TIME

'...let this encourage your heart: The God who calls us to live in time lives outside of time. We feel the burdens of deadlines but he never does. We grow impatient, while he knows nothing of that weakness.'

Randy Newman. Bringing the Gospel Home, p.155.

EVANGELISM

'...we sometimes present our gospel-masterpiece in a context that belies our message. We speak of measureless love, unmerited grace, and infinite goodness but our tone of voice, demeanour, and lifestyles convey the exact opposite. We want people to quiet their hearts so that they can hear the music of the gospel, but we're performing in a context of judgementalism. We want them to feel loved by God, but they feel unloved by us. We want them to be amazed by grace, but they can't get past the smell of condemnation.'

Randy Newman, Bringing the Gospel, p.129.   

HOME

'Home may be "where the heart is," but it's also where we let the darkness of those hearts display themselves for all to see.'

Randy Newman, Bringing the Gospel Home, p.60.

GRACE

'Grace is a scandal, an outrage. When grace no longer confounds, it no longer transforms.'

Randy Newman, Bringing the Gospel Home, p.60.

EVANGELISM

'Once we realize that evangelism occurs in the realm of the miraculous, we start praying more faithfully, trusting more wholeheartedly, and proclaiming more gently. When we relinquish trust in our ability to persuade and latch onto God's power to save, we find hope beyond explanation.'

Randy Newman, Bringing the Gospel Home: Sharing your faith with family and friends, p.14.

MARRIAGE

'Consider this: two friends met after a long separation. After greetings and pleasentries, one asked the other how his wife was.

"She's fine, I guess. we got divorced a year ago."

"Oh," the surprised friend responded. "I'm sorry to hear that. What happened?"

"I guess you could chalk it up to irreconciliable differences," the divorced man explained.

A long pause added awkwardness to the moment as the inquiring friend puzzled over the phrase, one that he'd apparently never heard. He broke the silence with, "Irreconciliable differences? I thought that was the whole point of marriage!"'

Randy Newman, Questioning Evangelism: Engaging People's Hearts the Way Jesus Did, p.174.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

'Consider...what the Bible does teach us about the problem of evil. It gives us slivers of a pie chart. One tiny sliver (and I'm convinced that it's no more than that) would be labeled, "We live in a fallen world." Another sliver would say, "There is a devil." Other tiny slivers would be labeled, "People have free will," "Sin has consequences," "Sometimes God disciplines his people," or "Good can come out of suffering."

Perhaps there are more slivers. I tire of even writing them because they offer so little consolation. The vast majority of the pie chart (a good 75 per cent if you could quantify such things) would be labeled in bold, bright letters, "WE DON'T KNOW."

However we choose to word our answer, we must not imply that one of the slivers in the whole pie. Our "answer" must sound and feel like it's 25 per cent sliver, 75 per cent "I don't know." If our words have no Job-like angst, we'll sound more like Job's friends and receive a similar response.'

Randy Newman, Questioning Evangelism: Engaging People's Hearts the Way Jesus Did, p.110.