There is a cowardice
in this age which is not Christian. We shrink from the consequences of
truth. We look round and cling dependently. We ask what men will think;
what others will say; whether they will not stare in astonishment. Perhaps
they will; but he who is calculating that, will accomplish nothing in this
life. The Father -- the Father which is with us and in us -- what does
He think? God's work cannot be done without a spirit of independence. A
man is got some way in the Christian life when he has learned to say, humbly
yet majestically, "I dare to be alone."
... Forbes
W. Robertson
The church has
severely under-estimated the fundamental antagonism between Christianity
and contemporary neo-pagan values.
... Max
Champion, "The Religious Crisis of
Western Civilisation"
Only when a man
tries to live the divine life can the divine Christ manifest Himself to
him. Therefore, the true way for you to find Christ is not to go groping
in a thousand books. It is not for you to try evidences about a thousand
things that people have believed of Him, but it is for you to undertake
so great a life, so devoted a life, so pure a life, so serviceable a life,
that you cannot do it except by Christ, and then see whether Christ helps
you. See then whether there comes to you the certainty that you are a child
of God, and the manifestation of the child of God becomes the most credible,
the most certain thing to you in all of history.
... Phillips
Brooks, The Law of Growth
I love poverty
because He loved it. I love riches because they afford me the means of
helping the very poor. I keep faith with everybody; I do not render evil
to those who wrong me, but I wish them a situation like mine, in which
I receive neither good nor evil from men. I try to be just, true, sincere,
and faithful to all men; I have a tender heart for those to whom God has
more closely united me; and whether I am alone, or seen by people, I do
all my actions in the sight of God, who must judge them, and to whom I
have consecrated them all. These are my sentiments; and every day of my
life, I bless my Redeemer, who has implanted them in me, and who, out of
a man full of weakness, of miseries, of lust, of pride, and of ambition,
has made a man free from all these evils by the power of His grace, to
which all the glory of it is due, as of myself I have only misery and error.
... Blaise
Pascal, Pensées
Pardon comes not
to the soul alone; or rather, Christ comes not to the soul with pardon
only! It is that which He opens the door and enters by, but He comes with
a Spirit of life and power.
... John
Owen
Those who charged
the Christians with burning down Rome with fire brands were slanderers
-- but they were, at least, far nearer to the nature of Christianity than
those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of
ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they
had a duty to their neighbours, and only mildly disliked because they were
meek and mild!
... G.
K. Chesterton, The Everlasting
Man
One of Paul's most
important teachings... is the doctrine of what we call "justification by
faith". It frequently appears to the non-Christian mind that this is an
immoral or at least unmoral doctrine. Paul appears to be saying that a
man is justified before God, not by his goodness or badness, not by his
good deeds or bad deeds, but by believing in a certain doctrine of Atonement.
Of course, when we come to examine the matter more closely, we can see
that there is nothing unmoral in this teaching at all. For if "faith" means
using a God-given faculty to apprehend the unseen divine order, and means,
moreover, involving oneself in that order by personal commitment, we can
at once see how different that is from merely accepting a certain view
of Christian redemption... That which man in every religion, every century,
every country, was powerless to affect, God has achieved by the devastating
humility of His action and suffering in Jesus Christ. Now, accepting such
an action as a fait accompli is only possible by this perceptive
faculty of "faith". It requires not merely intellectual assent but a shifting
of personal trust from the achievements of the self to the completely undeserved
action of God. To accept this teaching by mind and heart does, indeed,
require a metanoia ["transformation"], a revolution in the outlook
of both heart and mind.
... J.
B. Phillips, New Testament Christianity
Some misapprehension,
I say, some obliquity, or some slavish adherence to old prejudices, may
thus cause us to refuse the true interpretation, but we are none the less
bound to refuse and wait for more light. To accept that as the will of
our Lord which to us is inconsistent with what we learned to worship in
Him already, is to introduce discord into that harmony whose end is to
unite our hearts, and make them whole. "Is it for us," says the objector
who, by some sleight of will, believes in the word apart from the meaning
for which it stands, "to judge the character of our Lord?" I answer, "This
very thing He requires of us." He requires of us that we should do Him
no injustice. He would come and dwell with us, if we would but open our
chambers to receive Him. How shall we receive Him is, avoiding judgement,
we hold this or that daub of authority or tradition hanging upon our walls
to be the real likeness of our Lord?
