Quotes
Andrée Seu Peterson ☍
On Being Had ☍
Note well, all ye who take upon yourselves to dialogue with people of this world who with feigned searchings of the soul would plead their case on matters from abortion to aberrant sexuality. Beware the velvet glove that hides the iron fist. The pattern of persuasion will be similar across the board: at first the plaintive cry of suffering and social justice, to enlist your sympathy.
Then follows, in the blush of victories won, removal of the mask, abandonment of pretense, and the cackle of contempt toward all who thought they cared a whit about their former ratiocinations.
Bob Kauflin ☍
Good Music Can Become Your God ☍
If a spiritual giant like Augustine struggled with valuing musically-induced feelings over spiritual ones, we probably will too. But I don’t think many of us would see that as a “grievous sin.” Maybe we should.
C. H. Spurgeon ☍
From Commenting & Commentaries, addressing “me and my Bible” attitudes.
It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.
C. S. Lewis ☍
We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good, if bad, because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.
Carl Trueman ☍
What Can Miserable Christians Sing? ☍
On singing:
In the last year, I have asked three very different evangelical audiences what miserable Christians can sing in church. On each occasion my question has elicited uproarious laughter, as if the idea of a broken-hearted, lonely, or despairing Christian was so absurd as to be comical—and yet I posed the question in all seriousness.
On prayer:
One might also look at the content of prayers—those we speak in private and those at the church meeting. How often did Abraham, Moses, and Paul pray for health, for worldly success, for personal happiness and satisfaction? How do the concerns of these men compare with the content and priorities of our own prayers? Do our intercessions, despite the pious theological padding, unwittingly mimic the blasphemous priorities of the Elmer Gantrys of this world who peddle a pernicious gospel of health, wealth, and happiness?
D. A. Carson ☍
People do not drift toward Holiness…We slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
But That’s Just Your Interpretation! ☍
But the woman was determined to make herself the victim, and me the abuser and victimizer. So finally I asked her, rather quietly, if her anger and hurt sprang from what I said, or from what God says in Scripture. Was she angry with me, or with God? I make it a practice to listen to alternative interpretations, and I am happy to be corrected: I too must want to be a good worker who does not need to be ashamed as I handle the Bible. But if I tremble before the Word of God, I will not duck what it has to say just because it is culturally uncomfortable.
Darryl Dash ☍
Good Firefighters Dont Rush ☍
You think you want a rushed firefighter, he said. But only rookie firefighters do that. The experienced firefighters know that hurry puts lives at risk. Hurry gets in the way of saving lives. A frantic firefighter is not a good firefighter.
Bill gates calls busy the new stupid, and s right. Hurry robs us of our ability to love God and others and to think clearly. It makes us irritable. Hurry is the enemy of our souls.
David Powlison ☍
Revisiting Idols of the Heart and Vanity Fair ☍
Self-analysis cannot save us. It can become simply one more form of self-fascination. Other-analysis cannot save others. It can become simply one more form of judgmentalism.
When we take the Bible’s God-relational verbs and turn them into questions, we are exposed for what we are.
Faith makes self-knowledge look to God and relate to him. Faith is not introspective…Love makes knowledge of others generous-hearted and merciful. Love is not judgmental.
Because diagnostic categories are philosophically and theologically “loaded,” a Christian who seeks to be true to the Bible’s system of value and interpretation must generate biblical categories and must approach secular categories with extreme skepticism.
Idols counterfeit aspects of God’s identity and character, as can be seen in the vignette above: judge, savior, source of blessing, sin-bearer, object of trust, author of a will which must be obeyed, and so forth. Each idol that clusters in the system makes false promises and gives false warnings: “if only … then …” … Because both the promises and warnings are lies, service to each idol results in a hangover of misery and accursedness.
Moralism—the working psychology of the proverbial man on the street—sticks with responsible behavior. Complex causalities are muted in toto. Behavioral psychologies see both drives and rewards, but cast their lot with the milieu, taking drives as untransformable givens. Both responsible behavior and a semi-conscious but renewable heart are muted. Humanistic psychologies see the interplay of inner desire/need with external fulfillment or frustration but cast their final vote for human self-determination. Both responsible behavior and the power of extrinsic forces are muted. Ego psychologies see the twisted conflict between heart’s desire and well-internalized social contingencies. But the present milieu and responsible behavior are muted. It is hard to keep three seemingly simple elements together.
I think Powlison is arguing here that need models seem plausible because idols can reduce to other idols; the “base” idol expresses a “need.”
