enjoy
Mike Abendroth
Some Quotations To Think About
"If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering
nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our
Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted
creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite
joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud
pies in the slum because he can not imagine what is meant by the offer
of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." C. S. LEWIS -
Weight of Glory
"The almighty and everywhere present power of God; whereby, as it were
by his hand, he upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures; so
that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat
and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea, and all things
come, not by chance, but by his fatherly hand."from the HEIDELBERG
CATECHISM
"Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, I am your sin. You have taken
upon Yourself what is mine and given me what is yours. You have become
what you were not so that I might become what I am not." MARTIN LUTHER
"Nothing in my hands I bring, Simply to thy cross I cling; Naked, come
to thee for dress. Helpless, look to thee fro grace: Foul, I to the
fountain fly; Wash me Savior, or I die.Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let
me hide myself in thee." AUGUSTUS TOPLADY - Rock of Ages
"This life therefore is not righteousness but growth in righteousness;
not health but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise.
We are not what we shall be but we are growing toward it; the process is
not yet finished but it is going on; this is not the end but it is the
road. All does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified." MARTIN
LUTHER
"Let men count it folly or frenzy or whatsoever. We care for no
knowledge, no wisdom in the world but this - that man has sinned and God
has suffered, that God has been made the sin of man and man is made the
righteousness of God." RICHARD HOOKER
'True saints have their minds, in the first place, inexpressibly pleased
and delighted with the sweet ideas of the glorious and amiable nature of
the things of God. And this is the spring of all their delights, and the
cream of all their pleasures..." JONATHAN EDWARDS - Religious Affections
God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him....the
capacity to taste a thing must precede our desire for its
sweetness...the chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him
forever and of living by faith in future grace...the essence of faith is
being satisfied with all God is for us in Jesus. JOHN PIPER - Future
Grace
Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness, is
the alone instrument of justification; yet is it not alone in the person
justified, but is ever accompanied with all the saving graces, and is no
dead faith, but worketh by love. WESTMINSTER CONFESSION
"...The first effect of the power of God in the heart in regeneration is
to give the heart a divine taste or sense to cause it to have a relish
of the loveliness and sweetness of the supreme excellency of the Divine
nature. JONATHAN EDWARDS - Treatise of Grace
The change that takes place in a man, when he is converted and
sanctified, is not that his love for happiness is diminished, but only
that it is regulated with respect to its exercises and influence, and
the courses and objects it leads to...when God brings a soul out of a
miserable state and condition into a happy state, by conversion, he
gives him happiness that before he had not (namely God), but he does not
at the same time take away any of his love of happiness. JONATHAN
EDWARDS - Charity and Its Fruits
The one and only real and profound theme of the world and of human
history - a theme to which all others are subordinate - remains the
conflict between belief and unbelief. GOETHE
Just as the Holy Spirit came upon the womb of Mary, so He came upon the
brain of a Moses, a David, an Isaiah, a Paul, a John and the rest of the
writers of the divine library. The power of the Highest overshadowed
them, therefore that holy thing which was born of their minds is called
the Holy Bible, the word of God. The writing of Luke will, of course,
have the vocabulary of Luke and the work of Paul will bear the stamp of
Paul s mind. However, this is only in the same manner that the Lord
Jesus might have had eyes like his mother s or hair that was the same
color and texture as hers. He did not inherit her sins because the Holy
Spirit has come upon her. If we ask, how could this be, the answer is
God says so. And the writings of men of the Book did not inherit the
errors of their carnal minds because their writings were conceived by
the Holy Spirit and born out of their personalities without partaking of
their fallen nature. If we ask, how could this be, again the answer is
God says so. DONALD GREY BARNHOUSE, The Invisible War
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would
not be a great moral teacher. He would be a lunatic - on a level with a
man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the devil of
Hell. You must make a choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of
God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool,
you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at this
feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any
patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not
left that open to us. He did not intend to . C.S LEWIS, Mere
Christianity
Jesus Christ is the center of everything, and the object of everything,
and he that does not know Him knows nothing of nature and nothing of
himself. BLAISE PASCAL
If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals. PLATO
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point. JEAN
PAUL SARTE
Without God man has no reference point to define himself. 20th century
philosophy manifests the chaos of man seeking to understand himself as a
creature with dignity while having no reference point for that dignity.
R. C. SPROUL
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and
unjust. But how had I got the idea of just and unjust? Thus in the very
act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, the
whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one
part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. C. S.
