Quotes gathered by Craig Stephans to be read in light of the authority and truth of scriptures as
precedence over all other points of view, opinions and philosophy. These quotes are listed in
order of the oldest first; the most recent are at the end of the document.
I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm in men the greatest asset I possess, and the way to
develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement…So I am anxious to
praise but loath to find fault. Charles Schwab
Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him. Emerson
If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view
and see things from his angle as well as your own. Ford
The man who can put himself in the place of other men, who can understand the workings of
their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for him. Owen Young
The essential element in personal magnetism is a consuming sincerity—an overwhelming faith in
the importance of the work one has to do. Bruce Barton “The Man Nobody Knows”
What you are thunders so loud I can’t hear what you say. Emerson
From Voltaire’s Candide:
"We are going into another world," said Candide; "and surely it must be there that all is
for the best. For I must confess there is reason to complain a little of what passeth in our world in
regard to both natural and moral philosophy."
"I love you with all my heart," said Cunegonde; "but my soul is still full of fright at that
which I have seen and experienced."
"All will be well," replied Candide; "the sea of this new world is already better than our
European sea; it is calmer, the winds more regular. It is certainly the New World which is the
best of all possible worlds."
"God grant it," said Cunegonde; "but I have been so horribly unhappy there that my heart
is almost closed to hope."
But I’ve had such horrible misfortunes in my world that my heart is nearly closed to hope.
Voltaire “Candide”
What could be more stupid than to persist in carrying a burden that we constantly want to cast
off, to hold our existence in horror, yet cling to it nonetheless, to fondle the serpent that devours
us, until it has eaten our hearts. Voltaire “Candide”
Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. Joseph Campbell
“The Power of Myth”
A hero acts to redeem society while a celebrity lives for self. Campbell “The Power of Myth”
A New York social philosopher to a shinto priest: “We’ve been now to a good many ceremonies
and have seen quite a few of your shrines, but I don’t get your ideology. I don’t get your
theology.” The Japanese paused as though in deep thought and then slowly shook his head, “I
don’t think we have ideology,” he said, “We don’t have theology. We dance.” Campbell
“..Myth”
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I think what we’re seeking is an
experience of being alive. Campbell “Myth”
The fact that I, myself, do not understand the meanings of my paintings at the time I am painting
them does not mean that they have no meaning. Dali
Lloyd Douglas “The Green Light” 1934 novel
“But if you are ever to be immortal…you are immortal now. “
“For your comfort, my son, let me tell you that I have laid hold upon a truth powerful enough to
sustain me until I die. I know that, in spite of all the painful circumstances I have met, my
course is upward! I know that the universe is on my side! It will not let me down! I have been
detained at times—but – eventually – I go on through! I go on through!” he repeated earnestly. “I
have suffered – but I know that I am destiny’s darling!…You have suffered – but you, too, can
carry on through! Take it from me! I know! In spite of all the little detainments,
disappointments, disillusionments—I get the lucky breaks! I get the signal to go forward! I have
been delayed – long – long – long- but at length – I get the GREEN LIGHT!”
“The eternity-minded do not believe in catastrophes. There is no place in their vocabulary for
such a word as a “crisis.” In their opinion, what the day-to-day and hand-to-mouth opportunists
would call a “crisis” is but a phase of the irresistible onward drive!”
Through the eternal, we can conquer the future. Kierkegard
For man may grow until he towers to the skies, but w/o this light he is nothing, and his place is
nothing. Even as we try to deny the light we know that it has made us, and what we are without
it remains meaningless. L. Eisley
I need little, and that little, I need very little. St. Francis
In so far as one can see, man’s situation, his life, in itself, is disorientation, is being lost…There
exists a being, the creator of all this, omnipotent, infinitely wise and good, who communicates
with man and directs him by means of revelation, thus making possible an absolute orientation.
Can one ask for more? Living is a revelation. … The man of the West is undergoing a process of
radical disorientation because he no longer knows by what stars he is to guide his life. Ortega y
Gasset
Men cannot now even remember the noble gestures of pride they once assumed; and the
imperative of liberty that resounded in their ears for centuries would now be totally
incomprehensible. On the contrary, they feel an incredible anxiety to be slaves. Slavery is their
highest ambition: slavery to other men, to an emperor, to a sorcerer or to an idol. Anything
rather than feel the terror of facing singlehanded, in their own persons, the ferocious assaults of
existence….a dog in search of a master. Ortega y Gasset
Emerson “Self-Reliance”
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for
all men…that is genius.
Envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide.
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it…But the man is as it were clapped into jail by his
consciousness.
Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.
What I must do is all that concerns me not what people think.
The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the
independence of solitude.
Virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
The essence of virtue, of genius, and of life, which we call spontaneity.
Power ceases in the instant of repose.
Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.
Insist on yourself, never imitate.
That which each can do best none but his master can teach him.
Emerson “Compensation”
Power to him who power exerts.
In nature, nothing can be given; all things are sold. Benefit is the end of nature, but for every
benefit you receive a tax is levied.
The law of nature is Do the thing and you shall have the power; but they who do not the thing
have not the power.
A great man is always willing to be little.
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
Napoleon Hill “Think and Grow Rich”
One sound idea is all one needs to achieve success.
We are the masters of our fate, the captains of our souls because we have the power to control
our thoughts.
Our brains become magnetized with the dominating thoughts which we hold in our minds and,
by means with which no man is familiar, these “magnets” attract to us the forces, the people, the
circumstances of the life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts…we must
magnetize our minds with intense desires.
There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the
knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.
Faith is a state of mind which may be induced, or created, by affirmation or repeated instructions
to the subconscious mind through the principles of auto suggestions.
Repetition of affirmations of orders to your subconscious mind is the only known method of
voluntary development of faith.
All thought which has been emotionalized and mixed with faith begin immediately to translate
themselves into their physical equivalent or counterpart.
Faith is the only known antidote for failure.
One comes to believe whatever one repeats to one’s self.
There is one weakness in people for which there is no remedy. It is the universal weakness of
lack of ambition.
Enthusiasm is contagious and the person who has it under control is generally welcome in any
group of people.
The world has the habit of making room for the man whose words and actions show that he
knows where he is going.
What most of us never suspect of existing is the silent but irresistible power which comes to the
rescue of those who fight on in the face of discouragement.
Fear, the worst of all enemies, can be effectively cured by forced repetition of acts of courage.
The faculty of creative imagination is the direct link between the finite mind of man and infinite
intelligence.
Every human brain is capable of picking up vibrations of thought which are being released by
other brains.
Nothing which life has to offer is worth the price of worry.
Quote of D. Valloume, a Franciscan cited by Brennan Manning in “Signature of Jesus”
“All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no
interest in anything but the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. If God wants it to, my life will
be useful through my word and witness. If he wants it to, my life will bear fruit through my
prayers and sacrifices. But the usefulness of my life is his concern not mine. It would be
indecent of me to worry about that.”
Daniel Webster
If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear
temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them
just principles, we are then engraving that upon tables which no time will efface, but will
brighten and brighten to all eternity.
Montaigne (French essayist)
The first law that ever God gave to man was a law of obedience; it was a commandment pure
and simple, wherein man had nothing to inquire after or dispute, for as much as to obey is the
proper office of a rational soul acknowledging a heavenly benefactor—from obedience and
submission spring all other virtues, as all sin does from self-opinion and self-will.
The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness. Montaigne
Who would not wish, and find it more delightful and more excellent, to return all dust and sweat
victorious from a battle, than from tennis or from a ball, with the prize of these exercises.
Montaigne
He who should teach men to die, would at the same time teach them to live. Montaigne
He is most potent who is master of himself. Montaigne
Never let the fear of striking out get in your way. Babe Ruth
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he
has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. He will pass an invisible
boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and
within him; and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. Thoreau “Walden”
The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. Einstein
One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk
failure. John Gardner, writer & teacher
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Helen Keller
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something
inside them was superior to circumstances. Bruce Barton
Thomas A’Kempis “The Imitation of Christ”
Do what lieth in thee and God will assist thy good will.
If thou desirest to be truly contrite in heart, enter into thy secret chamber, and shut out the
tumults of the world.
For grace ever attendeth him that daily giveth thanks.
Jesus hath now many lovers of his heavenly kingdom, but few bearers of his cross. Many he
hath that are desirous of consolation, but few of tribulation. Many he findeth that share his table,
but few his fasting. All desire to rejoice with him, few are willing to endure anything for Him.
Many follow Jesus into the breaking of bread; but few to the dwelling of the cup of his passion.
Many reverence his miracles, few follow the shame of his cross. Many love Jesus so long as no
adversities befall them.
This is it which most of all hindereth heavenly consolation, that thou are too slow in turning
thyself unto prayer.
The secret of business is to know something no one else knows. Onassis
Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. Einstein
Success is the child of audacity. Disraeli
All you need in life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. Twain
To play great music you must keep your eyes on a distant star. Yehudi Menukin
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one
thing. Lincoln
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common
than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone
are omnipotent. Coolidge
The heights of great men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight—
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night. Longfellow
All succeeds with people who are sweet and cheerful. Voltaire
One significant activity that distinguishes high achievers from their less successful counterparts
is their love of reading and their corresponding lack of interest in television. George Gallup Jr
Walter Russell quoted by Glenn Clark in “The man who tapped the secrets of the universe”
An inner joyousness, amounting to ecstasy, is the normal condition of the genius mind.
I have absolute faith that anything can come to one who trusts to the unlimited help of the
Universal Intelligence within so long as one works within the law and always gives more to
others than they expect, and does it cheerfully and courteously.
To achieve greatness one had to go only one inch beyond mediocrity, but that one inch is so hard
to go that only those who become aware of God in them can make the grade, for no one can
achieve that one inch alone. ** See quote below regarding that inch
Lock yourself up in your room or go out in the woods where you can be alone. When you are
alone the universe talks to you in flashes of inspiration. You will find that you will suddenly
know things which you never knew before.
I believe that every man can multiply his own ability by almost constant wordless realization of
his unity with his source.
The greater the joy within one’s inner consciousness, the greater the force of recharge of
thought-energy within one; and that is why I have climaxed my defining words with the word
“ecstatic.” The ecstatic man is the most dynamic, the most silent and the most undemonstrative
of all men…By ecstatic I mean that rare mental condition which makes an inspired man so
supremely happy in his mental concentration that he is practically unaware of everything that
goes on around him extraneous to his purpose, but is keenly and vitally aware of everything
pertaining to his purpose.
By ecstasy I mean inner joyousness, and by inner joyousness I mean those inspirational fires
which burn within the consciousness of great geniuses, fires which give to them an
unconquerable vitality of spirit which breaks down all barriers as wheat bends before the wind.
He who cultivates that quiet, unobtrusive ecstasy of inner joyousness can scale any heights and
be a leader in his field, no matter what that field is.
The Life triumphant is that which places what a man gives to the world in creative expression far
ahead of that which he takes from it of the creation of others.
** From the movie Any Given Sunday said by Al Pacino’s character:
You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because in either game life or
football the margin for error is so small. I mean one half step too late or to early you don't quite
make it. One half second too slow or too fast and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are
everywhere around us. They are in ever break of the game every minute, every second.
On this team, we fight for that inch On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us
to pieces for that inch. We CLAW with our finger nails for that inch. Cause we know when we
add up all those inches that's going to make the fucking difference between WINNING and
LOSING between LIVING and DYING.
I'll tell you this in any fight it is the guy who is willing to die who is going to win that inch.
And I know if I am going to have any life anymore it is because, I am still willing to fight, and
die for that inch because that is what LIVING is. The six inches in front of your face.
The Law of the Higher Potential by Robert Collier
A definite purpose, held to in the face of every discouragement and failure, in spite of all
obstacles and opposition, will win no matter what the odds.
