quotestonote

Look at Christ - not at you!

2012-01-26T03:09:00.001-08:00

For every look at self—take ten looks at Christ! Live near to Jesus—and all things will appear little to you in comparison with eternal realities.

How many millions of dazzling pearls and gems are at this moment hidden in the deep recesses of the ocean caves. Likewise, unfathomable oceans of grace are in Christ for you. Dive and dive again—you will never come to the bottom of these depths! –Robert Murray McCheyne (1813-1843)

Kindness

2012-01-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

"He was a kind man, and had also that bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of any difficulty or scene."

G.K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories (Wordsworth Classics), 51.

Making the everyday drudgery count...

2012-01-10T01:55:00.000-08:00

George Herbert

THE ELIXIR.
TEACH me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for Thee.

...

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav'n espy.

All may of Thee partake ;
Nothing can be so mean
Which with this tincture (for Thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine :
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th' action fine.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold ;
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.

Quoted by Julian Hardyman in Maximum Life pg 90

vanishd.com

2012-01-10T01:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.vanishd.com/

is a site that enables you to look at the internet whilst at work.

It gives you a small window to read websites through behind a fake work file.

You can quickly remove the internet by flicking your mouse off the screen.

Paul writes in Colossians 3

...obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. ²³ Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, ²⁴ since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

Am I mistaken?

2012-01-05T08:10:00.001-08:00

‎"The hardest words to pronounce in the english language are 'I am mistaken."
-Charles Spurgeon

Piper on Peaching

2012-01-05T04:14:00.000-08:00

"All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You wake up on Sunday morning and you can smell the smoke of hell on one side and feel the crisp breezes of heaven on the other . . . The dangers of self-reliance and self-exaltation in the ministry of preaching are so insidious that God will strike us if he must in order to break us of our self-assurance and the casual use of our professional techniques" (Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, pp. 37-38).

God does not try.

2012-01-05T03:27:00.000-08:00

‎"The reason Christ came into the world was to save it -- and most emphatically His mission was not to try to save it" (Heaven Misplaced, p. 48- Doug Wilson).

Poetry and sanity

2012-01-04T03:46:00.000-08:00

Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 10-11:

"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom...

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself into. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

Evangelicals...

2012-01-03T03:16:00.000-08:00

Yancey, again in the introduction to Chesterton's Orthodoxy, xix:

"Evangelicals are the kind of responsible citizens most Americans appreciate as neighbours but don't want to spend much time with."

Ouch

God's gift of pleasure

2012-01-03T03:05:00.000-08:00

Yancey on Chesterton, Orthodoxy, xvi:

"Where did pleasure come from? After searching alternatives, Chesterton settled on Christianity as the only reasonable explanation for its existence in the world. Moments of pleasure are the remnants washed ashore from the shipwreck, bits of Paradise extended through time. We must hold these relics lightly, and use them with humility and restraint, never seizing them as our entitlements....

Guided by Chesterton, I came to see sex, money, power and sensory pleasures as God's gifts which, in a fallen world, must be handled with care, like explosives. We have lost the untainted innocence of Eden, and now every good thing represents risk as well, holding within it the potential for abuse. Eating becomes gluttony, love becomes lust, and along the way we lose sight of the One who gives us pleasure. The ancients turned good things into idols; we moderns call them addictions. In either case, what ceases to be a servant becomes a tyrant."

A cosmic shipwreck

2012-01-03T03:00:00.000-08:00

Yancey again on Chesterton, Orthodoxy, xiii:

"Chesterton viewed this world as a sort of cosmic shipwreck. A person's search for meaning resembles a sailor who awakens from a deep sleep and discovers treasure strewn about, relics from a civilisation he can barely remember. One by one he picks up the relics - gold coins, a compass, fine clothing - and tries to discern their meaning. Fallen humanity is in such a state. Good things on earth - the natural world, beauty, love, joy - still bear traces of their original purpose, but amnesia mars the image of God in us."

(if not amnesia, darkened hearts - Romans 1:21)

The problem of pleasure

2012-01-03T02:49:00.001-08:00

Philip Yancey on G.K. Chesterton on pleasure, in the introduction to Chesterton's 1908 autobiography Orthodoxy (repr.; New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2001), xiv-xv:

"Although Chesterton was a helpful guide on the problem of pain, he seemed equally fascinated with its opposite, the problem of pleasure. He found materialism too thin to account for the sense of wonder and delight that sometimes marks the world, a sense that gives an almost magical dimension to such basic human acts as sex, and childbirth, and artistic creation.

Why is sex fun? Reproduction surely doesn't require pleasure: Some animals simply split in half to reproduce, and even humans use methods of artificial insemination that involves no pleasure. Why is eating enjoyable? Plants and the lower animals manage to obtain their quota of nutrients without the luxury of taste buds. Why are there colors? Some people get along fine without the ability to detect color. Why complicate vision for all the rest of us?

It struck me, after reading my umpteenth book on the problem of pain, that I had never even seen a book on "the problem of pleasure." Nor have I met a philosopher who goes around shaking his head in perplexity over the question of why we experience pleasure. Yet it looms as a huge question - the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. On the issue of pleasure, Christians can breathe easier. A good and loving God would naturally want his creatures to experience delight, joy and personal fulfillment. We Christians start from that assumption and then look for ways to explain the origin of suffering. But should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness and meaninglessness?"

godlike feeling

2011-12-30T05:47:00.001-08:00

Motive for abuse:

"You are a very ordinary little person, Mikael. You would not be able to understand the godlike feeling of having absolute control over someone's life and death."

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, p.410

Dark grace

2011-12-23T06:29:00.000-08:00

"The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive."

O'Connor, ibid., p.862

The mystery of evil

2011-12-23T06:26:00.001-08:00

"Evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured."

Flannery O'Connor, The Catholic Novelist, in Collected Works, p.862

Bible story

2011-12-23T06:17:00.001-08:00

"Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than it is if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac. Both of these kinds of knowledge are necessary, but in the last four or five centuries we in the Church have over-emphasized the abstract and consequently impoverished our imagination and our capacity for prophetic insight."

Flannery O'Connor, The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South, in Collected Works (New York: The Library of America), p.859.

marriage and job

2011-12-22T01:35:00.004-08:00

Baucham Jr., Family Shepherds, p.92:

"When they identify that which defines and drives them, most men in our culture default to their careers. This is what determines where and when they move their families, how far they live away from extended family, the kind of church they attend (and how frequently), the lifestyle they enjoy, and the level of involvement they have in the discipleship of their children.

So a seismic shift is represented by changing the focus from one that says, "I'm a lawyer, and that defines the way my family is shaped," to one that says, "My wife and I entered a covenant relationship designed to bring forth, train, and launch a generation of godly offspring, and that's going to direct all the rest of my decisions." That isn't to say men should slack off at work. It is, however, to say that they should not slack off at home (something we almost never hear). This is a radical change of perspective, but one that I believe is warranted."

Note to self: what do I normally ask men at church about? 1. How are things at work? or 2. How are things at home with your wife and kids? Answer: pretty much always number 1. I am part of the problem...

