new acquaintance is what we’re apt to go on looking for the rest of that walk, that work, that relationship.
– Elizabeth Sherrill in “Journey into Rest”
REDISCOVERY
We need re-expression of the Christian gospel; but, maybe even more than that, we need re-realisation of the Christian gospel.
The re-expression is not an end in itself; it is only the means towards an end, and the end is the awakened realisation of what this gospel means.
It is when we face ourselves and face Christ, that we are lost in wonder, love and praise. We need to rediscover the almost lost discipline of self-examination; and then a re-awakened sense of sin will beget a re-awakened sense of wonder.
Perhaps then God will no longer have to say, “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?”
– Andrew Murray in “Daily Celebration”
ALL PAST IS PROLOGUE
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
– C. S. Lewis in “The Allegory of Love”
LUTHER’S EXAMPLE
Luther’s marriage provided the most vivid possible symbol of the equality implied in the Lutheran doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers,” and its great happiness set a pattern of ideal family life that has served civilization—and imposed burdens on the wives and children of ministers—ever since.
– William C. Placher in “History of Christian Theology”
BAD TRIP
I don’t … think any real journey is beginning with the New Age movement. I think it’s more a detour, a truck stop on the way to the Rockies.
– Peggy Noonan in “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”
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