He who loses his courage loses everything.
“Any wage I had asked of life, life would have paid” Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The goal of life has always been dominion—a means of overcoming all obstacles, of winning
dominion over circumstances.
Thought is a magnet
This heaven consciousness comes only as the result of a tremendous desire for spiritual truth, and
a hunger and thirst for things of the spirit.
The fundamental law of the universe is that every form of life holds within itself vitality enough
to draw to it every element it needs for growth and fruition. But it is only as it casts off all
outside support, and puts its dependence solely upon the life force that created it..that it is able to
draw to itself the elements it needs for complete growth and fruition.
Life is always and everywhere seeking expression.
Any unselfish expenditure of energy returns to you laden with gifts.
We increase whatever we praise…whatever is praised and blessed multiplies.
It is only lack of responsiveness to good that produces lack in your life.
The vision always precedes and itself determines the realization.
The images we hold steadfastly in our minds over the years are not illusions; they are patterns by
which we are able to mold our own destinies.
Doors that are worth entering are usually closed, but the resolute and courageous knock at those
doors, and keep knocking persistently until they are opened.
Life is expansion, mentally and physically. When you stop growing, you die.
He who addresses himself to problems every man must come to solve, builds his house on the
road, and every man must come to it. Emerson
What have I to give that will add to the happiness of those around me?
Love is magnetism
The purpose of man here is to utilize and distribute God’s good gifts.
The first essential in the creation of anything—is the mental picture or image.
The imagination is of all qualities in man the most Godlike—that which associates him most
closely with God.
Gain a mental attitude in which you are constantly expecting good.
The one and only thing you have to win success with is mind. For your mind to function at its
highest capacity, you’ve got to be charged with good cheer and optimism.
In every face—in even the plainest and most unfortunate countenances—there is some precious
aspect of the divine image of which we are a reflection, and if you look with an open heart, you
can see an awesome beauty, a glimpse of something so radiant it gives you joy. Dean Koontz
….loves the ideal more than the reality, which is the cause of all the misery that the human
species creates for itself. Koontz
Thomas Merton---Seven Storey Mountain---a quote of a word from God to him
Everything that touches you shall burn you, and you will draw your hand away in pain,
until you have withdrawn yourself from all things. Then you will be all alone.
Everything that can be desired will sear you, and brand you with a coterie, and you will
fly from it in pain, to be alone. Every created joy will only come to you as pain, and you
will die to all joy and be left alone. All the good things that other people love and desire
and seek will come to you, but only as murderers to cut you off from the world and its
occupations.
You will be praised and it will be like burning at the stake. You will be loved and it will
murder you heart and drive you into the desert.
You will have gifts and they will break you with their burden. You will have pleasures
of prayer and they will sicken you and you will fly from them.
And when you have been praised a little and loved a little, I will take away all your gifts
and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and
you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you shall begin to possess
the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the
souls of men you will never see on earth.
Do not ask when it will be or where it will be. On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert
or in a concentration camp…It does not matter, so do not ask me, because I am not going
to tell you. You will not know until you are in it.
But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you
into the high places of my joy and you shall die in me and find all things in my mercy
which has created you for this end…that you may become the brother of God and learn to
know the Christ of the burnt men.
Brennan Manning –Lion and Lamb
It is always true to some extent that we make our images of God. It is even truer that our image
of God makes us. One of the most beautiful fruits of knowing the God of Jesus is a
compassionate attitude toward ourselves.
Jesus presented a God who does not demand but gives; does not oppress but raises up; does not
wound but heals. A God who forgives instead of condemning, and liberates instead of
punishing.
The most important thing that ever happens in prayer is letting ourselves be loved by God.
There is a tyranny of public opinion which we often find at work in our lives…The expectations
of which often act as a subtle but controlling pressure on our behavior. The crowd does not take
kindly to non-conformity.
In prayer, we discover what we already have…Everything has been given to us by the Father in
Jesus. All we need now is to experience what we already possess. The most precious moments
of prayer consist in letting ourselves be loved by the Lord.
Jesus does not ask us to wait until later until the end for help and healing. Hope is the good news
of transforming grace now. We are freed not only from the fear of death but from the fear of
life; we are freed for a new life, a life that is trusting, hopeful and compassionate.
There are 3 ways to commit suicide: taking my own life, letting myself die, and letting myself
live without hope. This last form of self-destruction is so subtle that it often goes unrecognized,
and therefore unchallenged. Ordinarily, it takes the form of boredom, monotony, drudgery,
feeling overcome by the ordinariness of life.
Leo Booth-The God Game
Problems arise when people try to control too much behavior, to impose rules and then attach
God to them to be sure they are followed.
Part of the structure of a spiritually dead religion is a belief system that implies that if the system
isn’t working for you, it’s because something is wrong with you.
For many people, the belief God will get them is no laughing matter. It keeps them in fear and
flight from themselves and from God. There are also those who are equally afraid God won’t get
them—won’t take care of them and make it better.
Pascal – Penses
I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot
stay quietly in their own chamber...there is one very real reason...the natural poverty of our
feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it
closely...hence...the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible.
There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their hearts
because they know him, and those who seek him with all their hearts because they do not know
him.
The knowledge of God is very far from the love of him.
Man is so made that by continually telling him he is a fool he believes it, and by continually
telling it to himself he makes himself believe it . For man holds an inward talk with his self
alone, which it behooves him to regulate well.
Merton—“Seven Storey Mountain”
Is it any wonder that there can be no peace in a world where everything possible is done to
guarantee that the youth of every nation will grow up absolutely without moral and religious
discipline, and without the shadow of an interior life, or of that spirituality and charity and faith
which alone can safeguard the treatsies and agreements made by governments.
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on
the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men. A weird life it is indeed, to be living
always in somebody else’s imagination as if that were the only place in which one could at last
become real.
The difference between a good play and a great play is that after the experience of a great play
we understand a little more about why we are alive. Kenneth Tyron-critic
Aristotle
All men by nature have a desire to know. Aristotle
For what is most divine is also most valuable. A
For there is something always moving the things that are being moved; and the first mover is
itself unmoved.
There must be some eternal and immovable substance.
It (God) produces motion by being loved, and what it moves moves all things else.
Even in these circumstances (painful ones), nobility shines out when a person bears with
calmness the weight of accumulated misfortunes, not from insensibility but from dignity and
greatness of spirit. A
No high-minded person will dwell on the past, least of all past injuries; he will prefer to overlook
them.
Relaxation and fun are indispensable elements of life.
The function of the intellect generally is the apprehension of truth. The function of the practical
intellect is the apprehension of truth in order to promote right desire.
Vice distorts and deceives the mind when it comes to principles of actions.
Without friends no one would choose to live, even though he possessed every other good…if a
man is to be happy he will need good friends.
Happiness reaches as far as the power of thought does, and the greater a person’s power of
thought, the greater will be his happiness; not as something accidental but in virtue of his
thinking, for that is noble in itself. Happiness must be a form of contemplation.
Most people are controlled by necessity rather than by reason and by fear of punishment rather
than by love of nobility.
If nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain, the inference must be that she has made
all animals and plants for the sake of man. Aristotle
You cannot set up a court in the kingdom of the blind and condemn those who see. Dan
Berrigan
In our journey, we so often feel abandoned, and we need only to be reassured that we are not
alone. Koontz
Let us replace sentimentalism by realism, and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws
which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern. Emerson
When we don’t allow ourselves to hope, we don’t allow ourselves to have purpose. Without
purpose, without meaning, life is dark. We’ve no light within, and we’re just living to die.
Koontz
The glory of God is the human being fully alive. And the life of the human consists in beholding
God. Irenaeus
Too often the church is an enemy of our solitude. Too often the church is one more agent in the
vast social conspiracy of togetherness and noise aimed at distracting us from encountering
ourselves. The church keeps us busy on this course or that, this committee or that trying to
provide meaning through motion until we get burned out and withdraw from the church’s life.
Even in its core act of worship the church provides little space for the silent and solitary inward
journey to occur. Parker Palmer, author
Self-consciousness has seeded self-hatred. Manning
Being fully present in the now is perhaps the premier skill of the spiritual life. Manning
We do not sing because we are happy. We are happy because we sing. William James
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint all things are friendly and sacred, all events
profitable, all days holy, all men divine. Emerson
He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. Emerson
Let us lie low in the Lord’s power and learn that truth alone makes rich and great. Emerson
The magnanimous know very well that they who give time, or money, or shelter to the
stranger—so it be done for love and not for ostentation--do, as it were, put God under obligation
to them, so perfect are the compensations of the universe. Emerson
The great will not condescend to take anything seriously. Emerson
That which we are we shall teach, not voluntarily but involuntarily. Emerson
Every man believes that he has a greater possibility. Emerson
The poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should
delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his
inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. Emerson
Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the Creator passes.
Emerson
The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship. Emerson
Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of
human affairs. Emerson
When you come into the room, I think I will study how to make humanity beautiful to you.
Emerson
To make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom…power dwells with
cheerfulness…a man should make life and nature happen to us. Emerson
Life begins today for the person who meets himself. At whatever age this great event occurs,
life, deep and full, wells up and from that time on it can truly be said one lives. Strangely
enough, multitudes of men and women are born, spend their days and die, never having really
known themselves. NV Peale
Yet take thy way, for sure thy way is best;
Stretch or contract me, thy poor debter
This is but tuning of my breast,
To make the music better. George Herbert “The Temple”
In short, I must trust him (Jesus) completely. If I do, I have nothing to fear—regardless of the
pain and frustration of the present moment. I must also find joy in my friends—those who love
me and support me. But it is a two – way street: I must also love and support them…If the union
with Jesus is to be deeply rooted, stable, then it must be nourished constantly by prayer…
friendship cannot be sustained without continual presence and communication. Joseph Cardinal
Bernadin
The fear of public speaking is fearing ostracism, criticism, standing out, being an outcast; the
fear of being different prevents most people from seeking new ways to solve their problems.
Robert Kiyosaki "Rich Dad, Poor Dad”
Human kind cannot bear very much reality. TS Eliot
Do not waste time bothering whether you love your neighbor, act as if you did. CS Lewis
To be free is often to be lonely. WH Auden
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another. Charles Dickens
This is what is driving our whole civilization into suicide; the feeling that we are living
existences in which nothing matters very much…for the poet everything matters and it matters a
lot—that is the realm where we work. James Dickey
The Pilgrim is deeply in love with his God and never tires of communicating with Him. Through
this constant communion with his Lord and master he gains much wisdom and understanding; he
learns that true riches are of the spirit and are accessible to all. He knows as few of us do that a
wholehearted response to the message of the gospel is the only one that makes sense and satisfies
the very core of our being. He knows that to give God one's all means in the truest sense to gain
all. He knows that the cost of discipleship will never begin to measure up to the rewards which
await the faithful disciple who does the will of the father, both here and hereafter. He knows the
secret of interior freedom and what it means to have one’s hunger and thirst satisfied. He knows
the beauty of each creature. He knows the deep, abiding joy and peace which surpass all
understanding. Yes, he knows how absolutely wonderful God is in His love and mercy to all his
children but especially to those who unconditionally open their hearts to him. Helen Bacoucin
Preface to “The Way of the Pilgrim”
The Christian is expected to perform many good works, but the act of prayer is fundamental
because without prayer it is not possible to do good. Without frequent prayer it is not possible to
find one’s way to God, to understand truth, and to crucify the lusts of the flesh. Only fidelity to
prayer will lead a person to enlightenment and union with Christ. Way of The Pilgrim
How merciful is our Lord Jesus Christ and how great is his love! By what different paths he
draws sinners to himself and with what wisdom he transforms small happenings into great and
significant ones. Way of the Pilgrim
Too pray often is in our will, but to pray truly is a gift of grace. St. Macarius
In society today, we are half asleep when awake and half awake when asleep. Erich Fromm
The ability to be alone is a condition for the ability to love. Fromm
The decision to grow always involves a choice between risk and comfort. John Ortberg
Creative achievements depend on single-minded immersion. Quoted by Ortberg
One of the surest marks of greatness, of course, is accessibility and the appearance of having an
unstinted allowance of time. Bruce Barton
Great progress will be made in the world when we rid ourselves of the idea that there is a
difference between work and religious work. Barton
The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can’t mend fractured
hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits. Koontz
A civilization spiraling into an abyss often finds the spiral thrilling and sometimes loves the
promise of the depths below. People often see the romance of darkness but cannot see the
ultimate terror that waits at the bottom, in the deepest blackness. Consequently, they resist the
hand of truth extended, regardless of the goodwill with which it’s offered, and have been known
to kill their would be benefactors. Koontz
From time to time someone so special comes along that upon meeting him or her, the direction of
your life shifts unexpectedly, and you are therewith changed forever and for the better. Koontz
What do you do with the skeptic? You get him to talk. Aristotle
Victor Hugo “Les Miserables”
Man lives by affirmation even more than he does by bread
To meditate is to labor; to think is to act.
