LIFE

'We live the given life, and not the planned.'
Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p.178.

I SHALL NOT WANT

'All shall work together for good: everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.194.

EDEN RESTORED

'When a human being, by the power of God’s grace, expresses a desire that is rooted not in his own selfishness (‘My will’) but rather in God’s plan for creation (‘Thy will’), such a posture reverses the bias of the Fall in that individual’s own life and re-establishes a little piece of Eden, through him or her, on earth.’

Pete Grieg, God on Mute, p.162.

WHAT HISTORY TEACHES US

'First, whom the gods would destroy they must first make mad with power. Second, the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small. Third, the bee fertilizes the flower it robs. Fourth, when it is dark enough you can see the stars.'

Charles A Beard in Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore', p.86.

WHERE OUR ULTIMATE LOYALTY LIES

'Living in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity. As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality - God and his kingdom of love - to which we must be conformed.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'Transformed Nonconformist' in The Gift of Love, p.12.

WHERE OUR TRUE VALUE COMES FROM

'Long before any human being saw us, we are seen by God's loving eyes. Long before anyone heard us cry or laugh, we are heard by God who is all ears for us. Long before any person spoke to us in this world, we are spoken to by the voice of eternal life. Our preciousness , uniqueness and individuality are not given to us by those who meet us in clock-time - our brief chronological existence - but by the One who has chosen us with an everlasting love, a love that existed from all eternity and will last through all eternity.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.37.

GOD'S SOVERIGNTY OVER SUFFERING

'...he told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. And then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all their dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of their desert journey and how they were almost at their goal whenever lion chased them and wounded Aravis. And also, how very long it was since he had had anything to eat.

"I do not call you unfortunate," said the Large Voice.

"Don't you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?"

"There was only one lion," said the Voice.

"What on earth do you mean? I've just told you there were at least two the first night, and -"

"There was only one: but he was swift of foot."

"How do you know?"

"I was the lion." And as Shasta gasped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. "I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.'"

CS Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, p.129.

SINGLENESS & SOVEREIGNTY

'I want to suggest that our cultural attachment to ideas of "choice" can make it harder for us to see how God is working in the unchosen circumstances of our lives. When Christians argue that the only good celibacy is "voluntary" celibacy rather than mandated celibacy, they gloss over the degree to which all our choices are constrained by the interaction of circumstances and conviction.'

Eve Tushnet, Tenderness, p.48.

THE LIMITS OF HUMAN FRIENDSHIP, THE INFALLIBILITY OF CHRIST'S FRIENDSHIP

'A man may love another as his own soul, yet perhaps with all that love he can do nothing to help his friend. He may pity someone in prison, but be helpless to bring him any comfort. We may suffer with someone in trouble, and yet be unable to help. We cannot love grace into a child, nor mercy into a friend. We cannot love anyone into heaven though we may greatly desire to do so. But the love of Christ, being the love of God, is infallibly effectual. It produces all the good things Christ desires to produce in his people. Christ loves life, grace and holiness into us. He loves us also into a covenant of love with himself. Christ loves us into heaven. Love in Christ is his will to do good to the one he loves. Whatever good Christ by his love wills to do to anyone is infallibly done to that person.'

John Owen, Communion with God, p.72.

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.

WHY THE REFORMERS STRESSED PREDESTINATION

'The reason that all the Reformers foregrounded predestination in the way that they do is because they're arguing against the idea, prevalent then, that the church had the means of salvation - that if you do thus and so, you will be saved. The Reformers believed that the church had put a certain ritualized idea of salvation in the place of God. And to move people back toward the idea of omnipotence, divine omnipotence, the Reformers sought to end what they saw as perhaps a corrupt cycle of spending money, doing things that were intended as acts which would insure your salvation. And so, the doctrine of predestination really is a way of making the argument that it is God that determines these issues and not any human institution.' 

Marilynne Robinson in Timothy Larsen and Keith L Johnson, Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, p.210.

WE NEED A MYSTERIOUS GOD

'About God, how could he give up his secrets and
still be God?'
Mary Oliver, from 'A Little Ado About This and That' in Blue Horses, p.69. 

GOD'S SOVEREIGNTY OVER SIN

'We trust that the God who specializes in bringing good out of evil will make something beautiful out of our efforts to love God and our neighbors in creation. Indeed, God often brings good out of our failures, and even our sins. For in the aftermath, we sometimes learn humility, and faith, and other vital lessons we would learn no other way.' 

John G Stackhouse Jr., Why You're Here, p.179. 

WHAT GOD CAN DO WITH SIN

'A doctrine of sin requires us to acknowledge that our perceptions are faulty - and a doctrine of providence requires us to acknowledge that in the face of sin, God will bring about goods that otherwise would never have existed.' 

Lauren F Winner, The Dangers of Christian Practice, p.9. 

GOD & SUFFERING

'Somehow, in a way we are inclined to find offensive, God has to get his boots muddy and, it seems, to get his hands bloody, to put the world back to rights. If we declare, as so many have done, that we would rather it not be so, we face a counter question: Which bit of dry, clean ground are we standing on that we should pronounce on the matter with such certainty?' 

Tom Wright in J Todd Billings, Rejoicing in Lament, p.87. 

WHERE FEAR DRIVES US

'"We all live in the hands of God."

"I tell myself that every time I'm really frightened. Unfortunately that's the only time I do think it."' 

William Maxwell, 'The French Scarecrow' in Over By the River and other stories, p.122. 

THE CALVINIST BELIEF IN THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

'This apparent fatalism is actually confidence that life is shaped by divine intention, which will express itself in ways that can be baffling or alarming but that always bring an insight, pose a question, or make a demand, to the benefit of those who are alert to the will of God.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.100. 

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

'...we can wrongly interpret unintended effects as once-conscious aims - as though Luther, when he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg castle, envisioned Protestantism. It is like the man who unwittingly cracks a joke and then takes credit for it, misleading others into thinking him clever. We repeatedly credit famous names with too much power, as if some of them actually intended the consequences of their deeds and so truly held the reins of history. But none did; and those presumptuous enough to think themselves exceptions have only been like the hard-hearted Pharaoh of the Exodus, who decisions were not his own ("God hardened Pharaoh's heart").'.

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk: Finding God in the Deep, Still Places, p.30

TEMPTATION

'Some people undergo their heaviest temptations at the beginning of their conversion; some towards the end of their course; others are greatly troubled all their lives; while there are some whose temptations are but light. This is in accordance with the wisdom and justice of God's ordinance, who weighs the condition and merits of every man, and disposes all things for the salvation of those whom He chooses.' 

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, p.41. 

THE LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE WHEN SPEAKING OF GOD

'We have got so beyond those things for which language was initially contrived, that, unless we use extreme caution, we cannot speak, unless we speak exceeding unintelligibly, without literally contradicting ourselves - Coroll. No wonder therefore, that the high and abstract mysteries of the Deity, the prime and most abstract of all beings, imply so many seeming contradictions.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.89.