... George
Macdonald, "It Shall Not Be Forgiven"
A life devoted
unto God, looking wholly unto Him in all our actions, and doing all things
suitably to His glory, is so far from being dull and uncomfortable, that
it creates new comforts in everything that we do.
... William
Law
As the great test
of medical practice is that it heals the patient, so the great test of
preaching is that it converts and builds up the hearers.
... Herman
L. Wayland
He has great tranquillity
of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.
He will easily be content and pacified, whose conscience is pure. You are
not holier if you are praised, nor the more worthless if you are found
fault with. What you are, that you are; neither by word can you be made
greater than what you are in the sight of God.
Thomas
à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ
[With thanks to Roger
E. Doriot]
Were Christians
duly instructed how many lesser differences in mind and judgment and practice
are really consistent with the nature, ends, and genuine fruit of the unity
that Christ requires among them, it would undoubtedly prevail with them
so as to manage themselves in their differences by mutual forbearance and
condescension in their love, as not to contract the guilt of being disturbers
or breakers of it. To speak plainly, among all the churches in the world
which are free from idolatry and persecution, it is not different opinions,
nor a difference in judgment about revealed truths, nor a different practice
in sacred administrations, but pride, self-interest, love of honour, reputation,
and dominion, with the influence of civil or political intrigues and considerations,
that are the true cause of that defect of evangelical unity that is at
this day amongst them.
... John
Owen, A Discourse Concerning Evangelical
Love
Humiliation is
the beginning of sanctification; and as without this, without holiness,
no man shall see God, though he pore whole nights upon his Bible; so without
that, without humility, no man shall hear God speak to his soul, though
he hear three two-hour sermons every day.
... John
Donne
I will tell you
what to hate: hate hypocrisy, hate cant, hate intolerance, oppression,
injustice; hate pharisaism. Hate them as Christ hated them, with a deep,
living, godlike hatred.
... F.
W. Robertson
The fortitude of
a Christian consists in patience, not in enterprises which the poets call
heroic, and which are commonly the effects of interest, pride, and worldly
honor.
... John
Dryden
Perfection does
not consist in the knowledge of God's order, but in submission to it. The
order of God, the good pleasure of God, the will of God, the action of
God, grace -- all these are one and the same thing in this life. Perfection
is nothing else than the faithful cooperation of the soul with the work
of God. This ultimate purpose of our life grows and increases in our souls
secretly and without our knowledge.
... J.
P. de Caussade, Abandonment
Prodigal sons,
forgiven and reconciled with their heavenly Father, could they do other
than forgive one another? A fellowship of prodigal sons came into being
-- the church of Christ. Love begets love. A new power ... was let loose
upon our suffering world, the power to love those who have not deserved
love, the unworthy, the unlovely and unlovable, a man's enemies, and even
his torturers. Christians, in imitation of the Saviour, became, as it were,
Christs to one another and to the world.
... Theodore
O. Wedel
Jeremiah refutes
the popular, modern notion that the end of religion is an integrated personality,
freed of its fears, its doubts, and its frustrations. Certainly Jeremiah
was no integrated personality. It is doubtful if... he ever knew the meaning
of the word "peace". We have no evidence that his internal struggle was
ever ended, although the passing years no doubt brought an increasing acceptance
of destiny. Jeremiah, if his "confessions" are any index, needed a course
in pastoral psychiatry in the very worst way... The feeling cannot be escaped
that if Jeremiah had been integrated, it would have been at the cost of
ceasing to be Jeremiah! A man at peace simply could not be a Jeremiah.
Spiritual health is good; mental assurance is good; but the summons of
faith is neither to an integrated personality nor to the laying-by of all
questions, but to the dedication of personality -- with all its fears and
questions -- to its duty and destiny under God.
... John
Bright, The Kingdom of God
It is common to
hear churchmen speak as though they did not really regard Christian unity
as a serious question this side of the End. This is a disastrous illusion.
Christians cannot behave as though time were unreal. God gives us time,
but not an infinite amount of time. It is His purpose that the Gospel should
be preached to all nations, and that all men should be brought into one
family in Jesus Christ. His purpose looks to a real End, and therefore
requires of us real decisions. If we misconstrue His patience, and think
that there is an infinity of time for debate while we perpetuate before
the world the scandal of our dismemberment of the Body of Christ, we deceive
ourselves. In an issue regarding the doing of the will of God there is
no final neutrality.