Who disciples my children?

2011-12-20T01:55:00.000-08:00

Baucham Jr., Family Shepherds, pp.68-69:

"As the number of paid religious professionals has risen in recent decades, there has been a corresponding decline in the urgency and consistency with which parents - and particularly fathers - have viewed themselves as the principle disciplers of their children. And why shouldn't this be the case? If the church hires a youth pastor, a senior high pastor, associates for high school and middle school (separate ones for boys and for girls), and children's pastor, and a preschool director - many of whom have specialized degrees in their field from reputable seminaries - then why should a father who has not titles, positions, or special training dare to take it upon himself to do what there men and women have spent years preparing for?...

... we're naive if we think the exponential growth in the number of "professionals" on staff at out churches hasn't had a deleterious effect on the average Christian's view of himself in the grand scheme of things."

To the feet of Christ

2011-12-20T01:28:00.000-08:00

Voddie Baucham Jr, in Family Shepherds: Calling and Equipping Men to Lead their Homes (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2011), p.61:

"First, the eschatological nature of the gospel means we do not view our families as ends in themselves. Family shepherds are not men working to shape perfect families that will meet all their earthly needs. On the contrary, we know that Christ alone can meet our ultimate needs, and that he will fully do so only at the end of this present age. We also know that our family ties are temporal, and it's our ties to the body of Christ that matters eternally. Hence, our greatest desire is to lead our families to the feet of Christ, not to our own.

Second, the eschatological nature of the gospel means we do not hold our wives and children to unreasonable standards. We're all fallen creatures. Perfection is a hope we hold out for the age to come. In the meantime, we enjoy progressive sanctification while we praise God for making us more Christlike from day to day. This means we must not expect from our wives and children that which will be supplied only in the age to come."

(my underlining)

Gospel

2011-12-20T01:20:00.001-08:00

"The heart of most religions is good advice, good techniques, good programs, good ideas, and good support systems. These drive us deeper into ourselves, to find our inner light, inner goodness, inner voice, or inner resources. Nothing new can be found inside us. These is no inner rescuer deep down in my soul; I just hear echoes of my own voice telling me all sorts of crazy things to numb my sense of fear, anxiety, and boredom, the origins of which I cannot truly identify. But the heart of Christianity is Good News. It comes not as a task for us to fulfill, a mission for us to accomplish, a game plan for us to follow with the help of life coaches, but as a report that someone else has already fulfilled, accomplished, followed, and achieved everything for us. Good advice may help us in daily direction; the Good News concerning Jesus Christ saves us from sin's guilt and tyranny over our lives and the fear of death. It's Good News because it does not depend on us. It is about God and his faithfulness to his own purposes and promises."

Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life, p.20

Greed problem

2011-12-18T01:17:00.000-08:00

"Too much of the world's happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another. To increase my standard of living, people in another part of the world must lower theirs. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness. Industrialized nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made poor and hungry. It doesn't have to be that way. The experts on the world hunger problem say that there is enough to go round right now. We don't have a production problem. We have the agricultural capability to produce enough food. We have the transportation technology to distribute the food. But we have a greed problem: if I don't grab mine while I can, I might not be happy. The hunger problem is not going to be solved by government or by industry but in church, among Christians who learn a different way to pursue happiness... Christian blessing is a realizing that 'it is more blessed to give that to receive'."

Peterson, A Long Obedience, pp.118-119.

Splinters

2011-12-18T01:16:00.000-08:00

"If you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters."

H. H. Farmer

Gigantic secret

2011-12-18T01:14:00.000-08:00

"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan,
is the gigantic secret of the Christian."

G. K. Chesterton

The Chief end of Man?

2011-12-12T23:44:00.000-08:00

"We have learned in the democratic, capitalistic West that we are free agents and that the purpose of life is the maximization of individual happiness" - Leeman, The Church and the surprising offense of God's love

Leadership, Schwarzkopf-style

2011-12-12T05:15:00.001-08:00

General Norman Schwarzkopf:

"I have seen competent leaders who stood in front of a platoon and all they saw was a platoon. But great leaders stand in front of a platoon and see it as forty-four individuals, each of whom has aspirations, each of whom wants to live, each of whom wants to do good."

Cited in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John C. Maxwell, p.117

Pastor-teacher, what do you see before you on a Sunday morning?

Warts-and-all

2011-12-12T05:11:00.000-08:00

Peterson, A Long Obedience, p.75, on the Psalms:

"There is no literature in all the world that is more true to life and more honest than Psalms, for here we have warts-and-all religion. Every skeptical thought, every disappointing venture, every pain, every despair that we can face is lived through and integrated into a personal, saving relationship with God - a relationship that also has in it acts of praise, blessing, peace, security, trust and love."

Invading my turf

2011-12-02T02:31:00.001-08:00

"The kingdom of self is heavily defended territory. Post-Eden Adam and Eves are willing to pay their respects to God, but they don't want him invading their turf. Most sin, far from being a mere lapse in morals or a weak will, is an energetically and expensively erected defence against God"

Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, pp.31-32.

The lie

2011-12-02T00:45:00.000-08:00

"We have been told the lie ever since we can remember: human beings are basically nice and good. Everyone is born equal and innocent and self-sufficient. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. We are born free. If we are in chains now, it is someone's fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time.

How we can keep on believing this after so many centuries of evidence to the contrary is difficult to comprehend, but nothing we do and nothing anyone else does to us seems to disenchant us from the spell of the lie. We keep expecting things to get better somehow. And when they don't, we whine like spoiled children who don't get their way. We accumulate resentment that stores up in anger and erupts in violence. Convinced by the lie that what we are experiencing is unnatural, an exception, we devise ways to escape the influence of what other people do to us by getting away on vacation as often as we can. When the vacation is over, we get back into the flow of things again, our naivete renewed that everything is going to work out all right - only to once more be surprised, hurt, bewildered when it doesn't. The lie ("everything is OK") covers up and perpetuates the deep wrong, disguises the violence, the war, the rapacity.

Christian consciousness begins in the painful realization that what we had assumed was the truth is in fact a lie. Prayer is immediate: "Deliver me from the liars, God! They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth." Rescue me from the lies of advertisers who claim to know what I need and what I desire, from the lies of entertainers who promise a cheap way to joy, from the lies of politicians who pretend to instruct me in power and morality, from the lies of psychologists who offer to shape my behavior and my morals so that I will live long, happily and successfully, from the lies of religionists who pretend to promote me to the office of captain of my fate, from the lies of pastors who "get rid of God's command so you won't be inconvenienced in following the religious fashions!" (Mk 7:8). Rescue me from the person who tells me of life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit.

The lies are impeccably factual. They contain no errors. There are no distortions or falsified data. But they are lies all the same, because they claim to tell us who we are and omit everything about our origin in God and our destiny in God. They talk about the world without telling us that God made it. They tell us about our bodies without telling us that they are temples of the Holy Spirit. They instruct us in love without telling us about the God who loves us and gave himself for us."

Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, pp.26-27

Every fold and crease

2011-11-30T08:10:00.000-08:00

"It is not an abstraction called Humanity that is to be saved. It is you,... your soul, and, in some sense yet to be understood, even your body, that was made for the high and holy place. All that you are... every fold and crease of your individuality was devised from all eternity to fit God as a glove fits a hand. All that intimate particularity which you can hardly grasp yourself, much less communicate to your fellow creatures, is no mystery to Him. He made those ins and outs that He might fill them. Then He gave your soul so curious a life because it is the key designed to unlock that door, of all the myriad doors in Him."

C.S. Lewis, cited in Eugene Peterson's Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, p.73

Loving homage

2011-11-23T00:42:00.000-08:00

Kidner, Psalms 73-150, TOTC, p.436, commenting on Psalm 113:1:

Praise the LORD!
Praise, O servants of the LORD,
praise the name of the LORD!

"In these calls to praise there is more than mere repetition. There is point in specifying the Lord's servants and his name, since worship to be acceptable most be more than flattery and more than guesswork. It is the loving homage of the committed to the Revealed."

Frozen Planet

2011-11-21T11:12:00.000-08:00

Janice Turner, in The Times, Saturday November 19, p.29, on Frozen Planet:

"This series is curiously soothing. Sir David Attenborough has remarked about the great solace of Nature. "In moments of deep grief, the only consolation you can find is in the natural world," he told Radio Times. "People write to me and tell me this - people of great distinction... 'When so-and-so died, the only thing that made life tolerable was to watch programmes on plants and animals.' And I thought, 'That's true for me, yes.' Because we are part of a big, enduring thing."...

For the most part, I'm indifferent to Nature... so why, on blue afternoons, do I find that nothing rallies my spirits like poring over silly feline photos on Lolcats.com?... They transport us beyond our own species: we are freed, momentarily, from thinking about ourselves.

And Frozen Planet is all that: lush, expansive, revealing fresh wonderment in every snowflake, each surfacing whale. It makes us feel both microscopically insignificant and part of a mighty, unfathomable plan. But it is also a parable of life, the heaviness of its burdens, its brief joys...

I want to imagine this place is one that humans haven't yet screwed up. I want to relish the pure white wilderness, to swim with seals and romp with polar bear cubs. I want to lose myself in Nature. And believe that eventually summer will come"

Die heretic scum...

2011-11-18T01:08:00.001-08:00

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said,
"Well, there's so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?"
He said, "Religious."
I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?"
He said, "Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me too! Are you anglican or baptist?"
He said, "Baptist!"
I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?"
He said, "Baptist church of god!"
I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?"
He said,"Reformed Baptist church of god!"
I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?"
He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!"
I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off.

Tender love

2011-11-11T08:03:00.001-08:00

Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (repr; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997), 117-118:

"The whole of our ministry must be carried on in tender love to our people. We must let them see that nothing pleaseth us but what profiteth them; and that what doest them good doth us good; and that nothing troubleth us more than their hurt. We must feel toward our people, as a father toward his children: yea, the tenderest love of a mother must not surpass ours. We must travail in birth, till Christ be formed in them. They should see that we care for no outward thing, neither wealth, nor liberty, nor honour, nor life, in comparison of their salvation; but could even be content, with Moses, to have our names blotted out of the book of life, i.e. to be removed from the number of the living: rather than they should not be found in the Lamb's book of life. Thus should we, as John saith, be ready to 'lay down our lives for the brethren,' and, with Paul, not count our lives dear to us, so we may but 'finish our course with joy, and the ministry which we have received of the Lord Jesus.' When the people see that you unfeignedly love them, they will hear any thing and bear any thing from you..."

The ministry in mufti

2011-11-11T05:31:00.000-08:00

Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, p.1:

"Pastoral work takes Dame Religion by the hand and drags her into the everyday world, introducing her to friends, neighbors, and associates. Religion left to herself is shy, retiring, and private; or else she is decorative and proud - a prima donna. But she is not personal and she is not ordinary. The pastor insists on taking her where she must mix with the crowd.

When pastoral work is slighted, religion tends, among some, to become gaudy with ceremonial, among others to get cubbyholed as a private emotion. In either case she still does many things well: her theology can be profound, her meditations mystic, her moral counsels wise, her liturgies splendid. But until she is dragged into the common round she is not alive with Good News nor does she have a chance to put her ideas and beliefs to use, testing them out in actual life-situations.

Pastoral work is that aspect of Christian ministry which specializes in the ordinary. It is the pragmatic application of religion in the present. It has a horror of detachment, neutrality, studious isolation, or theoretic otherworldliness. It is the ministry in mufti."

The Dr on Preaching...

2011-11-11T02:36:00.000-08:00

The one thing needed above all else is the accompanying power of the Spirit... It is the power from on high. It is the preacher gliding on eagles wings, soaring high, swooping lie, carrying and being carried along by a dynamic other than his own. His consciousness of what is happening us not obliterated. He is not in a trance. He is being worked on but is aware that he is still working. He is being spoken through but knows he is still speaking.

Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones

The Sacred Anointing pg 28-29

Amy Winehouse's suicide note

2011-11-04T15:19:00.000-07:00

Amy Winehouse’s Suicide Note

Death, a shape, a thing. Death, a sound, a movement. Death is black, death is going back to black. They use my face. They use my eyes. They sell my soul. They touch me, they molest me. They tell me to stand, they tell me to sing. They plead with me to become.

They make me filthy, then they say they want to cleanse me. Death, the hour awaits, I have nothing, I am neither human nor a machine, stuck in between. I am neither a thing nor a feeling. I am neither alive nor dead. Death, the voice that sinks, the happiness that lingers in the flesh itself.

Death, they tell me to sing for the people. I say nothing, my words are nothing but futile distraction. I lie to humanity. I am a false icon. I am a disease, they, want me to spread. They want me to distract, they use my suffering as a tool to keep the people watching.

When will she break down? I want to break down. Death, awaits those with nothing left. Death, awaits those who betray their life for the meaningless rewards of the future. I want to die, I will die, moments, appearances, all falsities. They want me to sing and dance, they want me to please when there is only suffering left. They want me to be genuine, when it is all process. Fame, fake happiness, pretend desires. It’s all fake, it’s all dead.

Death, it’s all really dead.

Death, I’ve died a hundred times, so what’s one more.

Amy Winehouse

From http://theactivists.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/amy-winehouses-suicide-note/

Luther on Forgiveness

2011-11-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak thus: “I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there I shall be also.

Our unspeakable shame

2011-10-27T03:52:00.000-07:00

Don Carson, The Sermon on the Mount, Biblical Classics Library, p.119:

"The Western world is not characterized by prayer. By and large, to our unspeakable shame, even genuine Christians in the West are not characterized by prayer. Our environment loves hustle and bustle, smooth organization and powerful institutions, human self-confidence and human achievement, new opinions and novel schemes; and the church of Jesus Christ has conformed so thoroughly to this environment that it is often difficult to see how it differs in these matters from contemporary paganism. There are, of course, exceptions; but i am referring to what is characteristic. Our low spiritual ebb is directly traceable to the flickering feebleness of our prayers: 'You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with the wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures (James 4:2b-3)."