Laughter is sunshine; it chases winter from the human face.
All sublime conquests are, more or less, the rewards of daring…The onward march of the human
race requires that the heights around it should be ablaze with noble and enduring lessons of
courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history, and form one of the guiding lights of man. The dawn
dares when it rises. To strive, to brave all risks, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to yourself,
to grapple hand to hand with destiny, to surprise defeat by the little terror it inspires, at one time
to confront unrighteous power, at another to defy intoxicated triumph, to hold fast, to hold hardsuch is the example which the nations need, and the light that electrifies them.
There is nothing like dream to create the future.
Were it given to our eye of flesh to see into the consciences of others, we should judge a man
much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks. There is will in the thought,
there is none in the dream. The dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even
in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more
sincerely from the very bottom of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations
towards the splendours of destiny. In these aspirations, much more than in ideas which are
combined, studied and compared, we can find the true character of each man. Our chimeras are
what most resemble ourselves. Each one dreams the unknown and the impossible according to
his own nature.
Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of grief. He
who has not seen the things of this world, and the hearts of men by this double light, has seen
nothing, and knows nothing of the truth. The soul which loves and which suffers is in the
sublime state.
The world lets everything fall and die, which is nothing but selfishness, everything which does
not represent a virtue or an idea for the human race.
Look closely into life. It is so constituted that we feel punishment everywhere.
When you know and when you love, you shall suffer still…The luminous weep, were it only
over the dark.
An admirable thing, the poetry of a people is the element of its progress. The amount of
civilization is measured by the amount of imagination. Only a civilizing people must remain a
manly people.
Only motivation is absolutely across the board present in all …eminent people whose lives
present the most striking examples of calling, according to a study by Harvard professor Albert
Rothenberg. James Hillman “The Soul’s Code”
I can never predict what tiny, trivial bit of input will result in a huge and significant output. I
must always remain acutely sensitive to initial conditions, such as what or who comes into the
world with me and enters the world with me each day. On that I remain dependent. Hillman
Imagining demands absolute attention. Hillman
Intuition sees everything at once given as a whole. Time strings things out into a chain of
successive events leading toward a finishing line. Hillman
The requirement for true intimacy is chunks of unhurried time. Ortberg
Every human being you know is making a request of their friends, though it usually goes
unspoken. Here’s what they ask: “Motivate me. Call out the best in me. Believe in me.
Encourage me when I’m tempted to quit. Speak truth to me and remind me of my deepest
values. Help me achieve my greatest potential. Tell me again what God called me to be, what I
might yet become.” Ortberg
Sun Tzu “Art of War”
Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Way (Tao) to survival or
extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed.
One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred
engagements…One who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in
every engagement.
The one who excels in warfare first establishes himself in a position where he cannot be defeated
while not losing any opportunity to defeat the enemy….one who excels in warfare compels men
and is not compelled by other men.
If you know heaven and know earth, your victory will be complete.
The Tao of the true king must be to generously love his people.
Fyodor Dystoveky “Brothers Karamazov”
Loving humility is a terrible force, the most powerful of all, the like of which there is none…
Love is an instructress, but one must know how to acquire her, for she is acquired with effort,
purchased dearly, by long labor and over a long season, for it is not simply for a casual moment
that one must love, but for the whole of the appointed season. After all anyone is capable of
loving casually, even the doer of evil.
Much upon earth is concealed from us, but in recompense for that we have been gifted with a
mysterious, sacred sense of our living connection with another world, with a celestial and higher
world, and indeed the roots of our thoughts and emotions are not here, but in other worlds.
Untiringly, insatiably, love, love all creatures, love all things, seek this ecstasy and this frenzy.
There is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. Flannery O’Connor
George Weigel “Letters to a Young Catholic”
Every Christian has a vocation—a unique something that only you can do in the providence of
God…that same providence will, mercifully, repair and make straight whatever false steps we
take in living out our vocational commitments.
The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks
to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head.
And it is his head that splits. GK Chesterton
The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. Chesterton
For solemnity flows out men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be
light. Satan fell by force of gravity. Chesterton
By taking himself too seriously—by taking himself with ultimate seriousness—Satan fell.
Weigel
Love is not merely a feeling or sentiment, but rather a spiritual drive within us, a drive for
communion. Weigel
Death to self is the ultimate form of human liberation. Weigel
Genuine intellectual life is impossible without theology. John Henry Newman
Joseph Campbell “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”
It may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the
decline among us of such effective spiritual aid.
The hero is the man of self-achieved submission.
Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.
The first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal
zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify difficulties, eradicate
them in his own case and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of
the archetypal images.
The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man—perfected unspecific, universal man—
he has been reborn. His second solemn task and deed therefore is to return to us, transfigured,
and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewal.
Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of
peace or the high road to the soul’s destination.
It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight is truly
desperate.
The really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world.
Willed introversion is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a
deliberate device.
One has only to know and trust and the ageless guardians will appear.
Rothenberg MD “Creativity and Madness”
The creative process requires an ability to tolerate high levels of anxiety and a relative lack of
defensiveness in order to proceed.
For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Plato
Just as a need to control interferes with turning destructiveness into creation in art, so it interferes
with turning self-destructive feelings into a process of self-creation in life.
Imagination and creativity consist of special abilities to go beyond one’s own experience and
history in order to bring forth new ideas and things.
G Forde “On Being a Theologian of the Cross”
The soul’s insatiable thirst for glory is not ended by satisfying it but rather by extinguishing it.
Luther
Superficial optimism breeds ultimate despair.
The love of God does not find, but creates that which is pleasing to it.
It is impossible to trust in God unless one has despaired in all creatures and knows that nothing
can profit one without God. Luther
Free will without grace has the power to do nothing but sin. St. Augustine
As theologians of the cross we operate on the premise that faith in the crucified and risen one is
all we have going for us.
Knowledge of God comes when God happens to us, when God does himself to us.
Works that can be called good flow from righteousness as from an overflowing vessel.
Grace, instead of demanding love, simply gives it unconditionally.
Every act of Christ is instruction for us, indeed a motivation.
The impetus to good works comes entirely from being moved, aroused, and motivated by the
completed work of the Christ, who dwells in the believer through faith.
St. John of the Cross “Dark night of the soul”
Persons who are thus inclined to such pleasures have another very great imperfection, which is
that they are very weak and remiss in journeying upon the hard road of the cross; for the soul that
is given to sweetness naturally has its face set against all self-denial, which is devoid of
sweetness.
Communications which are indeed of God have this property, that they humble the soul and at
the same time exalt it.
For it is love alone that unites and joins the soul with God.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Goethe
Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to
ask questions. TS Eliot The Rock
Richard J. Foster Prayer
True, whole prayer is nothing but love. St. Augustine
To be effective pray-ers we need to be effective lovers….real prayer comes not from gritting our
teeth but from falling in love.
To pray is to change.
We experience the agony of prayerlessness.
To pray means to be willing to be naïve. Emilie Griffin “Clinging: the experience of prayer.”
We might just as well get used to the idea that, sooner or later, we, too, will know what it means
to be forsaken by God.
Darkness is a definite experience of prayer. It is to be expected, even embraced.
God creates everything out of nothing—and everything which God is to use he first reduces to
nothing. Kierkegaard
Crucifixion of the will…means freedom to care for others, to genuinely put their needs first, to
give joyfully and freely.
Humility means to live as close to the truth as possible: the truth about ourselves, the truth about
others, the truth about the world in which we live.
Humility is the principal aid to prayer. Teresa of Avila
Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. Henri Nouwen
We are “never less alone than when alone.” St. Jerome
Freedom is the product of discipline and commitment
We regard falling from God’s friendship as the only thing dreadful and we consider becoming
God’s friend the only thing worthy of honor and desire. This…is the perfection of life. Gregory
of Nyssa “The Life of Moses”
Progress in intimacy with God means progress toward silence.
Signs of maturing faith: Continuing hunger for intimacy with God, an ability to forgive others at
great personal cost, a living sense that God alone can satisfy the longings of the human heart, a
deep satisfaction in prayer, a realistic assessment of personal abilities and shortcomings, a
freedom from boasting about spiritual accomplishments and demonstrated ability to live out the
demands of life patiently and wisely.
While union is entirely a work of God upon the heart there are two vital preparations from our
side of the equation: love of God and purity of heart.
The message of hope the contemplative offers you is not that you need to find your way through
the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that …”God loves you, is
present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding
and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons. Thomas Merton
His wisdom burns away all the impurities in a man for one purpose: to leave him fit for divine
union. Madame Guyon
Purity of heart is to will one thing. Kierkegaard
Everything that one turns in the direction of God is prayer. Ignatius of Loyola
A part of our petition must always be for an increasing discernment so that we can see things as
God sees them.
To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.
Karl Barth
Any faith that makes the blessedness of people dependent upon anyone or anything other than
God himself is, to that extent, a false faith.
Most people desperately desire to believe that they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a
work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time they are
given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a
thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard’s thirst for cynicism, and
they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread. Koontz Odd Thomas
The Dark Night of the Soul Gerald May MD
Freedom and gratitude are abiding characteristics of the dark night. But they don’t arrive until
the darkness passes. They come with the dawn.
The dark night is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are
liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely.
No one is so advanced in prayer that they do not often have to return to the beginning. Teresa of
Avila
The deepening of love is the real purpose of the dark night of the soul. The dark night helps us
become who we were created to be: lovers of God and lovers of one another.
Liberation whether experienced pleasurably or painfully always involves relinquishment, some
kind of loss.
Most of us live in a world of overstimulation and sensory overload. Without realizing it, we
erect defenses against our own perceptions in order to avoid being overwhelmed. To some
extent, this deadens our sensitivity and dulls our perceptiveness. We find ourselves no longer
appreciative of the subtle sensations, delicate fragrances, soft sounds, and exquisite feelings we
enjoyed as children.
Our individual stories are colored and textured by who we are as individuals and by God’s
unique ways of loving us—ways that can never be prescribed, only discovered.
The contemplatives often sense an invitation to pray with God, to share God’s joy and sorrow,
which in turn God is sharing with all creation. There is a notion here of keeping God company
in whatever God is experiencing.
Seeing things as they were and not as he wished they were was one of Washington’s salient
strengths. From the book 1776 David McCullough
"Duty then is the sublimest word in the English language. You should do your duty in all things.
