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. 

MIRACLES & BELIEF

'Miracles don't make people believe!...It's the belief that is the miracle.'

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower, p.84.

THE NEWNESS OF FACTS

'...facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.'

Alasdair MacIntyre in Alister E McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly: Journeys through Science, Faith & Doubt, p.158.

FAITH OR WORKS?

'Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious moral effort is the only thing will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing that can save you from despair at this point: and out of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.148.

FAITH DEFINED

'Faith...is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.140.

DON'T BE SCARED OF AUTHORITY

'Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority.'

CS Lewis, Mere Orthodoxy, p.62.

BELIEVE GOD LOVES YOU!

'The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you.'

John Owen, Communion with God, p.17.

FAITH & WORKS

'Faith is not opposed to knowledge. It is opposed to sight. And grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning.'

Dallas Willard, Hearing God, p.188.

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.

THE TELESCOPE OF FAITH

'When you have a telescope, you can look through the wrong end (which makes everything look much further away than it is). Or you can look through the right end, and the distance is compressed for a moment. Too many of us have the telescope of faith turned the wrong way round, and Christ looks further away. Too many of us are so fixated on this life, particularly on what's not going well for us, with life's disappointments. The telescope is turned the other way, and heaven just seems further away even than it does without it. 

Song 5:1 makes us turn the telescope the right way around. Christ invites us to look at that day through the lens of this text and make it more real, more immediate. This text is intended to offer healing for our greyness and grumpiness. As we struggle in this life, we look through the telescope and we see the wedding feast, the perfect world and the glory that will be ours for all eternity. We see that we have not missed out on anything that matters because we are heading into the centre of the universe of all history to which marriage and sexuality point - and to which all singleness and unexpressed sexuality points to - the final climax of intimacy that will be ours in Christ.'

Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.104. 

PSALM 23

'...only a few months before I had copied the last verse of the psalm into a notebook: 'But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.' It had occurred to me how often the the authors of scripture depict God as a house or shelter in which one might dwell, as if faith were itself a home, affording all the protection, comfort, stediness and sense of belonging that home implies - as if the need for God were homesickness in paraphrase.' 

William Fiennes, The Snow Geese, p.104. 

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.

WHY FAITH NEEDS IMAGINATION

'...faith is a form of imagination, because to have faith means that is one is living as though it is true that Jesus is Lord, that salvation has been won and that the kingdom is both present and future. Faith is not merely a form of assent to certain doctrines; it is much more a form of trusting, or actually living in, a new reality that God has amde. There is a sense in which faith is a form of make-believe; it means living as though everything that God says is true and has come about. In worship one acts as if it were true, but with the belief that it really is so. Imagination is central to faith and a playful attitude lies at the heart of worship, and it is these capacities that enable the believer to transcend the immediate world and experience the new. Play and imagination are central to religious experience.' 

Brian Edgar, The God Who Plays, p.36. 

CHILD-LIKE FAITH

'...within the child-self that is part of us all, there is perhaps nothing more precious than the fathomless capacity to trust.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'All's Lost - All's Found' in A Room Called Remember, p.190. 

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. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF INTUITION

'...the criticism of religion that derides its central intuition as a projection of human fears and desires onto a universe that is alien to such things is itself a projection of human influences, deductions, and expectations onto a universe that is wholly incommensurate with them.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.220. 

FAITH NEEDS IMAGINATION

'Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, and its eye is the religious imagination.' 

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.85. 

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH NOT WORKS

'The reason we can speak of justification/ rectification by faith, not by works, is that faith is not a work.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.331.

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. 

TRUE FAITH

'As far back as I can remember, I had the habit of thanking God for everything I received, and asking him for everything I wanted. If I lost a book, or any of my playthings, I prayed that I might find it. I prayed walking along the streets, in school and out of school, whether playing or studying. I did this not in obedience to any prescribed rule. It seemed natural. I thought of God as an everywhere-present Being, full of kindness and love, who would not be offended if children talked to him.' 

Charles Hodge in Dale Ralph Davis, Slogging Along in the Paths of Righteousness: Psalms 13-24, p. 62.