The cure of souls

2011-10-26T06:01:00.000-07:00

Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, p.59:

"It should be clear that the cure of souls is not a specialized form of ministry (analogous, for instance, to hospital chaplain or pastoral counselor) but is the essential pastoral work. It is not a narrowing of pastoral work to its devotional aspects, but it is a way of life that uses weekday tasks, encounters, and situations as the raw material for teaching prayer, developing faith, and preparing for a good death."

Isn't it odd...

2011-10-26T05:48:00.000-07:00

Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, p.45:

"Isn't it odd that pastors, who are responsible for interpreting the Scriptures, so much of which come in the form of poetry, have so little interest in poetry?"

Goals

2011-10-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, p.28:

"America and suburbia and the ego compose my parish. Most of the individuals in this amalgam suppose that the goals they have for themselves and the goals God has for them are the same. It is the oldest religious mistake: refusing to countenance any real difference between God and us, imagining God to be a vague extrapolation of our own desires, and then hiring a priest to manage the affairs between self and the extrapolation. And I, one of the priests they hired, am having none of it."

Listening

2011-10-26T02:43:00.000-07:00

Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, pp.21-22:

"Pastoral listening requires unhurried leisure, even if it's only for five minutes. Leisure is a quality of spirit, not a quantity of time. Only in that ambiance of leisure do persons know they are listened to with absolute seriousness, treated with dignity and importance. Speaking to people does not have the same personal intensity as listening to them. The question I put to myself is not "How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?" but "How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?" The number of persons listened to must necessarily be less than the number spoken to. Listening to a story always takes more time than delivering a message, so I must discard my compulsion to count, to compile the statistics that will justify my existence.

I can't listen if I am busy. When my schedule is crowded, I'm not free to listen: I have to keep my next appointment; I have to go to the next meeting. But if I provide margins to my day, there is ample time to listen."

I cannot be busy and pray

2011-10-26T02:37:00.000-07:00

Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, p.20:

"I know it takes time to develop a life of prayer: set-aside, disciplined, deliberate time. It isn't accomplished on the run, nor by offering prayers from a pulpit or at a hospital bedside. I know I can't be busy and pray at the same time. I can be active and pray; I can work and pray; but I cannot be busy and pray. I cannot be inwardly rushed, distracted, or dispersed. In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than to my clamoring ego. Usually, for that to happen there must be a deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day, a disciplined detachment from the insatiable self."

my underlining.

only lazy people work hard

2011-10-26T02:31:00.000-07:00

Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, p.19:

"It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us; then we find ourselves frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen different demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation, to stave off the disaster of disappointing someone.

But if I vainly crowd my day with conspicuous activity or let others fill my day with imperious demands, I don't have time to do my proper work, the work to which I have been called. How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion? How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?"

Church?

2011-10-25T06:20:00.000-07:00

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

—	Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Work for... what?

2011-10-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

Lowman, A Long Way East of Eden, on work in a God-less world (p.47):

"Futility attaches to so much of our experience of employment. We have a job enabling us to work for money for food, to have energy to go back to work, to earn money for yet more food to go on working... for as long, downsizing and unemployment permitting, as we are a useful tool for someone else; then, after traversing that circle a few thousand times, what remains of us goes in a box, and the box goes into the ground."

I have value because...

2011-10-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

of my work

I achieve

I possess

I am loved

I look good

I am busy

people like or respect or want me

I enjoy

I remember

of my pain

of my failure or my sickness

a counsellor listens to me

of what i belong to

I help others

DIY identity options, from Lowman, A Long Way East of Eden, pp.20-26

A need to feel loved

2011-10-24T06:59:00.000-07:00

Lowman, A Long Way East of Eden, on deriving our self-worth from relationships (p.24):

"The problems come when our sense of worth depends too strongly on our need to feel loved, leading us into unhealthy co-dependency (holding on desperately, by sex, to a poor relationship, because we dare not face losing it); or to draining our partner, putting demands on one relationship after another that destroy them. ('Prove to me you still care for me! Show me I am tolerable, loveable!') The situation is exacerbated now that sex no longer implies long-term commitment. The sexual embrace, where the ultimate openness could imply the ultimate loving security, becomes instead a proving-ground for technique, where once again value has to be earned. ('Did he think i'm good?')."

Look, I'm here

2011-10-24T06:53:00.000-07:00

John Thaw (Inspector Morse) in TV Times:

'I suppose I am a workaholic. It's all about needing to work to give yourself some importance, to prove that you exist. If I have a month or two off with nothing happening I get very fidgety, nervy, edgy. It isn't insecurity because I know there's work coming up. It must be, I suppose, that I need to work so as to be able to say to people: "Look, I'm here. I exist."'

Cited in Lowman, A Long Way East of Eden, p.22

man as object

2011-10-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

Jean-Paul Sartre:

"All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every man including oneself as an object, that is, as a set of predetermined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities or phenomena which constitute a table or a chair or a stone."

Cited in Lowman, A Long Way East of Eden, p.6

Flowers for a fortnight

2011-10-24T06:28:00.000-07:00

Pete Lowman, A Long Way East of Eden, on the death of God and our identity and value (pp.5-6):

"The sky is emptied; heaven has gone away. We no longer feel we can depend on the reality and purposes of God. From being a unique creature of God, for whom the all-wise, loving Father has designed a unique purpose in life, the individual finds herself merely the product of blind forces. For millions of years, the evolutionary mud-pond has bubbled away; now we've clambered to the surface, to bask for a few brief moments in the sun. Tomorrow, the mindless process hurries on again. We're products of chance, without any special 'soul'; less durable than an oak tree, and maybe (since there are so many of us) of less value than an advanced computer. If we slip under a truck tomorrow, there should be flowers on a grave somewhere for a fortnight, but there are many others to take our place. By the law of supply and demand, we have very limited significance."

Put more succinctly by Racquel Welch:

"I am just a piece of meat."

Bored, they dropped it

2011-10-21T03:01:00.001-07:00

Peterson, Eat This Book, on the change from seminary professor to pastor (pp.165-166):

"I found myself in a very different world. The first noticeable difference was that nobody seemed to care much about the Bible, which so recently people had been paying me to teach them. Many of the people with whom i now worked knew virtually nothing about it - had never read it and weren't interested in learning. Many others had spent years reading it, but for them it had gone flat through familiarity and been reduced to sclerotic cliches. Bored, they dropped it. And there weren't many people in between. Very few of them were interested in what i considered an essential element in my primary work, getting the words of the Bible into their heads and hearts, getting the message lived. They found newspapers, videos, and pulp fiction more to their taste.
Meanwhile, I had taken on as my life work the responsibility of getting these very people to listen, really listen, to the message in this book. I knew i had my work cut out for me."

My underlining. Refreshingly honest.

Rotting inside us

2011-10-19T02:55:00.000-07:00

Julian Green, a diary entry for October 6 1941:

"The story of the manna gathered by the Hebrews is deeply significant. It so happened that the manna rotted when it was kept. And perhaps this means that all spiritual reading which is not consumed - by prayer and by works - ends by causing a rotting inside us. You die with a head full of fine sayings and a perfectly empty heart."

