WHAT GOD DESIRES

'God's desire for us is that we should live in him.'
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p.18.

THE GOOD TEMPTATION BRINGS IN GOD'S GOODNESS

'Though it is to the eternal damage of the saints, when they yield to, and are overcome by temptations, yet Satan and other enemies of the saints by whom these temptations come, are always wholly disappointed in their temptations, and baffled in their design to hurt the saints, inasmuch as the temptations and the sin that comes by it, is for the saints' good, and they receive a greater benefit in the issues, than if the temptation had not been, and yet less than if the temptation had been overcome.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Dane C Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, p.152.

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. 

AVOID THIS MISTAKE WHEN SUFFERING

'The only serious mistake we can make when illness comes, when anxiety threatens, when conflict disturbs our relationships with others is to conclude that God has gotten bored looking after us and has shifted his attention to a more exciting Christian, or that God has become disgusted with our meandering obedience and decided to let us fend for ourselves for a while, or that God has gotten too busy fulfilling prophecy in the Middle Easr to take time now to sort out the complicated mess we have gotten ourselves into. That is the only serious mistake we can make.' 

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.37. 

SIN

'Sin always begins with character assassination of God.'
Timothy J Keller, The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God's Mercy,  p.138. 

JUSTIFICATION

'...when we say that God will "justify" rather than merely "acquit," the action has a reconstituting force - hence the insufficiency of the courtroom metaphor "to acquit," God's righteousness is the same thing as his justice, and his justice is powerfully at work justifying, which does not mean excusing, passing over, or even "forgiving and forgetting," but actively making right that which is wrong.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.329. 

A GOD WHO CREATES VENOM

'Whatever else may be true, God has created venom, and we must not scruple to say it. If we have any conception of goodness that forbids this kind of possibility in God, then our God plainly enough does not exists, or the God that does exists is not He...And we need not scruple to confess a degree of satisfaction in this kind of discovery, showing that goodness is no such innocent, mawkishly insipid character, not such mollusc softness swimming in God's bosom as may affect to suppose...' 

Horace Bushell in Belden C Lane, Ravished by Beauty, p.231. 

ALL CREATURES GREAT & SMALL

'Every creature is a line leading to God.' 

Benjamin Whichcote in Belden C Lane, Ravished by Beauty, p.104. 

GOD'S GOODNESS

'God is a delicious good. That which is the chief good must ravish the soul with pleasure: there must be in it rapturous delight and quintessence of joy.' 

Thomas Watson in Belden C Lane, Ravished by Beauty, p.99. 

PRAISE GOD FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW

'When we taste things that are delicately sweet, let us say to ourselves, O how sweet is that God from whom all these creatures have received their sweetness.' 

Lewis Bayly in Belden C Lane, Ravished by Beauty, p.98. 

OUR RELATIONAL GOD

'One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself - creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.'

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, p.46.

GOD'S GOODNESS

'We will never have the easy, unhesitating love of God that makes obedience to Jesus our natural response unless we are absolutely sure that its is good for us to be, and to be who we are. This means we must have no doubt that the path appointed for us by when and where and to whom we were born is good, and that nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us on our way to our destiny in God's full world.' 

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p.370. 

PATIENCE

'...nothing can be more precise, certain and punctual than is the performance of mercy at the time and season which God has appointed, however long it is, or however many obstacles lie in the way of it.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.190. 

GOD'S GOODNESS

'Compare the behaviour of Providence towards you, with your own behaviour towards the Lord; and it must needs melt your hearts to find so much mercy bestowed where so much sin has been committed. What place did you ever live in, where you cannot remember great provocation committed, and notwithstanding that, manifold mercies received? O with how many notwithstandings and neverthelesses has the Lord done you good in every place! What relationship has not been abused by sin, and yet both raised up and continued by Providence for your comfort! In every place God has left the marks of His goodness, and you the remembrances of your sinfulness. Give yourselves but leave to think of these things, and it will be strange if your hearts do not melt at the remembrance of them.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.166. 

GOD'S GOODNESS

'Other men pursue good, and it flies from them, they can never overtake it; but goodness and mercy follow the people of God, and they cannot avoid or escape it. It gives them the chase day by day, and finds them out even when they sometimes put themselves by sin out of the way of it. In all the providences that befall them goodness and mercy pursue them.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.150. 

SUFFERING

'Eye the wisdom of God in all your afflictions. Behold it in the choice of the kind of your affliction, this, and not another; the time, now and not at another season; the degree, in this measure only, and not in the greater; the supports offered you under it, not left together helpless; the issue to which it is overruled, it is to your good, not ruin. Look upon these and then ask your heart, that question God asked Jonah, "Doest thou well to be angry?" (4.9). Surely, when you consider all - what need you had of these rods, that your corruptions will require all this, it may be much more, to mortify them; that without the perishing of these things you might have perished for ever - you will see great reason to be quiet and well-satisfied under the hand of God.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.131. 

GOD'S GOODNESS

'Ah, sirs, let me tell you, there is not such a pleasant history for you to read in all the world as the history of our lives, if you would but sit down and record from the beginning hitherto what God has been to you, and done for you; what signal manifestations and outbreakings of His mercy, faithfulness and love there have been in all the conditions you have passed through. If your hearts do not melt before you have gone half through that history, they are hard hearts indeed.' 

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p.118. 

SIN

'...when every sin is seen as the same, we are less likely to fight any sins at all. Why should I stop sleeping with my girlfriend whne there will still be lust in my heart? Why pursue holiness when even one sin in my life means that I'm Osama bin Hitler in God's eyes? Again, it seems humble to act as if no sin is worse than another, but we lose the impetus for striving and the ability to hold each other accountable when we tumble down the slip-n-slide of moral equivalence. All of a sudden the elder who battles the temptation to take a second look at the racy section of the Lands' End catalog shouldn't dare exercise church discipline on the young man fornicating with reckless abandon. When we can no longer see the different graduations among sins and sinner and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness. If our own legal system does not treat all infractions in the same way, surely God knows that some sins are more heinous than others. If we can spot the difference, we'll be especially eager to put to death those sins which are most offensive to God.'  

Kevin DeYoung, The Hole in Our Holiness, p.72.

PLEASING GOD

'Why do we imagine God to be so unmoved by our heart-felt attempts at obedience? He is, after all, our heavenly Father. What sort of father looks at his daughter's homemade birthday card and complains that the color scheme is all wrong? What kind of mother says to her son, after he gladly cleaned the garage but put the paint cans on the wrong shelf, "This is worthless in my sight"? What sort of parent rolls his eyes when his child falls off the bike on the first try? There is no righteousness that makes us right with God except for the righteousness of Chriost. But for those who have been made right with God by grace alone through faith alone and therefore have been adopted into God's family, many of our righteous deeds are not only not filthy in God's eyes, they are exceedingly sweet, precious, and pleasing to him.'

Kevin DeYoung, The Hole in Our Holiness, p.70.

GOD'S GOODNESS

'Just as stargazer cleans and calibrates a telepscope before looking at the sky, the person seeking to know truth must begin with self-knowledge. The same distortions that affect our view of ourselves and of our world also affects our view of God. I doubt God's goodness because I know that I and those around me are not completely good. I suspect God might enjoy making me squirm because I am capable of enjoying the same kind of power. I suspect that God is distant and unaffected by my pain because I have experienced that from others. Until I become familiar with the distortions of my own perceptions, I cannot even hope to understand God.'

Michael Mangis, Signature Sins, p.22.