YOUR WILL BE DONE

'In petitionary prayer, we set ourselves against what seems "normal." If a world filled with cancer, AIDS, sex slavery, rapacious greed, and toxic waste seems to us like "just the way things are," then petitionary prayer invites us to imagine a different world - the world as God meant it to be and will ultimately make it, a world in which those things are profoundly abnormal. To pray "Your will be done" is to adopt an appropriate distress over the world as it exists now and to hold on to the conviction that God will even now begin to change the world.' 

Wesley Hill, The Lord's Prayer, p.42.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE TODAY

'We are waiting until Easter becomes for this world a general event.'

Karl Barth in Wesley Hill, The Lord's Prayer: A Guide to Praying Our Father, p.37.

WHERE IS GOD?

'"So God's up there? I say, pointing to all those wonderful stars. "A someone?"
"Everywhere, Ort. He's everything. The trees, the ground, the water. Everything stinks of God, reeks of him."'
Tim Winton, That Eye, The Sky, p.89.

MISLEADING BOOK TITLES

'So few books fulfill the promise of their titles that experienced readers never expect the fare to come up to the menu.'

Edith Wharton, 'Expiation' in The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, p.195.

JESUS IS NOT ZEUS

'Jesus is not Zeus.'

Dane Ortlund , Gentle and Lowly, p.47. 

MIRACLES ARE NATURAL NOT UNNATURAL

'When Jesus expels demons and heals the sick, he is driving out of creation the powers of destruction, and is healing and restoring created beings who are hurt and sick. The lordship of God to which the healings witness, restores creation to health. Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly "natural" thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.' 

Jurgen Moltmann in Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers,  p.31. 

THE MORAL EMOTION

'...anger is always makes a value judgement. Anger is always a moral matter. It has rightly been called "the moral emotion" because it makes a statement about what matters. Human beings make moral judgments, therefore human beings do anger. Period. Like God, you come wired to size things up, to feel displeasure at wrong, and to act in order to do something about it.' 

David Powlison, Good & Angry, p.41. 

THE SIMPLICITY OF ANGER

'At its core anger is very simple. It expresses "I'm against that."' 

David Powlison, Good & Angry: Redeeming Anger, Irritation, Complaining, and Bitterness, p.39. 

PROOF OF LOVE

'There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognised.'

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p.80.  

WE NO LONGER POSTPONE ANY DESIRES

'According to Freud, the full and uninhibited satisfaction of all instinctual desires would create mental health and happiness. But the obvious clinical facts demonstrate that men - and women - who devote their lives to unrestricted sexual satisfaction do not attain happiness, and very often suffer from severe neurotic conflicts or symptoms. The complete satisfaction of all instinctual needs is not only not a basis for happiness, it does not even guarantee sanity. Yet Freud's idea could only have become popular in the period after the First World War because of the changes which had occurred in the spirit of capitalism, from the emphasis on saving to that on spending, from self-frustration as a means for economic success to consumption as the basis for an ever-widening market, and as the main satisfaction for the anxious, automatised individual. Not to postpone the satisfaction of any desire became the main tendency in the sphere of sex as well as in that of all material consumption.'   

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 72. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF THINKING WELL OF GOD

'...retain good thoughts of God, take heed of judging God to be a hard master, make good interpretations of his ways, and that is a special means to help you to contentment in all one's course.'  

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.225. 

DROWNING SUFFERING

'The sea of God's mercies should swallow up all our particular affections.'
Martin Luther in Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p.209.