FINDING PEACE ON THE JOURNEY
[My friend Marge had an experience] aboard a plane bound for Cleveland, waiting for takeoff. As she settled into her seat, Marge noticed a strange phenomenon. On one side of the airplane a sunset suffused the entire sky with glorious color. But out of the window next to her seat, all Marge could see was a sky dark and threatening, with no sign of the sunset.
As the plane’s engines began to roar, a gentle Voice spoke within her.
You have noticed the windows, He murmured beneath the roar and thrust of the takeoff. Your life, too, will contain some happy, beautiful times, but also some dark shadows. Here’s a lesson I want to teach you to save you much heartache and allow you to “abide in Me” with continual peace and joy.
You see, it doesn’t matter which window you look through; this plane is still going to Cleveland. So it is in your life. You have a choice. You can dwell on the gloomy picture. Or you can focus on the bright things and leave the dark, ominous situations to Me. I alone can handle them anyway.
And the final destination is not influenced by what you see or feel along the way.
Learn this, act on it and you will be released, able to experience the “peace that passes understanding.”
-Catherine Marshall in
Touching the Heart of God
SACRIFICIAL LIVING’S PAYOFF
God’s wisdom is not first counsel on how to practice family values or to use common sense. It is the wisdom of His plan of grace, the wisdom of the Cross. That wisdom is foolishness to the calculations of prudence. Wise living is sacrificial living, giving up what it cannot keep to gain what it cannot lose [to quote Jim Elliot]. It is a thank-offering of praise, enabled by the mercy of God that has united us to Christ in His death and resurrection.
-Edmund P. Clowney in
Tabletalk (March 1995)
SOME THINGS CAN’T BE MEASURED
The modern myth of power has gravely impoverished our civilization. It has deprived it of all values that lie beyond the search for power. The beautiful, the good, the true cannot be weighed and measured. True knowledge is spiritual knowledge, which is beyond the reach of the world of quantity and therefore is disregarded by our civilization.
-Paul Tournier in
The Whole Person in a Broken World
SOME THINGS CAN’T BE FORCED
The conduct of God, who disposes all things kindly, is to put religion into the mind by reason, and into the heart by grace. But to will to put it into the mind and heart by force and threats is not to put religion there, but terror.
-Pascal in
Pensees, 185
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS HURTS
When a little child becomes conscious of being a little child, the child-likeness is gone; and when a saint becomes conscious of being a saint, something has gone wrong.
-Oswald Chambers in
Our Brilliant Heritage
BUT THE GREATEST OF THESE …
If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philosophical importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love.
-C. S. Lewis in
The Weight of Glory
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