Quoted in Peterson, Eat This Book, p.109

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.
James 1:22
caveat lector.

A fine, clear, pure mirror

2011-10-19T02:47:00.000-07:00

Martin Luther, in his preface to the German Psalter (1528):

"If you want to see the holy Christian Church painted in glowing colors and in a form which is really alive, and if you want this to be done in miniature, you must get hold of the Psalter, and there you will have in your possession a fine, clear, pure mirror which will show you what Christianity really is; yea, you will find yourself in it and the true gnothi seauton ["know thyself"], and God himself and all his creatures, too."

Cited by Arthur Weiser, The Psalms, pp.19-20

Anything goes

2011-10-19T02:40:00.000-07:00

Peterson, Eat This Book, on using the Psalms (p.105-106):

"Using the Psalms as a school of prayer, praying these prayers we get a feel for what is appropriate to say as we bring our lives into attentive and worshipping response to God as he speaks to us. As we do this, the first thing we realize is that in prayer anything goes. Virtually everything human is appropriate as material for prayer: reflections and observations, fear and anger, guilt and sin, questions and doubts, needs and desires, praise and gratitude, suffering and death. Nothing human is excluded. The Psalms are an extended refutation that prayer is "being nice" before God. No - prayer is an offering of ourselves, just as we are. The second thing we realize is that prayer is access to everything that God is for us: holiness, justice, mercy, forgiveness, sovereignty, blessing, vindication, salvation, love, majesty, glory. The Psalms are a detailed demonstration that prayer brings us into the welcoming presence of God as he generously offers himself, just as he is, to us."

Accusation, cartwheels

2011-10-19T02:29:00.000-07:00

Peterson, Eat This Book, on the Psalms (p.104-105):

"The Psalms are the preeminent witness to our praying participation as we read or listen to God's word. Athanasius caught their genius succinctly when he said: "Most scriptures speak to us; the Psalms speak for us." And of, how they speak. They don't simply say, "Yes, God, I agree. Yes, that's right, I couldn't have said it better myself." Or, "Yes, would you say that again so I can write it down and show it to my friends." No, they argue and complain, they lament and they praise, they deny and declaim, they thank and they sing. On one page they accuse God of betraying and abandoning them and on the next they turn cartwheels of hallelujahs. Sometimes we suppose that the proper posture of response to God as we read the Bible is to be curled up in a wingback chair before a cosy fire, docile and well-mannered. Some of us are taught to think that reading the Bible means sitting in God's classroom and that prayer is politely raising our hand when we have a question about what he is teaching us in his Deuteronomy lecture. The Psalms, our prayer text within the biblical text, show us something quite different: prayer is engaging God, an engaging that is seldom accomplished by a murmured greeting and a conventional handshake. The engagement, at least in the initial stages, is more like a quarrel than a greeting, more like a wrestling match than a warm embrace."

Sappy soupy spirituality

2011-10-18T03:39:00.000-07:00

Peterson, Eat This Book, on exegesis (p.58):

"Without exegesis, spirituality gets sappy, soupy. Spirituality without exegesis becomes self-indulgent. Without disciplined exegesis spirituality develops into an idiolect in which I define all the key verbs and nouns out of my own experience. And prayer ends up limping along in sighs and stutters,"

Exegesis: an act of love

2011-10-18T03:32:00.000-07:00

Peterson, Eat This Book, on exegesis (p,55):

"Exegesis is the furthest thing from pedantry; exegesis is an act of love. It loves the one who speaks the words enough to want to get the words right. It respects the words enough to use every means we have to get the words right. Exegesis is loving God enough to stop and listen carefully to what he says. It follows that we bring the leisure and attentiveness of lovers to this text, cherishing every comma and semicolon, relishing the oddness of this preposition, delighting in the surprising placement of this noun. Lovers don't take a quick look, get a "message" or a "meaning," and then run off and talk endlessly with their friends about how they feel."

Beautifully wonderfully put!

The sovereign self

2011-10-18T03:21:00.000-07:00

Eugene Peterson (Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, 31-32) on the modern-day personal Trinity of my Holy Wants, my Holy Needs, and my Holy Feelings:

"We live in an age in which we have all been trained from the cradle to choose what is best for us. We have a few years of apprenticeship at this before we are sent out on our own, but the training begins early. By the time we can hold a spoon we choose between half a dozen cereals for breakfast, ranging from Cheerios to Corn Flakes. Our tastes, inclinations, and appetites are consulted endlessly. We are soon deciding what clothes we will wear and in what style we will have our hair cut. The options proliferate: what TV channels we will view, what courses we will take in school, what college we will attend, what courses we will sign up for, what model and color of car we will buy, what church we will join. We learn early, with multiple confirmations as we grow older, that we have a say in the formation of our lives and, within certain bounds, the decisive say. If the culture does a thorough job on us - and it turns out to be mighty effective with most of us - we enter adulthood with the working assumption that whatever we need and want and feel forms the divine control center of our lives."

An ice-axe

2011-10-18T03:15:00.001-07:00

"If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?... A book must be like an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us."

Franz Kafka, quoted by George Steiner, Language and Silence, p.67

A tattered coat

2011-10-18T02:46:00.000-07:00

Janice Turner on old age (The Times, Saturday October 15 2011, p.25):

"My Father broke a hip on Sunday morning. He just tipped over lightly on a carpeted floor. It didn't even hurt. I am reminded of how an overcooked chicken leg cleaves from the carcass. How fragile are the very old...
What are [the elderly] doing in a ward with a dozen others? Wards were for a time when holidays were spent in boarding houses queueing for a single shared bathroom. Wards are not for the ensuite age.
I wouldn't want to be in a barely curtained booth, with scant places to put my possessions, listening to a poor, distressed man with Alzheimer's in the next bed, while I'm recovering from surgery. I would be maddened by the fluorescent lights, the party atmosphere at the nurses' station at shift change, by the jabber of other people's visitors. I'd be mortified that they could hear my cries, my funeral plans. I'd want silence, solitude, darkness...
In the beds beside my father, the ancient men, despite their death-head open-mawed faces, remind me of small boys cupping their balls for comfort as they sleep...
It is a very deep lesson in humanity watching a whole ward of such broken folk, who would have simply revolted you until the day one of them is your own father...
As I change my father's pyjama jacket I keep thinking of Yeats's lines: "An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick"...
I don't want to lie there like my father, all faculties gone, except the good heart and the strong lungs, which until two summers ago dug his vegetable garden and mowed my lawn. A tired man tethered to a motor that refuses to stop. With a still-sharp mind that sees no point in getting better, just so that he can break another bone, that knows he will never live again in his own home. What a predicament."

Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent.
Psalm 71:9

Quality not just quantity...

2011-10-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Tim Hawkins, talking about discipleship using the metaphor of fruit growing:

"No-one gives a rat's armpit as to how many trees you have in your orchard! Here is the important question "What sort of fruit are you producing?" What is the quality of your fruit? Is it good fruit?". Page 4, Fruit that will last.

