Americans love sound bites, which distill life’s complexities into pre-digested bits of information. Sound bites fit our frenzied life styles. We don’t have to slow down to read or listen or consider or think as we work up the corporate ladder, hustle through two jobs, or juggle career with our children’s schedules.… The frenzy of American culture is so pervasive even Christians get caught in the futile madness. Pastors have difficulty finding volunteers to staff vital ministries. Christians say the church makes too many demands on their time.… It’s as if the world is sucking believers out of the pews and into the maelstrom of materialism.
—Bob Chuvala in the Christian Herald (July/Aug. 1990)
Opposing View
Although the world tells us to be assertive, the Word tells us to be gentle.
—Florence Littauer in The Best of Florence Littauer
We Worship The Totally Other One
Worship is not just personal introspection, or we would worship our feelings. Worship is not even a warm glow, or we would worship that. We worship One outside ourselves. We concentrate on him, we praise him, we adore him, we hear his Word for he is announcing it to us. We listen in holy awe to the word of God, for it is a part of that “all” of Scripture which is given by the outbreathing of God and is personally necessary for “my” correction and “my” instruction in righteousness.
—Roger Palms in Living Under the Smile of God
Heedless Knowledge
Man always knows his life
will shortly cease,
Yet madly lives as if he
knew it not.
—Richard Baxter in Hypocrisy
Riverbeds, Not Jugs
Recently I was sent a picture of a jug into which water was being poured. The idea was that love, or whatever we need, is poured into us like that. I don’t think of it so at all. I think of the love of God as a great river, pouring through us as the waters pour through our ravine in flood-time. Nothing can keep this love from pouring through us, except of course our own blocking of the water.
Do you sometimes feel that you have got to the end of your love for someone who refuses and repulses you? Such a thought is folly, for one cannot come to the end of what one has not got. We have no store of love at all. We are not jugs, we are riverbeds.
—Amy Carmichael in Whispers of His Power
Making Justice Weak
Justice without strength is helpless, strength without justice is tyrannical.… Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.
Popular education once recognized Christianity as its mother, yet the academic world has somehow come to treat supernatural religion as a disaffected mother-in-law and finally as an outlaw.
—Carl F. H. Henry in The God Who Shows Himself
I am not my brother’s judge
The secret of our relationships with one another in the Christian Church, especially when we have our differences, is “Jesus Christ is Lord.” To despise or stand in judgment on a fellow Christian isn’t just a breach of fellowship. It is a denial of the Lordship of Jesus. I need to say to myself, who am I, that I should cast myself in the role of another Christian’s lord and judge? I must be willing for Jesus Christ to be not only my Lord and Judge, but also my fellow Christians’ Lord and Judge.… I must not interfere with Christ’s Lordship over other Christians.
—John R. W. Stott in The Gospel, the Spirit, the Church
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