LEWIS
If God does not exist, everything is permissible. DOSTOEVSKY
If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer
and my banker to do so . G. K. CHESTERTON
You never met a mere mortal....remember the people you see are eternal;
if you knew what they d become you d fall down and worship. C. S. LEWIS
There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be
filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known
through Jesus. BLAISE PASCAL
Oh God, Thou hast made us for thyself, and ours hearts are restless
until they find their rest in Thee. St. AUGUSTINE
We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with
ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at
peace with God. THOMAS MERTON
There is a conscience in man; therefore there is a God in heaven.
EZEKIEL HOPKINS
Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true
spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal
pleasures. ST. AQUINAS
Sow a thought, reap an act. Sow an act, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap
a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny. SAMUEL SMILES
There are three kinds of people in the world; those who have sought God
and found Him and now serve Him, those who are seeking Him but have not
yet found Him, and those who neither seek Him nor find Him. The first
are reasonable and happy, the second reasonable and unhappy, and the
third unreasonable and unhappy. BLAISE PASCAL
There are only two kinds of people in the end; those who say to God, Thy
will be done , and those to whom God says in the end, Thy will be done
All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self choice there could be
no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever
miss it. C.S. LEWIS, The Great Divorce
Seek Christ, and you will find Him, and with everything else thrown in.
C.S. LEWIS
Original sin is the only rational solution of the undeniable fact of the
deep, universal and early manifested sinfulness of men in all ages, of
every class, and in every part of the world. CHARLES HODGE
So many Christians interpret Christ s words to witness rather than to be
a witness. And they see it as an activity instead of what it really is;
the state of our being - what you do emerges from who you are. CHUCK
COLSON
Preach the gospel all the time; if necessary, use words. FRANCIS OF
ASSISI
Duty is ours; consequences are God s. GENERAL STONEWALL JACKSONp> God
did not call us to be successful, but to be faithful. - MOTHER THERESA
God has communicated to man, the infinite to the finite. The One who
made man capable of language in the first place has communicated to man
in language about both spiritual reality and physical reality, about the
nature of God and the nature of man. FRANCIS SCHAEFFER
The distinction between Christianity and all other systems of religion
consists largely in this, that in these others men are found seeking
after God, while Christianity is God seeking after men. THOMAS ARNOLD
Everyone may be entitled to his own opinion but everyone is not entitled
to his own truth. Truth is but one. DOUG GROOTHIUS
Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In
its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder; it is a
howling reproach. What Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai were not
suggestions but ten commandments. TED KOPPEL, Duke commencement address
Ive learned to hold everything loosely because it hurts when God pries
my fingers from it. CORRIE TEN BOOM
I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only
because I see it but because by it I see everything else. C. S. LEWIS
It can be exalting to belong to a church that is 550 years behind the
times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong
to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing
to catch up. - JOSEPH SOBRAN
One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament
seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe
- a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the power behind death and
disease and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark
Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went
wrong..it is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil
war, a rebellion and we are living in part of the universe occupied by
the rebel. Enemy occupied territory - that is what the world is.
Christianity is the story of how the rightful King has landed, you might
say in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in His great
campaign of sabotage. C. S. LEWIS, Mere Christitalke
In a sense, it (Christianity) creates rather than solves the problem of
pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily
experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good
assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving. C. S. LEWIS,
The Problem of Pain
For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is - limited and
suffering and subject to sorrows and death - he had the honesty and
courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game, he is playing with his
creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact
nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself
gone through the whole of human experience from trivial irritations of
family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money
to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death.
When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in
disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. DOROTHY SAYERS
It is the duty of every Christian to be Christ to his neighbor. MARTIN
LUTHER
No one can truly say that Jesus is Lord, unless Thou take the veil away,
and breathe the living word. Then only then, we feel our interest in His
blood. JOHN WESLEY, hymn Spirit of Faith, Come Down
It is never on account of its formal nature as a psychic act that faith
is conceived in Scripture to be saving...It is not, strictly speaking,
even faith in Christ that saves, but Christ that saves through faith.
The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the
attitude of faith or nature of faith, but in the object of faith. B. B.
WARFIELD
The church is: a conspiracy of love for a dying world, a spy mission
into enemy occupied territory ruled by the powers of evil; a prophet
from God with the greatest news the world has ever heard, the most life
changing and most revolutionary institution that has existed on earth.