Attractive Astrology

2011-10-11T05:59:00.000-07:00

"[Babylon] has perfected a form of religion (astrology) which enhances her sense of power over her own destiny without making any moral demands on upon her."

Barry Webb, The Message of Isaiah (BST), p.190, commenting on Isa 47:9,12-13

Mark 1: Trinity

2011-10-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

Just as the original creation of the world was a creation of the triune God, Mark says, so the redemption of the world, the rescue and renewal of all things that is beginning now with the arrival of the King, is also a project of the triune God.

Keller, King's Cross, pg5

Madonna & idols of success

2011-10-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

I have an iron will, and all of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of inadequacy. . . I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being, and then I get to another stage and think I'm mediocre and uninteresting. . . . Again and again. My drive in life is from this horrible fear of being mediocre. And that's always pushing me, pushing me. Because even though I've become Somebody, I still have to prove I'm Somebody. My struggle has never ended and it probably never will.

via Counterfeit gods - Keller

Great shining tears

2011-09-13T07:15:00.000-07:00

Digory to Aslan (The Magician's Nephew, p.131):

"But please, please - won't you - can't you give me something that will cure Mother?" Up until then he had been looking at the Lion's great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion's eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory's own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.

John 13:35

Father - source and goal

2011-08-06T02:11:00.001-07:00

Smail, The Forgotten Father, p.20:

"Just as the Father is the source of everything both in creation and redemption, so also he is the goal of everything, and the mission of the Son and of the Spirit is to advance his glory and let him be all in all."

1 Cor 8:6; Eph 1:3ff; John 3:16; Phil 2:11; 1 Cor 15:24; 28

forget Father, distort Jesus

2011-08-06T01:58:00.000-07:00

Smail, The Forgotten Father, pp.27-28:

"But as we look to Christ and the Spirit in their togetherness, we dare not forget the Father. If we do we shall see Jesus only as the one who faces in our direction, as Saviour, Healer, Baptiser in the Spirit, Renewer of the Church, who by his Spirit meets our needs for pardon, wholeness, satisfaction and self-fulfilment. We shall see the value of Jesus as his value to us rather than as his value to God. The charismatic renewal is in danger of becoming imprisoned in just such a man-centred, need-dominated distortion of the gospel where Christ and his Spirit can be easily reduced to the source of our blessings and the satisfiers and servants of our needs.

We shall return to this often, but suffice to say at the moment that the Jesus of the gospels will just not fit into this mould, because it leaves out his chief priority. He was never the servant of the needs that pressed around him; his agenda was not written for him by the insatiable demands of those who thronged him, but rather by his obedience to his heavenly Father. His life was not dominated by the claims of men, but surrendered to the claim of God. To see the place of the Father in the life of Jesus helps us to see that out own greatest need is conversion from an obsession with our needs to an obedience-centred Christianity in which healing is only a prelude to following, being renewed to giving yourself in sacrifice to the one who has renewed you."

The Father of the Son

2011-08-06T01:48:00.000-07:00

Smail, The Forgotten Father, p.24:

"God the Father out of the context of the coming of Christ quickly ceases to be Father at all. He quickly becomes instead the remote and distant God of the philosophers, the anonymous and abstract ground of our being, who is in everything in general but never does anything in particular. He becomes the God at the end of the argument, the first cause that was needed to get everything started, the intelligent designer required to account for the purpose and order in the world. As such he becomes a concept or a presupposition, rather than a personal presence and power; he belongs to the debating society rather than the Church; is a subject of interest rather than an object of worship."

freedom and authority

2011-08-06T01:24:00.000-07:00

Thomas A. Smail, in The Forgotten Father, p.16:

"The way of deliverance from human authoritarianism is the rediscovery of divine authority. It is when we are most captive to the second that we shall be most free from the first."

United Nations

2011-07-31T01:04:00.000-07:00

Kings of the earth and all peoples,
princes and all rulers of the earth!
Young men and maidens together,
old men and children!
Psalm 148:11-12

Kidner, pithy and profound as ever, comments:

"In these few lines there emerges, quite incidentally and with unforced simplicity, the only potential bond between the extremes of mankind: a joyful preoccupation with God."

Psalms 73-150, TOTC, p.525.

Scandinavian crime fiction and original sin

2011-07-25T01:26:00.001-07:00

Fascinating and important stuff from John Sutherland, Emeritus Professor of English at UCL, in The Times, Sat July 23 2011, p.24:

Scandinavian crime fiction - such as the similarly sensational successful TV mini-series Wallander and The Killing - rests on a reading of human nature that is alien, but currently fascinating, to the Anglo-American mind. It can be summed up in a key moment in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when the heroine Lisbeth's probation officer, Nils Bjurman, rapes her violently and she takes her revenge by Tasering him and tattooing on his chest: "I am a sadistic pig and a rapist."

Bjurman is not, the novel intimates, a uniquely rotten apple in the Swedish justice system. He's just a man. (Larsson's original title, in Swedish, translates as "Men who Hate Women"). And, as a man, Bjurman is stained to his core with original sin, which he chooses to indulge. Not all men, thank God, do indulge it. But, like the characters in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, you can never remove that indelible mark of sin and the temptation to do it. It's God's tattoo on the human soul.

I don't know if Swedish radio has anything equivalent to the Today programme's Thought for the Day, but if it does I wouldn't mind betting it's very different from what we hear. And, I suspect, a lot less wishy-washy.

There is hot dispute about where classic English crime fiction begins, historically. One contender is William Godwin. His pioneering 1794 detective novel, Caleb Williams, expounds his core belief that "circumstance causes crime". It's a belief that you can follow through mainstream British liberal thought to Tony Blair's tediously repeated mantra, "tough on crime, touch on the causes of crime".

The Scandinavians have got to grips with those "causes and circumstances" more resourcefully than anyone else. But there is one thing they believe in their Calvinistic way, that you can never put right. The old Adam. Beneath the peace, prosperity, culture and education is evil that no welfare state, however benign, can eradicate.

God is glorious

2011-07-21T02:36:00.000-07:00

"An old hymn by Thomas

Binney captures the truth well:

Eternal Light! eternal Light!

How pure the soul must be

When, placed within Thy searching sight,

It shrinks not, but with calm delight

Can live, and look on Thee!

O how shall I, whose native sphere

Is dark, whose mind is dim,

Before the Ineffable appear,

And on my naked spirit bear

That uncreated beam?" - found in an article by Jonathan Gibson

God is all about God

2011-07-21T02:31:00.001-07:00

“We are willing to be God-centered, it seems, as long as God is man-centered.” - Piper, God is the Gospel

The Hell of Hells

2011-07-18T03:19:00.005-07:00

"After suffering the conscious pain of punishment, banishment and destruction by God for a billion ‘years’, those in hell will face the awful reality that those billion ‘years’ are but one point on an infinitely long line." JONATHAN GIBSON / BRIEFING #381 / JUNE 2010

The Most Orthodox Theologian in the Universe

2011-07-14T00:02:00.000-07:00

The devil is orthodox in his faith; he believes the true scheme of doctrine; he is no Deist, Socinian, Arian, Pelagian, or antinomian; the articles of his faith are all sound.