You can never do more, you should never wish to do less." Robert E. Lee
Worship is basically adoration, and we adore only what delights us. There is no such thing as sad
adoration or unhappy praise. John Piper “Desiring God”
I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend
every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord…not how much I might serve the Lord, how I
might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man
may be nourished…I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the
reading of the Word of God and to meditation upon it. George Muller of Bristol quoted by John
Piper in “Desiring God”
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards
promised in the gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too
weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when
infinite joy is offered us. CS Lewis “The Weight of Glory”
Thomas Merton “No Man is an Island”
If I am to love my brother, I must somehow enter deep into the mystery of God’s love for him.
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to
take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
It is the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not
because they have meaning, but because the Resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their
meaning.
Sin strikes at the very depth of our personality. It destroys the one reality on which our true
character, identity, and happiness depend: our fundamental orientation to God.
A community that seeks to invade or destroy the spiritual solitude of the individuals who
compose it is condemning itself to death by spiritual asphyxiation.
Do not desire chiefly to be cherished and consoled by God; desire above all to love him. Do not
anxiously desire to have others find consolation in God, but rather help them to love God.
It is not seldom that our silence and our prayers do more to bring people to the knowledge of
God than all our words about Him.
From Last Stand of Fox Company by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
Col. Chesty Puller USMC Korean War “We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now.
We finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.” 236
Gen. Oliver Smith USMC Korean War “Retreat, hell. We’re just attacking in another direction.”
205
Uncommon valor had become a common virtue. 274
Dean Koontz A Big Little Life
Our faith tells us that when the last hour comes, the best places to be taken are while in prayer or
while engaged in the work we committed ourselves in cheerful acceptance of the truth that work
is the lot of humanity, post Eden. If done with diligence and integrity, work is obedience to
divine order, a form of repentance. 22
A dog can be a living work of art, a constant reminder of the exquisite design and breathtaking
detail of nature, beauty on four paws. ..Being companions and guardians of a dog would be one
way to explore more fully the mystery of this world. 22-23…This may be the primary purpose of
dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we
should trust our intuition as they trust theirs, and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively
can be as real as anything known by material experience. 78-79.
Theory does not deserve respect when it conflicts with our intuition and common sense, which
are native to the mind and fundamental to sanity. 165
Living with a recognition of the spiritual dimension of the world not only ensures a happier life
but also a more honest intellectual life than if we allow no room for wonder and refuse to
acknowledge the mystery of existence. 263
Anglicanism Stephen Neill
Calvinism and Arminianism are both distortions of the truth. We can do justice to the gospel
only if we hold firmly both to the absolute sovereignty of God and to the moral freedom of man,
recognizing that it is only in the depths of the divine wisdom that what appears to us as a logical
contradiction is resolved. 141
Revival Martyn Lloyd Jones
What was happening on that cross on Calvary’s hill?...It was our being protected against the
glory and the holiness, and the righteousness, and the justice, and the wrath of God against sin.
246
There isn’t a soul in the world whom heaven doesn’t regard in particular fashion. There isn’t a
sigh or a word that Heaven fails to hear. Anne Rice in Angel Time 53
A particularly acute problem for Christian intellectuals today is that they have hired themselves
out as apprentices to a body of literature that is drawn almost wholly from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Robert Wilken
All you have to do to be convinced of Satan's reality is to start getting Christians empowered by
the Holy Spirit. Dennis Bennett Nine O'Clock in the Morning
Teach the people of God that anyone who takes prayer lightly is a dangerous Christian. C. John
Miller The Heart of a Servant Leader
1. Ordinarily don’t move into a new thing until you have made things happen where you are (by
grace). That is, you need to have solid evidence of effective leadership on one level before going
to another. This also prevents a person from moving on before he gets humbled by seeing how
impossible ministry is.
2. This leadership effectiveness includes: a. The grace to express love to others in a public
manner, b. willingness and determination to shepherd by being a servant, c. courage to act in
humility to disciple others in the face of resistance, and d. ability to command respect by
maturity of life so that others feel they are being led in a Christlike direction. C. John Miller The
Heart of a Servant Leader
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to
him, and his problem will be to make them appear as distortions to an audience which is used to
seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision
across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs
you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to
assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of
hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures. – excerpt from Flannery
O’Connor, ‘Essays & Letters”
The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.
William Temple
We must always be open to the sovereign God who can shake us to our cores, who gives us the
strength to transcend the limitations of our humanness and to do things we never thought
possible...Even when our resources are at their lowest point, even when we have nothing to offer,
we work out of a power that can take our scant reserves and overwhelm people with a mercy that
heals both body and soul. Adam McHugh Introverts in the Church
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility: Poetry of value comes from a person possessed of more than usual
organic sensibility who has thought long and deeply. The poet is a person endowed with more
lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human
nature, and a more comprehensive soul, a person who rejoices more than others in the spirit of
life that is in him; emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare said of man, ‘that he
looks before and after.’Wordsworth (from “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads)
They just stared at him, and their hands, resting on their swords, trembled as if they were
reaching out for their own deaths. Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.. Cornelia
Funke Inkdeath
360-Degree Leadership Michael Quicke
Conflict is inevitable because leadership means change, and change provokes resistance. If you
are looking for a life free from conflict, make sure you don’t become a leader or a preacher.
This great paradox about preaching, that it requires every ounce of human energy within God’s
mighty work, keeps preachers both fully stretched and humbly dependent.
Great leaders empower and release others to share leadership.
Congregations need to become communities of missionaries living out good news to a suspicious
and sometimes hostile world.
Scripture always begins with God and never with the motives of leaders and their followers.
Christian leadership’s source is God’s vision and purpose and his call upon men and women to
obey and speak out his will for his people….spiritual leaders develop visions beyond human
possibilities.
“Spiritual leaders work within a paradox, for God calls them to do something that, in fact, only
God can do.” Henry Blackaby
God is looking for servants of the Word.
Preachers speak God’s words to make an impact by God’s power and grace.
“Jesus did not develop a plan nor did he cast a vision. He sought the Father’s will. He had a
vision for himself and for his disciples but it came from his Father.” Blackaby
Preachers/leaders do not bring urgency to Scripture but release urgency from within Scripture.
Preachers should immerse themselves in Scripture’s dynamic that continuously leads people
forward.
Spiritual individuals may be gifted with spiritual wisdom, but spiritual wisdom is supremely a
corporate phenomenon, discerned together as the body of Christ.
“When you strip it all away, leaders do just two things: they create conflict and they resolve
conflict.” Barna
Dynamic leadership must both generate tension between an honest picture of present reality and
a compelling vision of God’s future and sustain such tension as a godly force for change.
Preacher/leaders must learn how to preach powerfully about God’s biggest picture-by
emphasizing his kingdom.
“If the leaders of the congregation are not spending significant, consistent time seeking God’s
direction—through prayer, Bible study, meditation, solitude and fasting—it will be impossible
for meaningful and lasting transformation to occur” Harrington, Bonem and Furr
Modeling grace is one of the most daunting responsibilities for a preacher/leader
Only by a gross act of myopic self-indulgence can preachers and congregations be selfcongratulatory.
Our hope and purpose is to follow Jesus Christ as we grow in our love and worship of God—
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as we grow in our love and care for one another and as we grow in
our love and ministry to the world.
To be devoted worshippers and followers of Jesus Christ as we compel others by our life and
words to come to him for eternal life.
Notes from Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley 2nd ed.
--change and constant creation are ways of sustaining order and capacity.
“In every organization, we need to look internally, to see one another as the critical resources on
this voyage of discovery. We need to learn how to engage the creativity that exists everywhere
in our organizations….We must engage with each other, experiment to find what works for us,
and support one another as the true inventors we are.” 9
In the quantum world, relationship is the key determiner of everything…unseen connections
between what were previously thought to be separate entities are the fundamental ingredient of
all creation. 11
The survival and growth of systems that range in size from large ecosystems down to the
smallest microbial colonies are sustained by a few key principles that express the system’s
overall identity combined with high levels of autonomy for individuals within that system. 13
In the quantum world, relationships are not just interesting; to many physicists, they are all there
is to reality. One physicist, Henry Stapp, describes elementary particles as, “in essence, a set of
relationships that reach outward to other things.” 34
Matter’s total identity includes the potential for particles and waves…related to the church…at
times we function as particles in relationship to one another and when we are all together in our
relationships with one another and with the Lord we are experienced by others as a wave, an
overwhelming expression of God’s creative love.
We must interact with the world to see what we must create.38
We need fewer descriptions of tasks and instead learn how to facilitate process.39 We need to
become savvy about how to foster relationships, how to nurture growth and development.
“Love is the most potent source of power.” 40
Quantum leaps occur when an electron inexplicably leaps instantaneously from one orbit to
another. There are no intermediate stages. It is in one place. Then it is in another. Physicists
cannot tell when it will take place; they can only indicate the probability of it happening based
on the necessary conditions. (Therefore, the church must constantly be engaged in other orbits
in hopes that the lost and unchurched will enter the orbit of the church.)
We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our
connectedness. 45 (Therefore there are no small activities in the body of Christ or by the body of
Christ. )
Space (fields) is never empty. If it is filled with harmonious voices, a song arises that is strong
and potent. If it is filled with conflict, the dissonance drives us away and we don’t want to be
there. 57
An organization rich with many interpretations develops a wiser sense of what is going on and
what needs to be done. Such organizations become more intelligent. 67
Roles mean nothing without understanding the network of relationships and the resources that
are required to support the work of that person. 72
Everything alive is an open system that engages with its environment and continues to grow and
evolve.77
If an organization seeks to develop these life-saving qualities of adaptability, it needs to open
itself in many ways. Especially important is the organization’s relationship to information,
particularly to that which is new and even disturbing. Information must actively be sought from
everywhere, from places and sources people never thought to look before. And then it must
circulate freely so that many people can interpret it. The intent of this new information is to keep
the system off-balance, alert to how it might need to change. An open organization doesn’t look
for information that makes it feel good, that verifies its past and validates its present. It is
deliberately looking for information that might threaten its stability, knock it off balance, and
open it to growth. 83 (Consider the information that the disciples gain from Jesus and then that
the church gains from the Spirit and from the epistles…it continually throws them off balance
and causes them to reevaluate and grow while being transformed by God and built into a
kingdom and priests to serve him and bear witness to Jesus.)
Its stability comes from a deepening center, a clarity about who it is, what it needs, what is
required to survive (I would add “to thrive”) in its environment. 83
The presence of a clear identity makes the organization less vulnerable to its environment; it
develops greater freedom to decide how it will respond. 86 A clear sense of identity—the lens of
values, traditions, history, dreams, experience, competencies, culture—is the only route to
achieving independence from the environment.
Effective self-organization is supported by two critical elements: a clear sense of identity and
freedom 87
Stasis, balance, equilibrium, these are temporary states. What endures is process—
dynamic,adaptive,creative. 90
The work of any team or organization needs to start with a clear sense of what they are trying to
accomplish and how they want to behave together. 106
The leader’s role is not to make sure that people know exactly what to do and when to do it.
Instead, leaders need to ensure that there is strong and evolving clarity about who the
organization is. 130
By far the most powerful force of attraction in organizations and in our individual lives in
meaning. 132
We also need to acknowledge the shadow side of life—the sorrow and suffering that has come
into our experience. 133
If a system is in trouble, it can be restored to health by connecting it to more of itself. To make a
system stronger, we need to create stronger relationships. 145
People need to be connected to the fundamental identity of the organization or community.
People need to be connected to new information. People need to be able to reach past traditional
boundaries and develop relationships with people anywhere in the system. 146
We don’t accept an organization redesign because a leader tells us it is necessary. We choose to
accept it if, and only if, we see how this new design enables us to contribute more to what we’ve
defined as meaningful.
