THE INTEGRITY OF JESUS

'Jesus asks everything of us, but he asks nothing of us that he has not first endured.' 

Tim Chester, Enjoying God: Experience the power and love of God in everyday life, p.76. 

CHRISTIAN MEDITATION

'...three distinctives of Christian meditation: it is centred on the truth of God, moved by the love of God, and directed to the praise of God.' 

Edmund P Clowney, Christian Meditation, p.91. 

OUR SUNG PRAISE IS MEDITATION

'Through the centuries the rich Word of Christ, working in the meditating hearts of Christians, has produced the spiritual wisdom in which Christians have addressed one another in songs of exhortation and God in songs of praise. In spite of many detours into formalism or sentimentalism, the hymnody of the church has returned again and again to the richness of devotional meditation on the Word of the Lord. If Christians begin to understand the meditative nature of the praise together, their approach to the corporate praise of God would be transformed. The recovery of meditation will also bring a tide of fresh songs of praise. Motre Christians will begin to sing their meditations and to compose hymns of thanksgiving to the Lord for his mighty works of saving love.' 

Edmund P Clowney, Christian Meditation, p.80. 

THE WONDER OF THE GOSPEL DEMANDS MEDITATION

'Grace and meditation go together. If our relation to God were legalistic, we might computerize his commandments like a motor code so that meditation would be eventually unnecessary. But our minds cannot encompass the marvel of God's grace. The more we reflect, the more the wonder increases and we are drawn and driven to further meditation and worship.' 

Edmund P Clowney, Christian Meditation, p.48. 

FOLLOWING JESUS HURTS

'No one who commits to following Christ, and does so, lives a life of ease. No one. If your Christianity has not brought discomfort to your life, something is wrong. A committed heart knows the discomfort of loving difficult people, the discomfort of giving until it hurts, the discomfort of putting oneself out for the ministry of Christ and his church, the discomfort of a life out of step with modern culture, the discomfort of being disliked, the occasional experience of having nowhere to lay your head.' 

R Kent Hughes, Luke (Vol.1): That You May Know the Truth, p.372. 

CHRISTIAN MEDITATION

'Meditation reflects on the truth of God in the presence of God.' 

Edmund P Clowney, Christian Meditation, p.46. 

CHRISTIAN MEDITATION

'To seek the face of the living God the Christian does not launch a voyage in inner space nor does he enter of abstract infinity. Rather he mediates on Christ of the scripture and on the scripture of Christ. He fills his thoughts with what the Bible says about Jesus, for he is not attempting to imagine a Christ but to learn about the real Christ. The disciple who would learn from his Master must treasure is words.'  

Edmund O Clowney, Christian Meditation: What the Bible teaches about meditation and spiritual exercises, p.29. 

INTIMACY AVOIDANCE

'When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.' 

Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces, p.5. 

WHERE TRUE LOVE LEADS

'The only reason the love of parents, the love of a spouse, the love of children, and the love of friends are precious is because they in some way resemble God's love. All human love derives from God and is meant to direct us back to God.' 

Dorothy Day in Jana Marguerite Bennett, Singleness and the Church, p.206. 

SAFE HERMENEUTICS

'The safest of all hermeneutical principles is to know the whole of the Scriptures.' 

John Stott, Challenges of Christian Leadership, p.43. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF REST

'Birdwatchers seldom get nervous breakdowns.'
John Stott, Challenges of Christian Leadership, p.37

CHRISTIAN IDOLATRIES AROUND MARRIAGE

'...Christians' idolatries surrounding marriage...that God can help us find The One who will make life more or less perfect; that Jesus commanded us to live in nuclear families just like in the 1950s; that marriage is primarily about love...' 

Jana Marguerite Bennett, Singleness and the Church, p.154. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING ENEMIES

'The good man has enemies. He would not be like his Lord if he had not.'

Charles Spurgeon, Psalms (Volume 1), p.91.