Jonathan Edwards, 'True Grace Distinguished from the Experience of Devils,' inWorks, Hickman ed., 2:43

Classic Pithy Stotty

2011-07-06T13:39:00.001-07:00

The reality of saving faith is exhibited in serving love.

John Stott, The Radical Disicple, pg 86

The worst thing about hell

2011-07-06T05:33:00.000-07:00

"O how dreadful will eternity appear to them after they shall have been thinking on it for ages together, and shall have so long an experience of their torments! The damned in hell will have two infinities perpetually to amaze them, and swallow them up: one is an infinite God, whose wrath they will bear, and in whom they will behold their perfect and irreconcilable enemy. The other is the infinite duration of their torment." - Jonathan Edwards, The Eternity of Hell quoted in Donnelly, Heaven and Hell, page 43.

Modern ethical confusion

2011-07-06T04:39:00.000-07:00

"Contemporary society is in a state of ethical chaos. Imagine a group of young professionals enjoying a meal in any big-city restaurant. Not an eyebrow will be raised if someone mentions that they have recently had an abortion. A reference by another to their same-sex partner will elicit no disapproval. But if one of the party were to light a cigarette in a no-smoking section of the restaurant? Shock, horror, unanimous disgust! Is exhaling tobacco smoke more reprehensible than sexual perversion or killing an unborn child? Are such people competent to make moral judgments, to decide how God should deal with sin?They cannot even distinguish between wickedness and bad manners." - Ted Donnelly, Heaven and Hell, page 25.

vanity, all is vanity

2011-07-06T02:16:00.000-07:00

As I Walked Out One Evening

by W. H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river

I heard a lover sing

Under an arch of the railway:

'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you

Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,

For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages,

And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whirr and chime:

'O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley

Drifts the appalling snow;

Time breaks the threaded dances

And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes

And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,

And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,

And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,

The lovers they were gone;

The clocks had ceased their chiming,

And the deep river ran on.

We are not just matter!

2011-07-04T02:35:00.001-07:00

"To seek the fabric of contemporary humanity inside the brain is as mistaken as to try to detect the sound of a gust passing through a billion-leaved wood by applying a stethoscope to isolated seeds." So argues the philosopher and clinical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis. He condemns the growing use of brain science to try to explain every aspect of human life. In his new book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, Tallis attacks the idea that we can understand humanity through 'biologism' – the belief that humans are essentially animals and can be explained in biological terms. Although our existence was brought about by evolution, Tallis asserts that humans are profoundly different from animals. Moreover, he claims that biologism and 'neuromania' are dangerous for society, fuelling a belief that there is no hope of moral progress for humans." from Start the Week, Radio 4, 27/06/2011. Raymond is not an atheist but rejects philosophical naturalism as flawed and morally dangerous. Interesting...

Theodicy and personal ethics

2011-07-04T01:50:00.000-07:00

"Amongst the poignant prayers that voice over the movie, the young Jack O’Brien sincerely whispers, I want to know what you are and Why should I be good if you aren’t?" - A quote from a review of the film "The Tree of Life"

What is the book of Job all about?

2011-07-04T01:40:00.000-07:00

"Tree of Life starts with a quote from the Book of Job which is one of the most f***ed up thing in the Bible. The angry jealous Yahweh of the Old Testament made a stupid deal with the devil that he couldn't get Job to curse God because Job was such a good person. So God destroyed Job's life and eventually Job asked God "Why are you doing this to me?" and God said "I'm doing this because I feel like it and who the f*** are you anyway" and that was that." from Elaine Caroll's review of the tree of life (http://elainecarroll.blogspot.com/2011/06/tree-of-life.html).

Incarnation

2011-06-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

N.T.Wright, cited by Keller, King's Cross, p45:

"How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh, that life itself became life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that, or it means nothing. It is either the most devastating disclosure of the deepest reality of the world, or it is a sham, a nonsense, a bit of deceitful playacting. Most of us, unable to cope with saying either of those things, condemn ourselves to live in the shallow world in between."

Healing hands

2011-06-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

Keller, King's Cross, p16:

"I am reminded of a line from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: "The hands of the king are healing hands, and thus shall the rightful king be known." As a child blossoms under the authority of a wise a good parent, as a team flourishes under the direction of a skillful, brilliant coach, so when you come under the healing of the royal hands, under the kingship of Jesus, everything in your life will begin to heal. And when he comes back, everything sad will come untrue. His return will usher in the end of fear, suffering, and death."

Poring, questioning, analyzing

2011-06-28T07:41:00.000-07:00

Tim Keller, King's Cross, xv:

"Before the change, I pored over the Bible, questioning and analyzing it. But after the change it was as if the Bible, or maybe Someone through the Bible, began poring over me, questioning and analyzing me."

Your body is a temple

2011-06-23T00:45:00.000-07:00

"Using porn is an act of defilement, like committing an act of defilement in the Holy of Holies. I hardly dare write it, but this is the force of Paul's argument: it's like having sex with a prostitute on the Ark of the Covenant. Such an act is unthinkable" - Tim Chester, Captured by a better vision, 93

Imperatives from indicatives

2011-06-23T00:40:00.000-07:00

"God set us free to be free" - Tim Chester, Captured by a better vision, p90.

When a Real Estate Agent Opens His Bible and Invites a Heavy Metal Guitarist to Church

2011-06-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

Brian Welch – Guitarist in one of the biggest metal bands in the world was addicted to drugs destroying his and his young daughter’s life when his real estate manager shared Matthew 11:28 with him. In his own words this is what happened next:

Matthew 11:28 - Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. All tweaked out, I got my dictionary and looked up weary and looked up burdened, I pulled the scripture apart. “I’m weary and burdened I need rest for my soul” and I didn’t know whether it was real… but they invited me to church a couple weeks later and I received Christ at the church and went home… and I prayed “Jesus you’ve got to take these drugs from me. Search me right now, search my heart!... Father!”

I felt so much fatherly love from heaven and it was like “I don’t condemn you, I love you, I love you” It was just love, love and instantly that love from God came into me and It was so powerful that I threw away all my drugs and quit “Korn”…It changed me, my heart was changed like that!

This was transcribed from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOeruTrdF1Q&feature=player_embedded

What is life all about?

2011-06-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

My dream came true, way more than I ever dreamt about I made more more, I played big shows, houses, cars, I tried drugs, I tried sex, I tried everything. I tried everything to try and get pleasure out of this life and thought that I could fulfil my life with all this stuff, with having my dream come true and it came true. But it didn’t fulfil it.

…Christ gives you the gift of understanding life. Which is; everything was created for Christ and by him and we were created to be with him and it’s the most incredible feeling because it’s where you belong and contentment is given to you in life… you’re exactly where you need to be.

This was transcribe from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOeruTrdF1Q&feature=player_embedded

To wedd or not to wedd?

2011-05-26T23:13:00.000-07:00

According to the latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey, which was conducted in 2008, almost two-thirds of people now see little difference between marriage and living together. Fewer than a fifth of people took issue with it.