We must look behind the things of organizations to work with the processes that gave them birth.
153
I believe we have been kept apart by three primary Western cultural beliefs: individualism,
competition, and a mechanistic world view. 164
Notes from Leadership in John by Garrett Kenney
For Christians, the charisma for leadership must come from Jesus. His charisma also imbues
other Christians to excel in their areas of gifting. So the church should not look to one person
only for guidance but to those who are gifted in the relevant areas. Eph 4.11. These are areas of
leadership. Jesus is the ultimate leader and gift.
2 John indicates John’s acceptance that all of the followers of Jesus have the truth, have the
Father and the Son and have received peace, grace and mercy. They are walking in truth and the
commandments of Jesus. They are walking according to what they have heard from the
beginning. They are not following progressive teachings of those denying Jesus came in the
flesh and teaching other innovations. The leadership is participatory and encouraging while also
referring to the authority of apostolic teaching and the truth, as well as the election of the
“chosen lady” and her “children.” The author is known as “the elder” so has legitimization from
the tradition and his gifts and calling. There is not a coercion or presentment of his own
authority. It is a given in the community of the faithful.
John 1:9 Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not
have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. Members of the
church abiding in Jesus’ word and in the traditions of the church (Anglicanism) and participate in
the body of Christ and in this community in particular may participate in its leadership and
ministry because they have the Spirit of the Father and the Son.
LeadershipNext by Eddie Gibbs
The consumer-focused approach to ministry successfully attracted crowds, but it has failed for
the most part to transform lives or construct significant personal relationship that provide
encouragement, spiritual growth, accountability and avenues fro Christian ministry. 12
All ministry has become cross-cultural. 15
As a servant leader, Jesus’ primary allegiance was to his heavenly father.
For Roger Greenleaf (Servant Leadership) true servant leaders are those who are prepared to take
the initiative. But before embarking on a course of action, they listen to God and to the voices
around them in order to determine what God requires of them. They are committed for the long
haul, maintaining faith and hope, patience and fortitude. They also make time, no matter how
busy their schedules, to withdraw from the relentless demands of daily life in order to refocus
and renew their strength. 29
Emerging leaders are concerned not with institutional maintenance but with missional
effectiveness. They focus on ministry by the church in the world rather than ministry in the
church that is largely confined to the existing members. 31
The individual is made whole and healthy within a community that has a shared history and a
shared hope. 34
Missional leaders do not look for social affirmations but are prepared to take risks with the
realization that mission often entails a launch into uncharted waters against the prevailing tide of
public opinion. 52
Churches that continue to hold up the ideal of the stable nuclear family find that they are
alienating a significant percentage of their congregation. 53
Information age allows everyone to be a missionary and evangelist and recruiter for the church.
Seniors must be motivated and empowered to be mentors for young people, to take initiative in
the church, to do ministry as they are led.
Authentic witnesses do not have the “whole story” but bear testimony to what they have grasped
and have been obedient to in their own lives. 60
Two initiatives for the church: 1. To share our story in light of God’s story, and 2. To offer
ministry to others in prayer, listening, sharing a word, invitation to the family—in other words,
in friendship. Inviting into the community of believers allows a person to hear others’ stories
also in light of God’s story.
Missional churches recognize that they are signs and servants of the reign of God, but because
they themselves are in the process of becoming, they are ambiguous signs and unworthy
servants. When drawing people to it, the missional church must always point beyond itself. 87
…The missional church is more concerned with ministry by the church than ministry in the
church.
Authentic community begins with the frank recognition that loose connections are not robust
enough to provide cohesion. There must be strong bonds of mutual commitment that can
withstand the times of strain and upheaval. The authentic community involves finding a home
and a family and allows for times of forgiveness and affirmation to develop and for holding one
another accountable. 99 The boundary between the community and the outside world becomes
not a defensive wall but a frontier for engagement. 100
People who lead must know where they are going, and they must inspire confidence in others to
want to go with them. 109
Noone discovers their true worth outside of community. Our identity is established, developed,
and affirmed through relationships. 116
Stetzer: Planting New Churches
10 most frequent traits of successful postmodern churches:
 Being unashamedly spiritual
 Promoting incarnational ministry
 Engaging in service
 Valuing experiential praise
 Preaching narrative expository messages
 Appreciating and participating in ancient patterns
 Visualizing worship
 Connecting with technology
 Living community
 Leading by transparency and team.
Gallup found that 70% of Americans say that church is not meeting their needs which are,
 To believe that life is meaningful and has purpose
 To have a sense of community and deeper relationships.
 To be appreciated and respected.
 To be listened to and heard.
 To grow in faith.
 To receive practical help in developing a mature faith. 211
Treatment of visitors:
1. Have members spend the first 5 mins. after the service speaking with visitors and nonmembers.
2. Have everyone fill out a registration card. Members can write their name and prayer request,
so visitors will not be uncomfortable
3. Have a lay person make the first call or visit to guests. Clergy first time f/up reduced
effectiveness in half. 85 % of those visited w/in 36 hrs return. % reduces after 36 hours.
8 characteristics of an incorporated member:
 should be able to list at least 7 new friends in church
 identify their spiritual gifts
 involved in at least 1 role in the church appropriate to their spiritual gift
 be actively involved in a small group.
 Demonstrate a regular financial commitment to the church.
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Personally understand and identify with church goals.
Attend worship services regularly.
Should identify unchurched friends and relatives and take specific steps to help them
toward responsible church membership. 284
New believers need close Christian friends, especially disciple makers who can accept them as
they are while challenging them to mature. Many Christians make little effort to cultivate new
friends b/c they feel comfortable with the friends they already have. 296
Simple Church Thom Rainer & Eric Geiger
More programs and more events do not lead to greater spiritual impact; in fact, the opposite has
proven true. Stay focused on the simple process of discipleship and say no to everything else.
You must eliminate nonessential programs, limit adding more programs, reduce special events
and ensure the process is easy to communicate and easy to understand.
Churchmorph by Eddie Gibbs
Because the gospel message is one of reconciliation between sinful humans and God, its
effectiveness needs to be demonstrated by communities that are learning how to practice
reconciliation. 45 …Evidence of personal and relational transformation w/in its corporate life is a
necessary prerequisite for the church in order for it to have a significant and positive impact on
society.
Rather than importing a model from elsewhere, every local church must discern God’s calling in
regard to his purposes and the specifics of their situation, as well as to each individual’s own
unique history, gifts and passion 47
A sense of being stalled spiritually among some Christians may stem from an addiction to
adrenaline rushes and an aversion to the “boring” or “mundane” of daily life and spiritual
disciplines. The desire for emotional highs produces the “need” for more intense experiences
instead of Christian discipleship. Other barriers to spiritual growth may reflect a general desire
for “therapeutic” and “technique”-dependent approaches, instead of the acceptance that suffering
often accompanies the Christian life without solutions other than the strength to go through the
trials with hope and faith.
Many unbelievers who join churches first help with service efforts of the church after being
invited by Christian friends. The main way of growing churches adding members is by members
telling their family and friends about ministries of the church and inviting them.
“Transforming Churches Towards Mission” The Gospel and Our Culture Network (gocn.org)
cited by Gibbs
Missional Church
 Proclaims the gospel
 A community in which all members are learning to become disciples of Jesus.

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
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

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The bible is normative
Understands itself as different from the world because of its participation in the life,
death and resurrection of its Lord.
Seeks to discern God’s specific missional vocation for the entire community and for all of
its members.
A missional community is indicated by how Christians behave toward one another.
Is a community that practices reconciliation.
People within the community hold themselves accountable to one another in love.
Practices hospitality.
Worship is the central act by which the community celebrates with joy and thanksgiving
both God’s presence and God’s promised future.
The community has a vital public witness.
There is a recognition that the church itself is an incomplete expression of the reign of
God.
Equipping Church by Sue Mallory
The largest group of people available and equipped to help in any ministry will not volunteer to
do so on their own. They have to be detected and identified as passionate or gifted and then
invited to respond to a specific opportunity to serve. 136
Hybels: Courageous Leadership
Christian leaders must insist that
 The gospel be preached
 The lost be found
 The believers be equipped
 The poor be served,
 The lonely be enfolded into community,
 And God gets the credit for it all.
People need more than a vision they need a step by step plan to make the vision reality.
Missional Churches
An essential element of being an apostolic church that is in sharp contrast with the culture is the
acknowledgment of the power of evil in the world. The Enlightenment and post-modernity have
attempted to void any concept of evil. The missional church, however, engages the evil powers
in the name and victory of Jesus. The authors write,
Without an understanding of evil and of God’s ultimate victory over evil in the age to come, it is
difficult for the church to have any sense of urgency about its participation in the mission of
God’s reign in and to the world. If the church is truly apostolic, it must see itself as participating
in God’s victory over evil. (Loc 2056-59)
I think churches that do not recognize evil and their place in the battle between the powers of
Satan and God cannot fulfill God’s mission in the world. Spiritual warfare is a spiritual activity
in which the missional church must engage fully to be effective.
C.S. Lewis Screwtape Letters:
Screwtape:
“Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient
during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on
the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the
nursery by "Stories from the Odyssey" buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when
lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department
of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes a
risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into
what He calls His "free" lovers and servants-"sons" is the word he uses, with His inveterate love
of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals.
Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to
any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to do it on their own. And there lies
our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial
dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to
tempt.”
Baseball Gen Mgr: "The first law of psychology is that if someone is self-absorbed, he will
usually become self-delusional" Best American Sports Writing Intro Peter Gammons
We are not naturally gracious people. Our natural tendency is to see the immorality, hypocrisy,
and incompetence of the church and walk away. But when we walk away from the church
because it is not what we want it to be or even all that it can be, we end up proclaiming to the
world a false god—a legalistic, judgmental god. By embracing the church as a fallen mess of
sinful people, filled with faults and failures, we proclaim the true God—one who is full of
grace—to the whole world…So we stay and serve, not because the church is perfect—far from
it. We stay and we serve because it is the very grace we show to others in the church that makes
the church the place of grace that God designed it to be. Jim Samra The Gift of Church
Making disciples takes time; it doesn’t happen overnight! Because churches spend so much of
their time dealing with “mundane” activities like hospital visitation, prayer meetings, weekly
services, and providing nursery care, it is sometimes easy to miss the cumulative effect that these
simple activities can have in transforming people into the image of Christ. Jim Samra The Gift of
Church
“Oh, my soul, be prepared to meet him who knows how to ask questions” (T. S. Eliot – The
Rock)
The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living
and loving God; the more we learn about the cross in all its historical and theological
dimensions, the more we discover about the One in whose image we are made and hence about
our own vocation to be the cross-bearing people, the people in whose lives and service the living
God is made known. NT Wright “The Challenge of Jesus”
Jesus believed it was his vocation to be the embodiment of that which was spoken of in the
Jewish symbols of Temple, Torah, Word, Spirit and Wisdom, namely YHWH’s saving presence
in the world, or more fully in Israel and for the world. NT Wright
The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes all of postmodernity is essentially
nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection
of Jesus we find the answer: the God who made the world is revealed in terms of a self-giving
love that no hermeneutic of suspicion can ever touch, in a Self that found itself by giving itself
away, in a Story that was never manipulative but always healing and recreating, and in a Reality
that can truly be known, indeed to know which is to discover a new dimension of knowledge, the
dimension of loving and being loved. NT Wright
The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place where the world is in pain,
and as we embrace that vocation, we discover it to be the way of following Christ, shaped
according to his messianic vocation to the cross, with arms outstretched, holding on
simultaneously to the pain of the world and to the love of God. NTWright
God forgive us that we have imagined true humanness, after the Enlightenment model, to mean
being successfully, having it all together, knowing all the answers, never making mistakes,
striding through the world as though we owned it. The living God revealed his glory in Jesus
and never more clearly than when he died on the cross, crying out that he had been forsaken. NT
Wright
David DESilva “Sacramental Life”
The sign of the cross made on our foreheads at baptism means we have been ‘consecrated to a
crucified Messiah,’ and therefore that we, too, are bound by baptism to ‘crucify the old person
and to bear the cross.’
“Evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread” Rev. Dr. D. T. Niles Sri
Lankan evangelist qtd by Desilva
Received as a spiritual nourishment, [Holy Communion] is the ‘health of soul and body, the cure
of every spiritual malady. By it, our vices are cured, our passions restrained, temptations are
lessened, grace is given in fuller measure, and virture once established is fostered; faith is
confirmed, hope is strengthened, and love kindled and deepened.’ Thomas a Kempis Imitation of
Christ qtd by Desilva
In the Eucharist, we look back upon Christ’s giving of himself as a past event. We become
present to him, offering himself to us in the present moment. But we also look forward to the
consummation of Christ’s self giving, when his death for the life of the world will have had its
full effect.
Feasting at the Lord’s table means fasting from other tables.
Steering Through Chaos: Mapping a Clear Direction for Your Church in the Midst of Transition
and Change (Scott Wilson)
The purpose of each service, meeting, class, small group, and activity is to create an opportunity
in which people’s lives can be eternally transformed by the power and grace of Jesus Christ.
==========
As we stretch ourselves to seek God with all our hearts and ask him to use us to advance his
kingdom, we need to be very much aware of the dark side of our hearts: our thirst for personal
glory.
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I realized that people aren’t here to help me fulfill the vision. They are the vision! Everything I
do is about their faith, their growth, their development, and their joy in knowing, loving, and
serving God.
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The leader’s role—especially during periods of transition—isn’t to demand loyalty and affection
from his followers but to point people to Christ as the head of the church.
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We looked at ourselves and our functions, and we concluded that above all else our primary
responsibility was to hear from God and provide leadership in pursuing him. In our meetings, we
began talking far more about the Spirit, how to hear God, and the direction he was leading us.
==========
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Matthew (Stanley Hauerwas)
The Sermon on the Mount cannot help but become a law, an ethic, if what is taught is abstracted
from the teacher.
When the church assumes it is at home in the world, that is, when the church loses the
eschatological character of Jesus's proclamation of the kingdom, too often the salvation wrought
in Christ is construed in individualistic and pietistic terms.
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followers are the visible community of faith; their discipleship is a visible act which separates
them from the world-or it is not discipleship. And discipleship is as visible as light in the night,
as a mountain in the flatland. “To flee into invisibility is to deny the call. Any community of
Jesus which wants to be invisible is no longer a community that follows him.” (Bonhoeffer
2001,
About the cardinal flying into our kitchen window: Our 3 year old son Jack “It thinks it sees a
bad bird; he doesn’t know it’s only him.”
Alexander Schmemann “Great Lent”
Lent is a spiritual journey and its destination is Easter.
In the midst of enjoying life,… we cease to refer our life to that new life which Christ revealed
and gave to us. Indeed, we live as if He never came. This is the only real sin, the sin of all sins,
the bottomless sadness and tragedy of our nominal Christianity. Schmemann
All that which is genuinely perfect, beautiful, and good is at the same time naturally humble.
One “saint” – and here saint means very simply a man taking his faith seriously all the time—
will do more for changing the world than a thousand printed programs. The saint is the only true
revolutionary in the world.
At all times but especially in our troubled and confused era, every Orthodox revival has had its
source in the “rediscovery” of the Sacraments and sacramental life, and above all in a Eucharistic
revival…And that today this Eucharistic and sacramental revival knocks at the doors of our
Church should hearten us as a sign that the fateful crisis of “secularism” can be overcome.
We must work at our salvation because we have been saved, yet it is only because we are saved
that we can work at our salvation. We must always and at all times become and be that which—
in Christ---we already are: “You are Christ’s and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor 3.22)
Ideally, of course, the whole life of a Christian is and should be preparation for Communion, just
as it is and should be the spiritual fruit of Communion. In the early Church it was precisely the
rhythm of that participation in the Eucharist—the living in the remembrance of the one and in the
expectation of the next—which truly shaped Christian spirituality and gave it its true content: the
participation, while living in this world, in the new life of the world to come and the
transformation of the “old” by the “new.”
Even in the darkness and spiritual decomposition of our troubled times the Church “never ages
but always rejuvenates herself.”
To have faith in the Son of God is far more important than to have health and comfort in this life.
Whitacre -- John
Suffering, Martyrdom, and Rewards in Heaven by Josef Ton
The strange paradox is that God’s method of solving the human problem of suffering, of pain,
and of death is by suffering and pain and self-sacrifice to the point of death.
In a world overshadowed by the lie, the truth always hurts and disturbs.
God has no other formula but that of self-giving and self-sacrifice.
Being humble means that however much authority and power and glory God gives you, you
remain under His authority and rule, and always give Him all the praise and all the glory….The
purpose of God, then, is to find people who are capable of handling authority and to whom, in
the end, He can entrust the jobs of ruling over His creation, not merely as a trial run, but for all
eternity.
What kind of people is God looking for?
1. Men and women who have taken the fundamental decision that they will obey their God
absolutely; they will live according to His laws whatever the cost they may have to pay
for it.
2. They prove faithful, persevering through all the difficulties, tortures and even martyrdom.
3. They are passionate to proclaim the sovereign rule of god and to acknowledge Him in
everything, always giving Him all the praise and all the glory, without ever attributing
any merit to themselves.
4. They are continually immersed in the task of telling others about their God, leading
others to Him, and showing others the way to righteousness.
5. Instead of instant satisfaction here and now, they look forward to their true fulfillment in
the eternal future.
The truth is that the grace of God is not only a saving grace, but an enabling grace, as well,
meant to empower us to achieve God’s goals in our lives.
The basic character trait that God wants to develop in His children is that of servanthood, the
capacity to look for the needs and the hurts of others and to live for them, to feed them, to save
them, to lift them up, and to fulfill them. This character trait, according to Jesus, makes for
greatness in the kingdom of heaven.
Love means involvement, participation, sharing, self-giving, and supremely, the yearning for
union.
“it is through our obedience in the service of Christ through many trials and afflictions that the
work of glorification is done in us, in our inner man.
Our problem in the West is that we have always been taught that grace is the free gift of God
given to us. We were never taught that grace is something meant to transform us into sacrificial
givers to others, leading us into the sacrificial involvement in the cause of Christ and His gospel.
…Everything Paul did was for this purpose, namely, for the purpose of spreading the grace of
God to more and more people.
Self-sacrifice belongs to the very nature of God
God’s rewards are always by grace. On the other hand, they are only given as a consequence of
obedience in suffering and in self-sacrifice for others.
The real reward is our becoming like Christ.
There is no genuine life in Christ that is not at the same time, by the power of the Holy Spirit,
being regularly transformed into the likeness of Christ. A gospel of grace, which omits
obedience, is not Pauline in any sense. Gordon Fee on Phillipians
Many theologians point out that in Paul we find both the indicative mood, in which we are told
what we are and what we have in Christ, and the imperative mood, in which we are commanded
to become what we are in Him and to obtain what we have in Him.
Suffering for Christ means, first of all, being aware that Christ is still in pain for a dying world
and is still at work perfecting His body, the church; it involves becoming concerned with His
concerns and agreeing with Him that it is happier to give than to receive. Then, as a result of
this, it means pouring ourselves into service of others until we empty ourselves in order to fill
others, until we become poor in order that they may become rich, and until we sacrifice ourselves
in order that they may be blameless at the judgment seat of Christ.
And as we take the gospel of life and light and glory to the blind people of the world, we
will undoubtedly disturb their earthly pursuits and they might even react by killing us. It
happened to our Forerunner, and He Himself said that it most certainly will happen to us if we
follow in His footsteps.
Jesus took the form of a slave whose essence is absolute obedience
In Romans and in the letters from prison, obedience is the key element in man’s relationship with
God.
In the Pauline doctrine of salvation, we discover two levels of action: the one above is the plane
of God's actions, and the one below is the plane of man's actions. On the higher level, God does
the electing, the calling, the saving, the keeping, the sanctifying, and the glorifying. On the level
below, the individual has to believe, to be zealous for good works, to deny himself or herself, to
serve God and other people, to strive for perfection and holiness, to persevere, to endure
hardship, and to aim to be found worthy of God's calling
Bearing witness is accompanied by death
God has so ordained that whatever He achieves, He accomplishes through His children’s
voluntary suffering. For this reason, the gospel, which is God’s plan in action, requires voluntary
sufferers.
We are all stewards who have been called to feed the starving people of the world with the
gospel. Everything we have has been given to us in order for us to feed them.
Is it not the most extraordinary thing in the universe to have a character that is conformed to the
image of our Father and of our Lord Jesus Christ?
Our conclusion, therefore, is that the essence of the grace of God is in living sacrificially for
others.
The chosen ones must understand that they have to become like Christ in their character first, for
only then will they be able to handle sharing His position of ruling; for this reason, their
character has to be severely tested by sufferings and self-sacrifice. They have to demonstrate the
same mental attitude that Christ displayed toward God and toward other people.
Since they are “in Jesus,” they now participate with Jesus not only in suffering with Him but also
in ruling with Him. Therefore, even in their tribulations, they should act not as the victims but as
the conquerors!
In God’s economy one conquers by dying.
Although all the devils, the world, our neighbors, and our own people are our enemies, revile and
slander us, pound and plague us, we should consider this nothing but a shovelful of manure
dumped around the vine to fertilize it well, or as a cutting away of useless, wild branches, or as a
taking away of a little excess and hindering foliage. Therefore, when they think they have done
us great harm and have well avenged themselves, they do but teach us more patience and
humility and stronger faith in Christ. Luther
It is the slave’s duty to be faithful to the strange and often incomprehensible wishes of his lord,
his master. G. De Ru
Heavenly bliss is not to be regarded as ‘blessed idleness,’ but as a heavenly liturgy in which the
redeemed serve God and the Son. G. De Ru
The first duty of the disciple is to discover the will of his Master and to do it with joy and
passion.
Three fundamental character traits that God aims to produce in us, and they are the most basic
for our growth in Christlikeness:
1. The first and most important is the willingness and capacity to live under the authority of
God. The attitude of submission and obedience to God.
2. The second is agape-love. This is the love that produces a servant attitude even to the
point of self-sacrifice.
3. The third is wisdom which leads to obedience.
Justyn Terry The Justifying Judgment of God
“By suffering and dying in the place of sinful humanity Christ represented the human race and
bore the sin of the world, but that is not to say that every sinner stands forgiven. There needs to
be a repentance of sin and a turning to Christ to receive his forgiveness and the gift of the Holy
Spirit.”
Judgment remains a continuing reality for the Christian, but as sanctification, not condemnation,
for all condemnation has been borne already by Jesus Christ the Lord.
The process of sanctification thus requires ears that are open to this word and a willingness to be
unsettled, discomforted and changed.
When Jesus is confronted by the words of temptation from Satan in the wilderness, from the lips
of Simon Peter, and more implicitly, in Gethsemane and Golgotha, Jesus responds with
contradiction. The words of the devil are not merely resisted but exposed for their error and
refuted.
For the holiness of God makes two demands: for an answering holiness in love and for a
judgment on those who do not answer but defy. And Christ met both, in one and the same act.
PT Forsyth
Harrington, Bonum & Furr Leading Congregational Change
Life-threatening conflict occurs when people lose sight of the vision to which God has called
them. ..Life-giving conflict is a deeper understanding and commitment that grows out of a
significant disagreement. As the church genuinely seeks God’s will in the context of its vision, a
better solution is found and the church is able to carry out its mission more effectively. When
managed in a life-giving manner, conflict empowers the people to solve the problem and keep
the church on mission.