PETER KREEFT
The good news makes no sense unless you believe the bad news first. A
free operation is not good news if you don t think you have a mortal
disease. Once the main obstacle to believe in Christianity was the good
news. It seemed like a fairy tale; too good to be true. Today, the main
obstacle is the bad news; people just don t believe in sin even though
that is the only Christian doctrine that can be proven by reading daily
newspapers. Calling a person sinful is not to deny that his being
remains good, any more than calling the statute of Venus de Milo a
damaged work of art means denying that its sculptor created a
masterpiece. Humanity is a good thing gone bad, the image of God in
rebellion against God, God s beloved in a state of rebellion. Peter
Kreeft
In this modern world of ours many people seem to think that science has
somehow made such religious ideas as immortality untimely or old
fashioned. I think science has a real surprise for the skeptics.
Science, for instance, tells us that nothing in nature, not even the
tiniest particle, can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know
extinction. All it knows is transformation. If God applies this
fundamental principle to the most minute and insignificant parts of His
universe, doesn t it make sense to assume that He applies it to the
masterpiece of His creation, the human soul? Dr. WARNER VON BRAUN,
founder of U.S. space exploration program
What will you do with Jesus,
Neutral you can not be,
One day your heart will be asking,
What will He do with me.
C. S. LEWIS, Chronicles of Narnia
Any sin is more or less heinous depending upon the honor and majesty of
the one whom we had offended. Since God is of infinite honor, infinite
majesty, and infinite holiness, the slightest sin is of infinite
consequence. The slightest sin is nothing less than cosmic treason when
we realize against whom we have sinned. JONATHAN EDWARDS, The Justice of
God in the Damnation of Sinners
We can not grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of
someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the
highest degree we are capable of. God s holiness is not simply the best
we know, infinitely better. We know nothing like divine holiness. It
stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable.
Only the spirit of the Holy can impart to the human spirit the knowledge
of the holy. A. W. TOZER
No attribute of God is more dreadful to sinners than His holiness.
MATTHEW HENRY
I am convinced that the first step toward attaining higher standard of
holiness is to realize more fully the amazing sinfulness of sin. J. C.
RYLE
We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as
the natural and expected thing. A. W. TOZER
"The almighty and everywhere present power of God; whereby, as it were
by his hand, he upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures; so
that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat
and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea, and all things
come, not by chance, but by his fatherly hand." Heidelberg Catechism
An ineffably holy God, who has the utmost abhorrence of all sin, was
never invented by any of Adam s fallen descendants. A. W. PINK
Right now counts forever. R. C. SPROUL
We are called to live Coram Deo - in the presence of God, under the
authority of God and to the glory of God. R. C. SPROUL
I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes
and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I
believe in order to understand. ST. ANSELM of Canterbury
We are consecrated and dedicated to God; therefore, we may not hereafter
think, speak, meditate or do anything but with a view to his glory...We
are God s; to him, therefore, let us live and die. JOHN CALVIN, The
Institutes
Who is unhappy at not being a king, except a deposed king? All of these
miseries of man prove man s greatness. They are the miseries of a
deposed king. BLAISE PASCAL
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird; it would be a jolly sight
harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs
at present. An you cannot go on indefinitely being an ordinary decent
egg. We must be hatched or go bad. C. S. LEWIS
Among the Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as
if He as God...Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the
Indians, anyone might say that he was part of God, or one with God:There
would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew,
could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being
outside the world Who made it and was infinitely different from anything
else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man
said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been
uttered by human lips. C. S. Lewis
It costs a man just as much or even more to go to hell than to come to
heaven. Narrow, exceedingly narrow is the way to perdition. SOREN
KIERKEGAARDp> Christianity is not a system of philosophy, nor a ritual,
nor a code of laws; it is the impartation of a divine vitality. Without
the way there is not going, without the truth there is no knowing,
without life there is no living. MERRILL TENNEY on Jn 14:6
The London Times once asked a number prominent people to write essays on
the topic, What s Wrong with the World. G. K. Chesterton reply is the
shortest and most to the point in history:
Dear Sirs:
I am.
Sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON
The medievals had a saying; we are dwarfs standing in the shoulders of
giants. We see farther than the ancients not because we are taller than
they but because we have their shoulders to stand on. PETER KREEFT
For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to
conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom,
self-discipline and virtue. For the modern mind, the cardinal problem is
how to subdue reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a
technique. C. S. LEWIS, The Abolition of Man
Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know
ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through
Jesus Christ, Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our
life or our death, of God or of ourselves. PASCAL
From heaven even the most miserable life will look like one bad night at
an inconvenient hotel. St. THERESA
Men of sound judgment will always be sure that a sense of divinity which
can never be erased is engraved upon men s minds. JOHN CALVIN
The picture of fallen man as given in Scripture is that he knows God but
does not want to recognize Him as God. CORNELIUS VAN TIL
Astronomers are curiously upset by..proof that the universe had a
beginning. Their reactions provide an interesting demonstration of the
scientific mind - supposedly a very objective mind - when evidence
uncovered by science itself leads to a conflict with the articles of
faith of their own profession. ROBERT JASTROW, astronomer
What is behind the universe is more like mind than it is like anything
else we know...It is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing
to another. C.S. LEWIS
Even the common folk and the most untutored, who have been taught only
by the aid of the eyes, cannot be unaware of the excellence of divine
art, for it reveals itself in this innumerable and yet distinct and
well-ordered variety of the heavenly host. JOHN CALVIN
Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to
know God, most of life s problems fall into place of their own accord.
J.I. PACKER
According to Scripture, God is incomprehensible yet knowable, absolute
yet personal. HERMAN BAVINCK
There is nothing so abominable in the eyes of God and of men as
idolatry, whereby men render to the creature that honor which is due
only to the Creator. BLAISE PASCAL
The first chapters of the Bible tell us of the sin of man. The guilt of
that sin had rested upon every single one of us, it guilt and its
terrible results..but..it also tells us of something greater still; it
tells us of the grace of the offended God. J. GRESHAM MACHEN
This passage in (Romans 1:18), therefore, stands in its insistence that
even in the most excellent men, however endowed with law, righteousness,
wisdom, and all virtues, free will, their most excellent part, is
nonetheless ungodly, and unrighteous, and merits God s wrath. MaARTIN
LUTHER
According to Scripture the essence of man consists in this, that he is
the image of God. As such he is distinguished from all other creatures
and stands supreme as the head and crown of the entire creation. LOUIS
BERKOF
Once man ceases to recognize the infinite value of the human soul...then
all he can recognize is that man is something to be used. HELMUT
THIELICKE
The ethic of the bible reflects the character of the God of the Bible.
Remove from Scripture the transcendent holiness, righteousness and truth
of God and its ethic disappears. JOHN MURRAY
Love is the sum of all virtue, and love disposes us to do good. JONATHAN
EDWARDS
Two things, belief and conduct, are indissolubly bound together; they
are part of one whole, as roots and fruit are both alike parts of one
tree, organically connected. LIONEL SPENCER THORNTON
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and
goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person
you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you
would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption
which you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are,
in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these
destinations...There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a
mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts civilizations - these are mortal,
and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals
whom we joke with, work with, marry snub, and exploit - immortal horrors
or everlasting splendors. C. S. LEWIS, The Weight of Glory
The Bible is the only book that has been written not just by human
characters inside the story but also by the divine author of the story.
Its perspective is double, that of the characters and that of the
author, or that of the human authors and that of the divine author. Like
Christ - the word of God in person - the Bible, the word of God in
writing, is the Word of God in words of men. It has both a human nature
and a divine nature. PETER KREEFT, God s Love
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
JIM ELLIOTT (from his wife Elizabeth s book, Through Gates of Splendor
We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people
of a certain kind. C. S. LEWIS, Mere Christianity
My identity and my eternal destiny are determined by my love. For what I
love becomes my end, and my end is my destiny. PETER KREEFT God s Love
A sculptor can leave his work and come back to it another day, and take
up where he left off. But it is not so with the growth of the soul. The
work of grace in us either waxes or wanes, flows or ebbs. ANDREW
ANDERSON
Spiritual growth consists most in the growth of the root, which is out
of sight. MATTHEW HENRY
Some people s religion reminds me of a rocking horse, which has motion
with progress. ROWLAND HILL
Let us not cease to do the utmost, that we may incessantly go forward in
the way of the Lord; and let us not despair of the smallness of our
accomplishments. JOHN CALVIN
The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the
kingdom of God. LEO TOLSTOY
Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: To know what he
ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he
ought to do. THOMAS AQUINAS
Holiness is the end of redemption, for Christ gave Himself for us that
He might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto Himself a peculiar
people zealous of good works. CHARLES HODGE
The world invents its own good works and persuades itself that they are
good. But Paul declares that good and right according to the world are
to be judged by the commandments of God. JOHN CALVIN
For the Christian, this world is an arena, not an armchair. ANONYMOUS
The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those
who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have begun thinking
less of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this .
Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in; aim at earth and you get
neither. Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a
widower in the next. WILLIAM RALPH INGE
All the danger is when the world gets into the heart. The water is
useful for sailing the ship; all the danger is when the water gets into
the ship; so the fear is when the world gets into the heart. THOMAS
WATSON
I more fear what is within me than what comes from without. MARTIN
LUTHER
Even the sinning of the regenerate man differs essentially from that of
the unregenerate man. R. B. KUIPER
Now a thing operates in accordance with its nature. THOMAS AQUINAS
Though we as Christians are like Christ, having the first fruits of the
Spirit, yet we are unlike Him, having the remainders of the flesh.
THOMAS WATSON Original sin is in us, like the beard. We are shaved today
and look clean, and have a smooth chin; tomorrow our beard has grown
again, nor does it cease growing while we remain on earth. MARTIN LUTHER
The natural response to denials of Satan s existence is to ask, Who then
runs his business. J.I. PACKER
Satan watches for those vessels that sail without convoy. GEORGE
SWINNOCK
It is a serious thing..to remember that the dullest and most
uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you
saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror
and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the
other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming
possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspections proper to
them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all
friendships, all loves, all play, all politics...It is immortals whom we
joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or
everlasting splendors. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
God is not only holy, but the source and pattern of holiness: He is the
origin and the upholder of the moral order of the universe. He must be
just. The Judge of all the earth must do right. Therefore it was
impossible by the necessities of his own being that he should deal
lightly with sin, and compromise the claims of holiness. If sin could be
forgiven at all, it must be on the same basis which would vindicate the
holy law of God, which is not a mere code, but the moral order of the
whole creation. But such vindication must be supremely costly. Costly to
whom? Not to the forgiven sinner, for there could be no price asked from
him for his forgiveness; both because the cost is far beyond his reach,
and because God loves to give and not to sell. Therefore God himself
undertook to pay a cost, to offer a sacrifice, so tremendous that the
gravity of his condemnation of sin should be absolutely beyond question
even as he forgave it, while at the same the Love which impelled to pay
the price would be the wonder of angels, and would call forth the
worshiping gratitude of the redeemed sinner. On Calvary this price was
paid by God: the Son giving himself, bearing our sin and its curse; the
Father giving the Son, his only Son whom he loved. But it was paid by
God become man, who not only took the place of the guilty man, but also
was his representative...The divine Son, one of the three persons of the
one God, he through whom, from the beginning of the creation, the Father
has revealed himself to man (Jn 1:18), took man s nature upon him, and
so became our representative. He offered himself as a sacof the moral
order of the universe. He must be just. The Judge of all the earth must
do right. Therefore it was impossible by the necessities of his own
being that he should deal lightly with sin, and compromise the claims of
holiness. If sin could be forgiven at all, it must be on the same basis
which would vindicate the holy law of God, which is not a mere code, but
the moral order of the whole creation. But such vindication must be
supremely costly. Costly to whom? Not to the forgiven sinner, for there
could be no price asked from him for his forgiveness; both because the
cost is far beyond his reach, and because God loves to give and not to
sell. Therefore God himself undertook to pay a cost, to offer a
sacrifice, so tremendous that the gravity of his condemnation of sin
should be absolutely beyond question even as he forgave it, while at the
same the Love which impelled to pay the price would be the wo
..if the death of Christ on the cross is the true meaning of the
Incarnation, then there is no gospel without the cross. Christmas by
itself is no gospel. The life of Christ is no gospel. Even the
resurrection, important as it is in the total scheme of things, is no
gospel by itself. For the good news is not just that God became man, nor
that God has spoken to reveal a proper way of life for us, or even that
death, the great enemy, is conquered. Rather, the good news is that sin
has been dealt with (of which the resurrection is a proof); that Jesus
has suffered its penalty for us as our representative, so that we might
never have to suffer it; and that therefore all who believe in him can
look forward to heaven. ...Emulation of Christ s life and teaching is
possible only to those who enter into a new relationship with God
through faith in Jesus as their substitute. The resurrection is not
merely a victory over death (though it is that) but a proof that the
atonement was a satisfactory atonement in the sight of the Father (Rom
4:25); and that death, the result of sin, is abolished on that basis.
Any gospel that talks merely of the Christ-event, meaning the
Incarnation without the atonement, is a false gospel. Any gospel that
talks about the love of God without pointing out that his love led him
to pay the ultimate price for sin in the person of his Son on the cross
is a false gospel. The only true gospel is of the one mediator (1 Tim.