Any one of the idols may have an independent hold on the human heart. Idols may reduce to one another in part: for example, a man with an intractable pornography and lust problem may be significantly helped by repentantly realizing that his lust expresses a tantrum over a frustrated desire to be married, a desire which he has never recognized as idolatrous. Idols can be compounded on top of idols. But sexual lust has its own valid primary existence as an idol as well. A biblical understanding of the idolatry motif explains why need models seem plausible and also thoroughly remakes the model.
Even the counterculture values of his “radical Christian” subculture can be understood in part as an idolatrous narrowing of the Christian life in reaction to the opposite idolatrous equation of Christianity with the American Dream.
Much of the variation among us is simply empowered by the “accidents” of life experience: tragedies or smooth sailing, handicaps or health, riches or poverty, New York City or Iowa or Uganda, a high school or a graduate school education, first-born or eighth-borh, male or female, born in 1500 B.C. or 1720 or 1920 or 1960 or 1990. Much individual variation is due to hereditary and temperamental differences: kinds of intelligence, physical coordination and capabilities, variation in talents and abilities, metabolic and hormonal differences, and so forth. In the last analysis, idiosyncratic choice from among the opportunities and options one encounters encounts for the nearly infinite range for individuality within the “commonalities” that biblical categories discern in us.
Christian counselors with a psychologizing drift typically are concerned with ministering God’s love to people who view God as the latest and greatest critic whom they can never please. But their failure to conceptualize people’s problems in the terms this article has been exploring inevitably creates a tendency towards teaching a “Liberal” version of the gospel. The cross becomes simply a demonstration that God loves me. It loses its force as the substitutionary atonement by the perfect Lamb in my place, who invites my repentance for heart-pervading sin.
The biblical gospel delivers from both personal sin and situation tyrannies. The biblical notion of inner idolatries allows people to see their need for Christ as a merciful savior from large sins of both heart and behavior. The notion of socio-cultural-familial-ethnic idolatries allows people to see Christ as a powerful deliverer from false masters and false value systems which we tend to absorb automatically. Christ-ian counseling counseling which exposes our motives—our hearts and our world—in such a way that the authentic gospel is the only possible answer.
David Qaoud ☍
Don’t Believe Your Own Press ☍
“I get a lot of love, and I get a lot of hate. I don’t believe all the kind things said about me, and I don’t believe all the negative things said about me.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ☍
Life Together ☍
It makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
Grayson Quay ☍
Liberal Methodists Toss Out the Africans ☍
One liberal minister compared the Traditional Plan to a “virus” that would cross the ocean and “make the American church very sick,” in what appears to be an attempt to draw a theological parallel to the racist Ebola panic of 2014.
When I mentioned to a dapper Anglo-Catholic gentleman over post-Mass drinks that I normally attended an ACNA parish, he said with scorn in his voice, “We don’t need a bunch of Africans telling us what to do.”
In 1998, when the African bishops led the charge to defend Christian sexual ethics at the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference, Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, New Jersey, who is not in any meaningful sense a Christian or even a theist, made the shockingly racist claim that African Christians had “moved out of animism into a very superstitious kind of Christianity.” Others found even more creative ways to infantilize black people, suggesting that if African Christians oppose gay marriage and clergy, they must have been brainwashed into doing so by American right-wingers.
Jeremy Walker ☍
Borrowed Conviction ☍
A list of gurus is not the same as a developed set of theological convictions.
Read the Scriptures and pray and study and pray and ask and listen and pray until you know what that means. If you are coming to me, I can tell you and show you what I believe and why I believe it. I will try to persuade you, because these things are important. If you want to check out these things with someone else, that is your call. But don’t come to the conclusion that these things are not important, or you will end up living in a spiritual landscape without definition, in a house without the roof and walls that provide order and security.
Settle the basics of comprehensive Christian believing and living and then get on with the substance of that convinced life. Listen more - much more - to the undershepherds God has given you that to the ones he has given someone else (and steer clear of the men who claim to be shepherds but have given up on or been legitimately rejected by sheep).
Jerry Bridges ☍
God not only blots our sins from His record, He also remembers them no more. This expression means He no longer holds them against us. The blotting out of our transgressions is a legal act. The remembering them no more is a relational act.
John Piper ☍
Nowhere in the Bible is gratitude connected explicitly with obedience as a motivation. We do not find the phrase “out of gratitude” or “in gratitude” for acts toward God…Christian obedience is called the “work of faith,” never of the “work of gratitude.”
Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.
Jonathan Edwards ☍
I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as highly as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with.