Apart from a strong sense of vitality—in relationship to God and with one another through
shared vision—the change process is doomed to failure.
A good question for leaders of congregations to ask, “Are the things we are doing the most
faithful and effective means of reaching our community with the Gospel?”
A congregation that is not committed to following God or that is experiencing serious discord
within the body will find it virtually impossible to follow the difficult path of transformation.
The fundamental calling of the Christian faith is to worship God. The call of discipleship is to
radically reorder life’s decisions around the one true living God and his claim to our lives. To
respond to this call faithfully and effectively, we must experience life-changing encounters with
God in the body of Christ as a regular discipline.
Individually the change leader must consistently encounter the holiness of God.
A church cannot be on mission with God without an energizing corporate worship experience
that helps the body encounter God’s holiness.
If our hearts are hardened and we do not experience mercy and grace, spiritual and relational
vitality is not possible.
The experience of grace and humility is an empowering one. We live in the awareness that we
must trust and follow God. We are freed from the need to live with the pretense of being in
control.
Creating urgency as described in this model refers to the energy and motivation for change that is
generated by contrasting between an accurate perception of reality and God’s ideal…Hope,
vision and a passion to be right with God and with others are the best tools to propel a healthy
sense of urgency.
LeAnne Payne The Healing Presence
C.S. Lewis said something to the effect that if being Christian does not make one an awful lot
better, it can make one an awful lot worse. Such a one becomes a religious tyrant who, in the
name of a religious cause, has a great deal of power to do harm.
High Christology is what makes high ecclesiology possible John P Meier
John Wesley “Many Christians have just enough religion to be miserable”
“What concerns me is no longer my concern, I must be, from this moment, entirely for God, and
for God alone, not for myself.” Bernadette’s Diary 1873-1875 Lourdes A to Z
Stott: “The task of the evangelist is to reveal Christ in all of his fullness and to reveal the
fullness of the gospel.”
“What communicates now is personal authenticity”
“Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of
an enigma…mystery is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our
own significance.” Bryce Courtnay The Power of One.
LeAnne Payne The Healing Presence
Joyful are the Christians who faithfully proclaim the Word of the Kingdom and move in its
power to free and heal. But such a ministry is never, to my knowledge, without personal
suffering. Those I’ve known who are effective in the healing ministry—that is, in helping others
heal their relationships—incur the severest wrath of the Evil One. They may find every close
personal relationship under an utterly demonic and irrational attack. This is because Christians
who come into spiritual and psychological wholeness are thereby freed to go out and take the
world for Christ.
The Church’s liturgy, whether high of low, formal or informal, must provide the space for the
needed steps and opportunities of praise, worship, and thanksgiving, for repentance, for teaching
of the Word, experience of the Word in the Eucharist, and last but not least, in the invocation of
the Presence of Christ in such a way that the healing gifts are part of our worship.
We all have a liturgy, and it is good or bad, rich or barren, not only in relation to its theological
completeness and balance, but in its capacity to lead us into true worship and thereby mediate to
us the Real Presence. No matter how “correct” it is, it is unsuccessful when there is unbelief and
a failure to unite with God through it. We are the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit, and we
corporately become brimming-over vessels for the Presence in successful worship.
The effect of prayer is union with God, and, if someone is with God, he is separated from the
enemy. Through prayer we guard our chastity, control our temper and rid ourselves of vanity. It
makes us forget injuries, overcomes envy, defeats injustice and makes amends for sin. Through
prayer we obtain physical well-being, a happy home, and a strong, well-ordered society…Prayer
is the seal of virginity and a pledge of faithfulness in marriage. It shields the wayfarer, protects
the sleeper, and gives courage to those who keep vigil…It will refresh you when you are weary
and comfort you when you are sorrowful. Prayer is the delight of the joyful as well as the solace
of the afflicted. Prayer is intimacy with God and contemplation of the invisible…Prayer is the
enjoyment of things present and the substance of things to come. St. Gregory of Nyssa in a
sermon on the Lord’s Prayer
These impious Galileans give themselves to this kind of humanity: as men allure children with a
cake, so they …bring converts to their impiety…Now we can see what makes Christians such
powerful enemies of our gods. It is brotherly love which they manifest toward strangers and
toward the sick and the poor. Emperor Julian the Apostate qtd by Kelsey
A psychiatrist from one of the leading hospitals in the US, in response to what emotions create
the most havoc: anger-resentment hostility, fear-anxiety, guilt – self-punishment, and egotism –
self-centeredness. Morton Kelsey Healing in Christianity. 1973
The fellowship of the Lord’s Supper is the superlative fulfillment of Christian fellowship. As the
members of the congregation are united in body and blood at the table of the Lord so will they be
together in eternity. Here the community has reached its goal. Here joy in Christ and his
community is complete. The life of Christians together under the Word has reached its
perfection in the Sacrament. Bonhoeffer Life Together
Bonhoeffer Life Together “It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in
community with Christian brethren….in the Christian community when the call to brotherly
confession and forgiveness goes forth it is a call to the great grace of God in the church.
When Gandhi was asked by E. Stanley Jones, missionary to India what Christians could do to
make Christianity more naturalized in India, he answered the following immediately, “First, that
all you Christians, missionaries and all, must begin to live more like Jesus Christ. Second, that
you practice your religion without adulterating it, or toning it down. Third, that you emphasize
love and make it your working force, for love is central to Christianity. Fourth, that you study the
non-Christian religions more sympathetically to find the good in them, to have a more
sympathetic approach to the people.”” Qtd in Song Ascents by E. Stanley Jones
People say that we must adopt the language and culture of the day to be relevant to today. That
is a mistake. If the church marries itself to the spirit of the times, it will be a widow in the next
generation. There is a universal language—the language of reality and the language of love.
Have those two things and you’ll be understood and appreciated in any situation, anywhere in
any age. The language of the true Christian throbs with reality and love and is understood and
appreciated anywhere. E. Stanley Jones
No one is farther than one word from God—Yes. Jones
If you are poor enough to receive, the Kingdom of Heaven is at your disposal—all yours. Then
the impossible “demands” of the Sermon on the Mount become possible accomplishments—
possible through an “offer;” the Kingdom of heaven and all its powers and all its resources
belong to you if you are poor enough to receive. Song of Ascents by E. Stanley Jones
Reading maketh a ready man, conference a full man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon
Spiritual practices are vessels of grace and should not become ends in themselves. Subversive
Spirituality Paul Jensen
The methods that make America strong—economic, military, technological, information—are
not suited to making the kingdom of God strong. I have to use a new methodology: truth telling,
love making, prayer and parable. These are not very well adapted to raising the standard of
living in suburbia or massaging the ego. I am undermining the kingdom of self and establishing
the kingdom of God. Eugene Peterson
Unconditional acceptance precedes deep transformation…Both accepting and transforming grace
are foundational to mission. Paul Jensen SS
If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another impression…Mission begins with a
kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that
cannot possibly be suppressed. Leslie Newbigin
Effective treatment of hurry sickness and other addictions include solitude, silence and
transparent community. Paul Jensen SS
Communion, community and ministry constitute the normative disciplines of the Beloved.
Jensen qtg Nouwen.
When mission is accompanied by compassion, healing, transformation and authority, people,
often in crowds are drawn to the missionary. Jensen SS
Mission spirituality must be radically flexible, never absolutized. Thus, we must be ready to
subvert any practice that supplants Jesus himself. Jensen SS
We ask you, Master, to be our Helper and Protector. Save those among us who are in distress;
have mercy on the humble; raise up the fallen; show yourself to those in need; heal the godless;
turn back those of your people who wander; feed the hungry; release our prisoners; raise up the
weak; comfort the discouraged. Let all the nations know that you are the only God, that Jesus
Christ is your servant and that we are your people and the sheep of your pasture. Clement of
Rome
The burning question facing college and youth ministries in the current time crunch is “How?”
How might God do the impossible? Jensen SS
If we do not know we are the beloved sons and daughters of God, we’re going to expect
someone in the community to make us feel special and worthy. Ultimately, they cannot. If we
start with trying to create community, we’ll expect someone to give us the perfect, unconditional
love. But true community is not loneliness grabbing onto loneliness…Many relationships begin
out of a fear of being alone, but they can’t ultimately satisfy a need that only solitude with God
can fulfill. Community is solitude greeting solitude. “I am the beloved; you are the beloved;
together we can build a home or place of welcome together.” Henri Nouwen
Men & Women are from Eden by Mary Healy
The body is a sacrament of the person. Pope John Paul II
The nuptial meaning of the body is our call to self-giving love, which is written into our very
embodiment as male or female. By becoming a gift to one another in a communion of persons,
we learn to love and be loved as God loves, and so fulfill our highest destiny.
The Holy Spirit then gives spouses the grace to do what they cannot do on their own: to turn
back to each other again and again, sincerely asking and granting forgiveness, thus gradually
overcoming any hardness of heart toward one another. The cross of marriage is its glory!
Those who invite Jesus into their marriage, from their prenuptial preparations to their wedding
day and throughout the years, will find the grace they need to mature and to experience the
mystery of Christ’s love revealed through their bodies.
"Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every
thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course.. The world would become religious
overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars
come out every night, and we watch television." Paul Hawken Environmentalist, entrepreneur,
author Commencement Speech at University of Portland, 2009
Walter Brueggeman The Word that Redescribes the World
The dominant text of our culture is a practice of despair.
Faith is to trust present-tense life to future gifts not yet in hand.
Preaching is demanding and often dangerous work.
The sustained energy of the Torah is about an obedience that is commensurate with miracles.
Education in hope is now an urgent matter for us, but one not possible until there has been an
embrace of the education in loss…there is a God who will wipe away every tear that is honestly
shed over loss.
The one who scattered in exile will gather in homecoming like a shepherd gathers the lost, at-risk
sheep.
Israel regularly invites its young into a liturgically constructed counter-world of Yahwistic
possibility.
Nothing has a greater impact on spiritual growth than reflection on Scripture…The numbers say
most churches are missing the mark—because only 1 in 5 congregants reflects on Scripture
everyday. MOVE Hawkins & Parkinson
The leaders of the more highly successful churches…share one key attribute: “an unrelenting,
uncompromising focus and drive to help grow people into disciples of Christ...It's their hearts-consumed by Christ--that make the difference." MOVE Hawkins & Parkinson
LeAnne Payne Restoring the Christian Soul
When we are rationalizing our sins, we are not looking up to God, trusting in Him, and listening
for the healing word. It is therefore necessary that temptation and trial compel us to face
honestly what is in our hearts.
With the greatest joy and no hesitancy or apology whatsoever, we call people to a radical
obedience to Christ. Such obedience requires that we confront, acknowledge, and repent of our
sin and propensity toward sin immediately as it becomes conscious. We are thereby spared
dreadful suffering, humiliating falls, and perhaps even a lifetime of regret.
The renunciation of self-hatred is a deliberate (volitional) step we take, and we keep our eyes on
the Source of our salvation, not on our subjective feelings.
“in our modern age, we yearn for authentic experiences where our courage must be
summoned...through these experiences...'we drop our pretenses, ego and arrogance in favor of
truth and transformation...we fulfill our intention to be authentic.'" Amy Snyder Hell on Two
Wheels on why ultradistance athletes compete …quotes Nancy Soloman.