... Lesslie
Newbigin, The Reunion of the Church
Christ did not
enchant men; He demanded that they believe in Him: except on one occasion,
the Transfiguration. For a brief while, Peter, James, and John were permitted
to see Him in His glory. For that brief while they had no need of faith.
The vision vanished, and the memory of it did not prevent them from all
forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever
known Him.
... W.
H. Auden, A Certain World
Newton, Pascal,
Bossuet, Racine, Fénelon -- that is to say, some of the most enlightened
men on earth, in the most philosophical of all ages -- have been believers
in Jesus Christ; and the great Condé, when dying, repeated these
noble words, "Yes, I shall see God as He is, face to face!"
... Vauvenargues
The secular university
is scandalized by the claims of revelation. Those who have, for whatever
historical reasons, become seekers-on-principle, cannot tolerate the allegation
that truth is a gift. To have to receive offends those who have determined
to take.
... Louis
Mackey
There can be no
end without means; and God furnishes no means that exempt us from the task
and duty of joining our own best endeavors. The original stock, or wild
olive tree, of our natural powers, was not given to us to be burnt or blighted,
but to be grafted on.
... Samuel
T. Coleridge
After a trip to
Mexico [in 1984]... I fell ill... The illness was protracted... I suffered
a mild depression... When [an episcopal priest] prayed for my recovery,
I choked up and wept. The only prayer I knew word for word was the Pater
Noster. On that day and in the days after it, I found myself repeating
the Lord's Prayer, again and again, and meaning every word of it. Quite
suddenly, when I was awake one night, a light dawned on me, and I realized
what had happened... After many years of affirming God's existence and
trying to give adequate reasons for that affirmation, I found myself believing
in God.
... Mortimer
Adler, quoted in Philosophers Who Believe, Kelly James Clark, ed.
[With thanks to Rowland
Croucher director of John
Mark Ministries]
As the wife of
a state Supreme Court justice in Arkansas put it, "My husband has been
a Methodist all his life, but if it comes to choosing between being a Methodist
and an American, he'll be an American every time." But this was not the
issue, quite. In this case the choice was between being a good Methodist
and a good American, and being a tribal religionist. But the theological
problem of churches without discipline comes into stark outline in the
quotation. Inadequately trained for membership, admitted without preparatory
training, without the proper instruments of voluntary discipline, many
members have never had the discontinuity between life in Christ and life
in the world brought home to them. Here the ordinary members are less at
fault than the leadership of the churches, who -- though sworn to uphold
the form of sound words and doctrine -- neglect catechetical instruction
and concentrate solely on the acquisition of more new members at any price.
... Franklin
H. Littell, From State Church to Pluralism
The most perfect
way of seeking God, and the most suitable order, is not for us to attempt
with bold curiosity to penetrate to the investigation of His essence, which
we ought more to adore than meticulously to search out, but for us to contemplate
Him in His works, whereby He renders Himself near and familiar to us, and
in some manner communicates Himself.
... John
Calvin
The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
My God, no hymn for Thee?
My soul's a shepherd too: a flock it feeds
Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is Thy Word, the streams, Thy Grace
Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
Out-sing the daylight hours.
... George Herbert
All theological
language is necessarily analogical, but it was singularly unfortunate that
the Church, in speaking of punishment for sin, should have chosen the analogy
of criminal law, for the analogy is incompatible with the Christian belief
in God as the creator of Man. Criminal laws are laws, imposed on men, who
are already in existence, with or without their consent, and, with the
possible exception of capital punishment for murder, there is no logical
relation between the nature of a crime and the penalty inflicted for committing
it. If God created man, then the laws of man's spiritual nature must, like
the laws of his physical nature, be laws -- laws, that is to say, which
he is free to defy but no more free to break than he can break the law
of gravity by jumping out of the window, or the laws of biochemistry by
getting drunk -- and the consequences of defying them must be as inevitable
and as intrinsically related to their nature as a broken leg or a hangover.
To state spiritual laws in the imperative -- Thou shalt love God with all
thy being, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself -- is simply a pedagogical
technique, as when a mother says to her small son, "Stay away from the
window!" because the child does not yet know what will happen if he falls
out of it.
... W.
H. Auden, A Certain World
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2008, by Robert McAnally Adams,
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