Classic & Contemporary Excerpts from July 14, 1989

Wrong-Way Conversion

Disobedience, as well as obedience, has the power to transform a person completely. Through disobedience in a particular decision, one can falsify the whole sequence of right thinking. The pastoral epistles talk about this a lot. Disobedience comes in a variety of disguises: as superficial indifference or as the continuous creation of problems; as ascetic rigorism or as sectarianism; as the quest for novelty or as a philosophical restlessness. All that stuff is given a lot of weight preeminently to cover a scar in the conscience that lies hidden in the background.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Spiritual Care

The New Disillusionment

Our society has had a decade and a half of experimentation with random sexual freedom. We have discovered that it is neither so very sexy nor so very free. My generation is disillusioned with sex as a social panacea. We look longingly at the marriages of our parents and grandparents and wonder how on earth they managed to stay best friends for so long—or even worst friends for so long! But at least they had someone to read the newspaper with.

—Erica Jong in Ms. magazine (May 1989)

He Must Increase

When Mother Teresa was passing through a crowd in Detroit a woman remarked, “Her secret is that she is free to be nothing. Therefore God can use her for anything.”

—Michael Glazier, Inc., catalog advertising Free to be Nothing, by Edward Farrell

The Inside Knob

It is startling to think that Satan can actually come into the heart of a man in such close touch with Jesus as Judas was. And more—he is cunningly trying to do it today. Yet he can get in only through a door opened from the inside. Every man controls the door of his own life. Satan can’t get in without our help.

—S. D. Gordon in The Bent-Knee Time

The Greatest Loss

There are many kinds of sorrow on earth, but the deepest of all sorrows is when the heart loses Christ, and He is no longer seen, and there is no hope of comfort from Him. Only a few are so sorely tempted. All comfort has gone, all joy is ended, there is no help from heaven or sun or moon, from angel or any creature. There is even no help from God. But the world rejoices.

—Martin Luther in Day by Day We Magnify Thee

Religious Doublespeak

Churches are getting into the doublespeak spirit.… Take the term “sin,” for instance. There’s a word we could all live without. I mean, who wants to be told they’re guilty of—sin? No one I know. Yet that kind of thing goes on in churches regularly.

So I think we should follow the lead of the noted Christian television personalities who, after having been involved in various questionable activities, replaced any references to sin with terms like “moral failure,” and “momentary lapse.”

Wouldn’t our churches be more cheery places if we all did the same? Many already are, as the modern rendering of Romans 3:23—from the SMNAV (Shirley MacLaine New Age Version)—illustrates: “For all have experienced momentary lapses and have come up a tad shy of the Divine Entity’s absolute ideal, but hey, nobody’s perfect. So don’t worry. Be happy!”

—Philip Wiebe in the Christian Leader (April 25, 1989)

Walking Advertisements

We ought to be Christians in large type, so that it would not be necessary [for others] to be long in our society, or to regard us through spectacles, in order to detect our true discipleship. The message of our lives should resemble the big advertisements which can be read on the street-boardings by all who pass by.

—F. B. Meyer in Our Daily Walk

A Difficult Prayer

Often it is through poverty of spirit that the wretched body so readily complains. Pray therefore humbly to the Lord that he may give you the spirit of self-reproach, and say with the Prophet: “Feed me, Lord, with the bread of tears and give me to drink tears in abundance.”

—Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ

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