Just under half thought cohabitation showed just as much commitment as getting married. When it comes to children, where opinion can often be a bit more traditional, only 28% said they believe married couples make better parents.

"If you cohabited or had children together you were as good as married in everyone's eyes. It's only after the introduction of the Hardwicke Marriage Act in 1753 that marriage became a legal concept and unmarried couples became stigmatised."

She says the "golden age" of marriage was as recent as the 1960s and 70s, when more people got married than ever before. Marriage was seen as a passport to adulthood, when you were allowed to have sex and live together.

Marriage statistics

In 2009 231,490 marriages were registered in England and Wales
It was the lowest number since 1895
The long-term picture for UK weddings is of decline, from a peak of 480,285 marriages in 1972

Source: ONS

"Obviously, people wanted that freedom as soon as they could," says Mansfield. "The average age of people getting married was 21 for women and 23 for men. Now you can put a decade on those ages and that's because sex and cohabitation outside of marriage are largely accepted.

"Having kids is a much bigger deal than marriage, a much bigger statement of commitment. Personally, I just don't think about getting married. I simply have never felt a need to be married."

Just found this interesting!

Canute knew he wasn't Christ

2011-05-26T23:01:00.001-07:00

"...it seems probable that King Canute was not a madman who thought he could control nature.

The first written account of the Canute episode was in Historia Anglorum (The History of the English People) by chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, who lived within 60 years of the death of Canute (1035 AD).

According to the story, the king had his chair carried down to the shore and ordered the waves not to break upon his land.

When his orders were ignored, he pronounced: "Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless and there is no King worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven and earth and sea obey eternal laws," (Historia Anglorum, ed D E Greenway)." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13524677

The heart of anger

2011-05-18T02:13:00.000-07:00

Welch (Depression) on anger (p.156):

"Once anger settles in, it will bring you to an increasingly familiar crossroad.
Will you turn to the true God, who shows compassion to those who have been victimized, or will you trust yourself?
Will you turn to the true God, who is the holy and righteous judge, or will you form a vigilante party that meets in your name, for your sake, and for your glory?
Anger typically begins in a way that imitates God - it makes judgements about right and wrong. But it can quickly turn into a stance against him. You are angry because your rights and your glory - not God's - have been violated."

Types of anger

2011-05-18T02:09:00.001-07:00

Welch (Depression) on anger (p.155):

"Anger can either be hot or cold. People are as hurt by one as they are by the other. The main difference is that hot anger is brief and explosive, cold settles in the long-term. Depressive anger is usually cold: the "cold shoulder," withdrawal, calculated rejection, putting blame on others, feeling sorry for oneself. In some ways, it is the most extreme anger in that it refuses to be affected by the other person. "I have been hurt, and I will never care enough to be hurt again." Avoid the hot-tempered person, but tremble before the cold, distant, uncaring, angry person."

Hardship and change

2011-05-17T02:38:00.000-07:00

Welch (Depression) on God using hardship (pp.134-135):

Throughout history, God was used hardships to reveal people's hearts, and this unveiling has a purpose. It is an essential part of the process of change. You have to see what is in your heart before you can set out to change it.
Notice how those who have medicated away their hardships with illegal drugs, alcohol or sex can seem immature. They may look forty-five but they have the character of an adolescent. Find a person who has weathered storms rather than avoided them and you will find someone who is wise.

The Fellowship of the Unashamed

2011-05-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

I am a part of the fellowship of the Unashamed.
I have the Holy Spirit Power. The die has been cast.
I have stepped over the line. The decision has been made.
I am a disciple of Jesus Christ.
I won’t look back, let up, slow down, back away, or be still.
My past is redeemed, my present makes sense, and my future is secure.
I am finished and done with low living, sight walking, small planning, smooth knees, colorless dreams,
tame visions, mundane talking, chintzy giving, and dwarfed goals.

I no longer need preeminence, prosperity, position, promotions, plaudits, or popularity.
I don’t have to be right, first, tops, recognized, praised, regarded, or rewarded.
I now live by presence, learn by faith, love by patience, lift by prayer, and labor by power.

My pace is set, my gait is fast, my goal is Heaven, my road is narrow,
my way is rough, my companions few, my Guide is reliable, my mission is clear.
I cannot be bought, compromised, deterred, lured away, turned back, diluted, or delayed.
I will not flinch in the face of sacrifice, hesitate in the presence of adversity,
negotiate at the table of the enemy, ponder at the pool of popularity,
or meander in the maze of mediocrity.

I won’t give up, back up, let up, or shut up until I’ve preached up,
prayed up, paid up, stored up, and stayed up for the cause of Christ.
I am a disciple of Jesus Christ.
I must go until He returns, give until I drop,
preach until all know, and work until He comes.

And when He comes to get His own, He will have no problem recognizing me.
My colors will be clear for “I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes..” (Romans 1:16)

Heard this. Wanted a place to put it.

your heart your home

2011-05-10T00:38:00.000-07:00

"The state of your heart is the state of your home. You cannot harbor resentment secretly towards your children and expect their hearts to be submissive and tender. You cannot be greedy for your time and expect them to share their toys. And perhaps most importantly, you cannot resist your opportunities to be corrected by God and expect them to receive correction from you."

Rachel Jankovic. Loving the Little Years: Motherhood in the Trenches. pp.14-15

Spurgeon's imagined heavenly court-scene

2011-05-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

If I might be allowed to picture in my imagination (and mark, it is nothing more than imagination), I could almost conceive a parliament in heaven. The angels are assembled; the question is proposed to them:-- "Cherubim and seraphim, cohorts of the glorified, ye spirits that like flames of fire, swift at my bidding fly; ye happy beings, whom I have created for my honour! here is a question which I condescend to offer for your consideration:--Man has sinned; there is no way for his pardon but by some one suffering and paying blood for blood. Who shall it be?" I can conceive that there was silence throughout the august assembly. Gabriel spoke not: he would have stretched his wings and flapped the ether in a moment, if the deed had been possible; but he felt that he could never bear the guilt of a world upon his shoulders, and, therefore, still he sat. And there the mightiest of the mighty, those who could shake a world if God should will it, sat still, because they felt all powerless to accomplish redemption. I do not conceive that one of them would have ventured to hope that God himself would assume flesh and die. I do not think it could have entered even into angelic thought to conceive that the mighty Maker of the skies should bow his awful head and sink into a grave. I cannot imagine that the brightest and most seraphic of these glorified ones would for an instant have suffered such a thought to abide with him. And when the Son of God, upstarting from his throne, spoke to them and said, "Principalities and powers! I will become flesh, I will veil this Godhead of mine in robes of mortal clay, I will die!"--I think I see the angels for once astonished.

November 23, 1856

C. H. SPURGEON

The heart of the problem

2011-05-08T07:26:00.000-07:00

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

—	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quoted in the Wall Street Journal quoted in the Week.

The religion of I

2011-05-03T03:36:00.000-07:00

Josh Moody on Gal 1:14, no other gospel, p.64:

"When we are captivated with the religion of I, what matters is what other I's think, not what the Great I Am thinks. We strive for heaven in order to impress earth, and heaven is not impressed."