2:5-6), who gave himself for us. Finally, just as there can be no gospel
without the atonement as the reason for the Incarnation, so also there
can be no Christian life without it. Without the atonement the
Incarnation theme easily becomes a kind of deification of the human and
leads to arrogance and self advancement. With the atonement the true
message of the life of Christ, and therefore also of the the life of the
Christian man or woman, is humility and self sacrifice for the obvious
needs of others. The Christian life is not indifference to those who are
hungry or sick or suffering from some other lack. It is not contentment
with our own abundance, neither the abundance of middle class living
with home and cars and clothes and vacations, nor the abundance of
education or even the spiritual abundance of good churches, Bibles,
Bible teaching or Christian friends and acquaintances. Rather, it is the
awareness that others lack these things and that we must therefore
sacrifice many of our own interests in order to identify with them and
thus bring them increasingly into the abundance we enjoy...We will live
for Christ fully only when we are willing to be impoverished, if
necessary, in order that others might be helped. JAMES MONTGOMERY BOICE,
Foundations of the Christian Faith
Jenny, God has made me for a purpose - for China; but he has also made
me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure. ERIC LIDDELL, Chariots of
Fire
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God,
"Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end,'thy will be
done. C. S. LEWIS
[Our] original shimmering self gets buried so deep we hardly live out of
it at all...rather, we learn to live out of all the other selves which
we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against
the world's weather. FREDERICK BUECHNER, Telling Secrets
If God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as
the Bible and the church, then I think that he speaks to us largely
through what happens to us...if we keep our hearts and minds open as
well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at
all deeply and honestly, then I think we can come to recognize, beyond
all doubt, that, however little we may understand of it, his word to
each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling. FREDERICK
BUECHNER, Now and Then
We wake, if ever we wake at all, to mystery. ANNIE DILLARD
Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction
which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be
identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell
of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's
side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moments when are last
you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and
uncertain even at best) of that something which you were born desiring,
and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary
silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from
childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?
You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed
your soul have been but hints of it - tantalizing glimpses, promises
never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your
hear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an
echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would
know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, "Here at last is
the thing I was made for." WE cannot tell each other about it. It is the
secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want,
the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or
chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when
the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is.
If we lose this, we lose all. C. S. LEWIS
We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The
mystery of life is the plainest part of it...Every stone or flower is a
hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives
we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to
misunderstand. G. K. CHESTERTON, Orthodoxy
We live in narrative, we live in story. Existence has a story shape to
it. We have a beginning and an end, we have a plot, we have characters."
EUGENE PETERSON
[I] had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought
that perhaps it involved a magician...I had always felt life firs as a
story; and if there is a story there is a storyteller. G. K. CHESTERTON
It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering
starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful
things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love
against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is
hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are
endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a
world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily
ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike,
becomes known by his true name...That is the fairy tale of the Gospel
with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales,
which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only
happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is
happening still. FREDERICK BUECHNER, The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and
Fairy Tale
The heart has it reasons that reason knows not of. BLAISE PASCAL
So long as we imagine it is we who have to look for God, we must often
lose heart. But it is the other way about - He is looking for us. SIMON
TUGWELL
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and
goddesses, to remember that the dullest and uninteresting person you
talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be
strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as
you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare...There are no ordinary
people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. C. S. LEWIS
...it (is) not in them, it only comes through them and what (comes)
through them (is) longing...They are not the thing itself; they are only
the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not
heard, news from a country we have never visited. C. S. LEWIS
The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing
to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm
that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.
And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense
described, becomes highly relevant t our deep desire. For glory meant
good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and
welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been
knocking all our lives will open at last. C> S. LEWIS, The Weight of
Glory
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
GOD MOVES IN A MYSTERIOUS WAY
(originally Conflict: Light Shining Out of Darkness )
God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform; He plants His
footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm.
You fearful saints, fresh courage take: The clouds you so much dread are
big with mercy, and shall break in blessings on your head.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust Him for His grace; behind
a frowning providence He hides a smiling face.
Deep in unfathomable mind of never failing skill He treasures up His
bright design and works His sovereign will.
Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan His work in vain; God is His own
interpreter, and He will make it plain.
WILLIAM COWPER
Thomas Watson, "[Jesus] alone is the Prince of Preachers. He alone is the best of expositors."