Kevin DeYoung ☍
Sincerity is a Christian virtue, as is honesty about our struggles. But my generation needs to realize that Christianity is more than chic fragility, endless self-revelation, and the coolness that comes with authenticity.
Cautious About Causation ☍
Of course, understanding our pasts can be useful in making sense of the present. But it’s a deterministic myth to think, “I had to turn out this way.” The fact of the matter is, there is no straight line whereby certain experiential inputs invariably lead to the same set of lifetime outputs.
The uncomfortable fact is that there are wide disparities between blacks and whites when it comes to a host of well-being measurements, from standardized test scores to educational attainment to household income to rates of incarceration. If some are quick to explain these disparities based on merit and hard work, others are quick to assume that discrimination and white supremacy are to blame. I’ve always found the easy explanations to be unhelpful—unhelpful in understanding the present and unhelpful in making things better in the future. It’s not discounting the legacy of racism or the value of personal responsibility to argue that neither is a sufficient explanation (nor an irrelevant consideration) for why people have what they have and are what they are.
People are complicated, and history is complicated. We don’t do anyone any favors by pretending that people or the past can be understood and summed up in a single, unifying theory.
Lianna Davis ☍
Her Stillborn Him Sovereign ☍
A quote that I believe I arrived at independently and resonate with.
A college professor—Kevin Zuber—had delivered a lecture that powerfully set in my heart this theme (I am paraphrasing): “Do the work in advance to know that God is sovereign because when difficulties come, this is what you will need to know.”
Mike Ovey ☍
The Art of Imperious Ignorance ☍
The argument for imperious (assuming authority without justification) ignorance.
The Bible is unclear, it is said, and so we must be content not to know. We must be ignorant.
Perhaps I should be more ready to adapt another of Hilary’s thoughts, that when faced with God’s revelation in the Bible, I should point less to a defect in the text (lack of clarity) but more to a defect in my understanding (subjective limits). Perhaps we should be less certain that parts of Scripture are ‘uncertain’.
Nathan Eshelman ☍
Christ is Your Heaven ☍
It is therefore the seeing of Christ that makes heaven; wherefore one said, “If I were cast into any hole, if it could have but a cranny to see Christ always, it would be heaven enough.”
Neil Postman ☍
Amusing Ourselves to Death ☍
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture… In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Philip Revell ☍
Do the Psalms Pass ‘Gospel Centered’ Test? ☍
This psalm talks more about the psalmist than it does about God. It uses phrases that will be written off by many as “Jesus is my boyfriend” language. There’s a lack of the kind of specificity we’d like to see. There’s no mention of Jesus. For many of us, we would have difficulty signing these words today without some kind of qualification or explanation. And if that’s the case—if our responses to the emotive language of the Psalms are a catalyst for concern and fear, rather than praise—something has gone wrong.
Sarah Walton ☍
Lay Aside the Fear of Legalism ☍
Legalism stems from putting confidence in our own efforts and abilities, producing pride and self-righteousness. Discipline, on the other hand, recognizes that we are already fully accepted by God through faith alone, and that we need to depend on the power of the Spirit, and exert effort to strive toward holiness, producing freedom and joy as we grow in godliness.
Ask the maximal righteousness question, not the minimal righteousness question…
If you have that mentality about your life, then you will ask not, “How many sins can I avoid?” but “How many weights can I lay down so that I am fleet-footed in the race of righteousness?”
Scott Sauls ☍
The best way to measure your desire to serve is to look at how you respond when someone treats you like a servant.
Stephen McAlpine ☍
Sexular Colonialism ☍
Go through the list of those who have backed them. Not a Smith or Jones in sight. But plenty of names you can’t pronounce quickly and that you know come from Pacific Islander and other ethnic backgrounds.
Thomas Watson ☍
Without meditation the truths which we know will never affect our hearts.
Reading without meditation is useless. Meditation without reading is dangerous.
Tim Keller ☍
Get Out! Tim Keller on the Exodus Story ☍
On the Exodus story being prototypical of the Christian story (attributed to Alec Motyer):
Think about it. Think of what an Israelite would say on the way to Canaan after passing through the Red Sea. If you asked an Israelite, “Who are you?” he might reply, “I was in a foreign land under the sentence of death and in bondage, but I took shelter under the blood of the lamb. And our mediator led us out, and we crossed over. Now we’re on our way to the Promised Land, though we’re not there yet. But he has given us his law to make us a community, and he has given us a tabernacle because we must live by grace and forgiveness. And he is present in our midst, and he will stay with us until we arrive home.