HOPELESS? HOPEFUL PRAYER

His prayers lean upward
on the dark and fall
like flares from a catastrophe.
He is a man breathing the fear
of hopeless prayer, prayed
in hope.

Wendell Berry, from '1994 VI' in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p.181. 

THE REALISM OF CHRISTIANITY

'Christianity does not merely offer a new way of beholding our world, but an enhanced capacity to live within that world and cope with its uncertainty and complexity, as well as our own frailty and failings. It enables us to confront glib and shallow accounts of our situation, such as the superficial rationalism of the Enlightenment or the facile optimism of an ideology of 'positive thinking', which seeks to exorcise any recognition of the darker and more disturbing aspects of human nature or creation. Reality is complex and ambivalent; wisdom demands that we recognise this, rather than crudely forcing it to be uniformly simple and positive. Intellectual violence is unable to suppress this darker truth about our world, which Christianity has afformed and confronted, rather than implausibly denied.'

Alister McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly, p.207.

FROM FEAR TO FAITH

'...the life of a Christian is lived in the tension between "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."'
Fleming Rutledge, Three Hours, p77.

WHY LOVE NEEDS COMMITMENT

'A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.' 

David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, p.xviii.

WE'RE TO BE CYNICAL - OF OURSELVES

'...the reality of God is measured by the truthfulness of his speech, not by my grasp of his presence. Under the sun sometimes everything is mixed up and back to front that actually we are meant to learn that God intends for us to be suspicious of ourselves - suspicious of why we doubt him and why cannot find him, suspicious of the deceptions our our own hearts - but nevertheless trusting the truth of his Word with every fibre of our being, even when we cannot see him.' 

David Gibson, Destiny, p.79. 

FAITH IS WAITING

'Faith is a way of waiting - never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost. There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the heels of every hope, and many holy thing lie in ruins because the world has ruined them and we have ruined them. But faith waits even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing worth waiting through. Faith waits - for the opening of a door, the sound of footsteps in the hall, that beloved voice delayed, delayed, so long that there are times when you all but give up hoping of ever hearing it. And when at moments you think you do hear it (if only faintly, from far away) the question is: Can it possibly be, impossibly be, the one voice of all voices.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'Delay' in A Room Called Remember, p.130. 

DIFFERENT TYPES OF DOUBT

'...the Bible's view of doubt is wonderfully nuanced. In many circles, skepticism and doubt are considered an absolute, unmitigated good. On the other hand, in a lot of conservative and traditional religious circles, any and all questioning or doubting is thought to be bad. If you are in a church youth group and you have questions about the Bible, the youth leader may mark at you, "You shouldn't doubt! You have to have faith." 

What you have in the Bible is neither view. There is a kind of doubt that is the sign of a closed mind, and there is a kind of doubt that is the sign of an open mind. Some doubt seeks answers, and some doubt is a defense against the possibility of answers. There are people like Mary who are open to the truth and are willing to relinquish sovereignty over their lives if they can be shown that the truth is other than they thought. And there are those like Zechariah who use doubts as a way of staying in control of their lives and keeping their minds closed. What kind of doubt do you have?'

Timothy Keller. Hidden Christmas, p.83.  

UNBELIEF DEFINED

'...unbelief is not a lack of faith or trust. It is the refusal to believe God. It leads inevitably to a turning away from God in a deliberate act of rejection.' 

William L Lane, Hebrews 1-8, p.86. 

THE ABSENCE OF GOD

'It is no accident that the first time the question "Where are you?" appears in the Bible, it was not from people looking from God, but from God, looking for his people.' 

Krish Kandiah, Paradoxology, p.58. 

THE ABSENCE OF GOD

'Paradoxically, even God himself experienced the absence of God - Jesus, the Son of God himself, cried in despair from the cross: "My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?"'

Krish Kandiah, Paradoxology, p.37. 

AN UNDECIDED HEART

The Contrite Heart

Isaiah, lvii, 15

The Lord will happiness divine
On contrite hearts bestow:
Then tell me, gracious GOD, is mine
A contrite heart, or no?

I hear, but seem to hear in vain,
Insensible as steel;
If aught is felt, 'tis only pain,
To find I cannot feel.

I sometimes think myself inclin'd
To love thee, if I could;
But often feel another mind,
Averse to all that's good.

My best desires are faint and few,
I fain would strive for more;
But when I cry "My strength renew,"
Seem weaker than before.

They saints are comforted I know,
And love thy house of pray'r;
I therefore go where others go,
But find no comfort there.

O make this heart rejoice, or ache;
Decide this doubt for me;
And if it be not broken, break,
And heal it, if it be.

William Cowper, Verse and Letters, p.147. 

OUR FAILURE IN DISCIPLESHIP

'It is these half-conscious fears, this dread of insecurity, rather than any deliberate refusal to face the cost of following Christ, which make us hold back. We feel that the risks of out-and-out discipleship are too great for us to take. In other words we are not persuaded of the adequacy of God to provide for the needs of all those who launch out whole-heartedly on to the deep sea of unconventional living in obedience to the call of Christ. Therefore, we feel obliged to break the first commandment just a little, by withdrawing a certain amount of our time and energy from serving God in order to serve mammon. This, at bottom, seems to be what is wrong with us. We are afraid to go all the way in accepting the authority of God, because of our secret uncertainty as to his adequacy to look after us if we do. 

Now let us call a spade a spade. The name of the game we are playing is unbelief...'

JI Packer, Knowing God, p.307.

THE INCARNATION

'It is from misbelief, or at least inadequate belief , about the incarnation that difficulties at other points in the gospel story usually spring. But once the incarnation is grasped as a reality, these other difficulties dissolve.' 

JI Packer, Knowing God, p.58. 

DOUBT

'I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubt and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.' 

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p.204. 

DOUBT

'When I ask myself how I know I believe, I have no satisfactory answer at all, no assurance at all, no feeling at all. I can only say with Peter, Lord I believe, help my unbelief. And all I can say about my love of God is, Lord help my lack of it.'

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O'Connor (Edited by Sally Fitzgerald), p.93. 

DOUBT

'I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.'

Flannery O'Connor in Richard Giannone, Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire, p.12.

DOUBT

'Look at him who is ever looking at you. With whatever faith you have, however feeble and flickering and mixed with doubt, look at him. Look at hime whatever faith you have and know that your worry about your lack of faith is itself a sign of faith. Do not look at your faith. Look at him. Keep looking, and faith will take care of itself.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.41.  

FAITH

'Jesus does not reject any who turn to him. At times we turn to him with little faith, at times with a mix of faith and doubt when we are more sure of the doubt than of the faith. Jesus is not fastidious about the quality of faith. He takes what he can get, so to speak, and gives immeasurably more than he receives. He takes our faith more seriously than we do and makes of it more than we ever could. His reposnse to our faith is greater than our faith.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.38.

FAITH

'...the opposite of faith is not doubt but self reliance.'

Michael S Beates, Disability & The Gospel, p. 71.

DOUBT

'Picture a small boy frustrated with a jigsaw puzzle because he is certain that the pieces do not fit the picture on the box. We are like this when we doubt. Each doubt makes us feel that this time we have found a real problem with God. But shake the pieces up a little, rearrange the one or two that we have put in the wrong place and everything changes. It is not the fault of the puzzle or the picture but the boy.

It is the same with our doubts. What we begin by calling God's problem ends up being seen as our problem that God solves.'

Os Guiness, God in the Dark, p.215.