Vigilance means first of all openness to the good, to the truth, to God, in the midst of an often
meaningless world and in the midst of the power of evil. It means that man tries with all his
strength and with great sobriety to do what is right; it means that he lives, not according to his
own wishes, but according to the signpost of faith. Pope Benedict Jesus of Nazareth Pt II
With only a few exceptions, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal
adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific
domain."[ Expert performance is the end result of individuals' prolonged efforts to improve
performance while negotiating motivational and external constraints. In most domains of
expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of effortful activities (deliberate
practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences, even among elite
performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice K. Anders Eriksson
Ph.D
The Three Comings of the Lord by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1190-1153)
We know that there are three comings of the Lord. The third lies between the other two. It is
invisible, while the other two are visible. In the first coming he was seen on earth, dwelling
among men; he himself testifies that they saw him and hated him. In the final coming all flesh
will see the salvation of our God, and they will look on him whom they pierced. The intermediate
coming is a hidden one; in it only the elect see the Lord within their own selves, and they are
saved. In his first coming our Lord came in our flesh and in our weakness; in this middle coming
he comes in spirit and in power; in the final coming he will be seen in glory and
majesty…Because this coming lies between the other two, it is like a road on which we travel
from the first coming to the last. In the first, Christ was our redemption; in the last, he will
appear as our life; in this middle coming, he is our rest and consolation.
Ed Carruthers—18 yrs old in 1964 and a member of the US Olympic team to compete in Tokyo.
He was a favorite to win the gold in the high jump. He had 3 weeks in Tokyo before his event.
He didn’t have a coach with him and didn’t really know anyone, so he hung around playing ping
pong and eating ice cream during the time. He ended up gaining 10 pounds in two weeks and
despite a crash diet in the few days prior to the event, he could not lose the new weight and
ended up jumping well below his potential and finished a disappointing 8th in the high jump. 4
yrs later he competed in Mexico City and maintained a strict diet and exercise regimen while
awaiting the event. He finished with a silver to Dick Fosbury who won a gold with his
innovative Fosbury Flop.
The need for personal fulfillment is not met in Christianity; it is destroyed. Grace in Practice
Zahl
Andreas Kostenberger Excellence
The world desperately needs to see a display of what God is like. This extends to everything we
are and do—our own personal lives, our marriages and families, our moral and ethical standards,
and the pursuit of our calling, including scholarship.
NT Wright
Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices have become second nature.
Kostenberger
A vibrant and full-orbed spirituality, as exhibited by Jesus, involves active engagement with the
world on mission for God and as empowered by the Spirit…Times of prayerful solitude must
lead to active obedience and service in the world…Christian spirituality is a spirituality of
engagement not withdrawal.
Qtg St. Bonaventure--Let us not imagine that it suffices to read without unction, speculate
without devotion, investigate without wonder, examine without exultation, work without piety,
know without love, understand without humility, be zealous without divine grace, see without
wisdom divinely inspired.
Just because we have been recipients of grace does not mean that excellence comes to us without
any effort on our part. Salvation is by grace, and even sanctification is still by grace, but we must
cooperate with God’s grace as he sanctifies us by his Spirit.
Both passion and boredom are contagious; they pass from teacher to student.
Love is always fleshed out in terms of obedience and service not just feelings.
There is no magic formula for excelling in vocation and personal life other than the “utter
reliance on God’s grace in all things.”
From The Renewal of the Heart is the Mission of the Church by Gregory Clapper
“Our main doctrines, which include all the rest, are three—that of repentance, of faith, and of
holiness. The first of these we account, as it were, the porch of religion; the next, the door; the
third, religion itself.” Wesley
For Wesley, grace is everywhere in Christianity but it is by no means irresistible. Clapper
“May we all thus experience what it is to be not almost only, but altogether Christians! Being
justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus, knowing we have peace with
God through Jesus Christ, rejoicing in hope of the glory of God, and having the love of God shed
abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost given unto us!” Wesley
“In a word, let thy religion be a religion of the heart.” Wesley
“Where are these people who are supposed to be filled with the Holy Ghost, love of God and
love of neighbor?” Wesley
“The impulses of the Holy Spirit, even in men really inspired, so suit themselves to their rational
faculties, as not to divest them of the government of themselves.” Wesley
“God’s grace, seen especially in the forgiveness of sinners, is , from a human standpoint, the
most irresponsible and incomprehensibly loving act that has ever occurred—something that no
responsible human would ever do—and that is why such almost incomprehensible grace is
supposed to engender comprehensive and life-changing gratitude, humility and love in the
recipient.” W
“All the other enemies of Christianity are triflers; the mystics are the most dangerous of all its
enemies.” W
“Christianity is essentially a social religion, and that to turn it into a solitary one is to destroy it;
to conceal this religion is impossible, as well as utterly contrary to the design of its author.”
Wesley
the process of formation comes about not by looking at the exemplar but by looking with the
exemplar. Clapper
God’s grace can inhabit even the most limited options to make possible the flourishing of human
life. Clapper
Humility means knowing that we are not God, and that we merely are trying to use the freedom
God has given us to cooperate with the Holy Spirit. Clapper
From Barbara McClure Moving Beyond Individualism in Pastoral Counseling
Most pastoral counselors interviewed by McClure believe the primary character trait among
clients is narcissism. (a self-important grandiosity compensating for a deep sense of lack and
shame”
“Narcissists are outer-directed. They have no center. They have fragmented, unstable
relationships. They don’t have good internalized mirroring of idealizing self-objects. They are
always looking outside for a sense of meaning and value. Our postmodern world is fragmented,
mobile, and makes outer-directed, narcissistic, fragmented people. “ pastoral counselor qted by
McClure…The result is a person who has significant difficulties in relationships, who is ridden
with poor self-esteem and self-consciousness, who finds it difficult to function without a deep
sense of shame and inadequacy. Often persons with deficient selves are beset with a feeling of
helplessness, of being caught in a terrible bind without freedom or agency. McClure
Popular culture and media images promote and reflect the ideology of self. The answers to all
problems related to health, identity and enhancement could be found through purchasing the
right product or hiring the right expert. Consumption itself becomes therapeutic.
“The cross…the place of ultimate rejection becomes for all who believe, the place of
reconciliation.” Kern qtd in Rosner ed The Wisdom of the Cross
“The man whom Jewish logic derides as weak, pathetic and powerless and whom Greek wisdom
dismisses as incomprehensibly stupid, is known by those with spiritual insight to embody an
other-worldly power and wisdom.” Philip Kern
Paul wants to indicate how God overcomes by contraries and how the gospel is not human.
Chrysostom
And truly there is no sign more likely of divine election, than when a person, being more careful
about his or her salvation than any other thing, prays continually to God for the gift of true
repentance, of true humility and perfect charity and perseverance unto the end: and not content
with prayer only, strives also, as far as he or she can, to seek and to find the kingdom of God and
his righteousness as our Savior admonishes us. Robert Bellarmine
But the devil, who rejoiced for a time because he had overcome and cast down the first man,
became afterwards more sorrowful over the victory of Christ than he was joyful before. For from
that victory of Christ it came to pass that not only men, as was Adam, but even women and
children insult the devil and triumph over him. ..he is overcome by the grace of Christ, and so
overcome that many display trophies of chastity,, patience, humility, charity, although the devil
eagerly and constantly casts his fiery darts of temptation and persecution. Robert Bellermine d
1621
Demonic oppression is said to occur when there is a clear demonic influence in the things a
person thinks, says, and does. It is more a matter of what we call a ‘shadowing’ or ‘clinging’ of
spirits.’ The devil’s intent is to block healing. The devil attaches himself like some kind of
insidious leach, to an individual. He lives within the individual’s orbit, what we might call
sphere of activity. Generally this happens in cases where there is an emotional disturbance of
some sort. The tactical advantage for the devil here is great. Overt possession can be ruled out
fairly quickly, but because the individual is suffering emotionally one can never be sure where
the emotional illness ends and the demonic oppression begins. He can ride these cases for a
very long time, causing great havoc in families—good families in particular
…We are most like God—we who have been created in His image and likeness—when we
are living in a community of relational love. That’s what God lives in with His Son and the
‘offspring,’ if you will, of their boundless love—the Holy Spirit. Together, they live a totality of
unconditional love. We who live in loving families experience a foretaste of this great love here
on earth. We are living as God created us to live in this life. We bear the sign, love unto
victimhood, of being created in His image and likeness. This of course is completely
unacceptable to the devil. His mission is alienation--a negation of the good, of love itself. It is
precisely this image and likeness of God that he seeks to destroy in the loving family. So we see
him running the perimeter of families looking for a seam, an opening, a weakness in one or more
of the family’s members. When he finds one, he slips inside and enters the very life of the family,
causing unceasing torment…Frequently, it seems it is an emotional disorder within one of the
family members that presents him with his opportunity. Brian Gail Fatherless
Mothers know a lot of things that the rest of us don’t. A mother’s heart is God’s masterpiece,
His final creative act in Genesis. Most of us spend our entire lifetimes trying to understand
things that a mother simply intuits within the deep recesses of her heart. Gail..Fathlerless
Charles Gore, Bishop of Birmingham and Oxford d 1932
If Jesus is an absolutely trustworthy teacher in the spiritual concerns of life, then temptation
from evil spirits is a reality, and a reality to be held constantly in view…It is then in view of
unseen but personal spiritual adversaries organized against us as armies, under leaders who
have at their control wide-reaching social forces of evil, and who intrude themselves into the
highest spiritual regions ‘the heavenly places’ to which in their own nature they belong, that St.
Paul would have us equip ourselves for fighting in ‘the armour of light.’…The attacks of the
enemy upon the thoughts will be frequent and fiery. A constant and rapid action of the will will
be necessary to protect ourselves from evil suggestions lest they obtain a lodgement. And the
method of self-protection is to look continually and deliberately out of ourselves up to Christ—to
appeal to Him, to invoke His name, to draw upon His strength by acts of our will.
In his 1941 preface to Screwtape Letters, Lewis summarizes one of the main points he makes in
his Preface to Paradise Lost. He writes, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which
our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe,
and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them."
No heresy has ever sprung from pagan belief, from Aristotle, and from the books of other
heathen. No, these necessarily emerge from the church. Heresy and false doctrine are taken and
adduced from no other source than Scripture. Luther
The soul must be guarded with great care, lest through our love for letters it receive some
contamination unawares, as men drink in poison with honey. Basil
The love of Christ is held out to us as the subject which ought to occupy our daily and nightly
meditations, and in which we ought to be wholly plunged. Calvin
When you read a passage of Scripture, and have any enjoyment therein, go to your sick neighbor
and tell them what God has said to you. If you meet an ignorant one when you know somewhat
of the things of God, tell them to him. Nations are enriched by the interchanges of commerce,
and so are Christians. We each have something that another has not, and he has something that
we need. Let us trade together. Spurgeon
If a child is certain that his father loves him, he will grow up sure of himself and able to face life.
A child out walking holding his father’s hand or being swung around by his father with
exclamations of joy or who talks to his father as man to man is the happiest and freest creature in
the world. Fr. Reneiro Cantalamessa
When the church lives in prayer, faithfully seeking to discern the movement of the Spirit; when it
is itinerant in the sense that it responds to such movements freely rather than seeking to control
them; when it shows that authentic power displays itself in a servant disposition that empowers
others; and when it lives out of the poverty of the Christ, sharing its possessions with the world’s
needy, then when it speaks about “good news to the poor,” the world actually can find meaning
in the message. Likewise, when the church offers an alternative to the demonic powers of
addiction in the contemporary world, when it heals the sick by restoring them to full humanity,
when it is a community of reconciliation that is holy by means of embrace rather than by
exclusion, then its message of “good news to the poor” can be heard by the world, because it is
made powerfully present in communities gathered in the name of the Lord. Luke Timothy
Johnson, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church
God is infinitely happy in the enjoyment of himself, in perfectly beholding and infinitely loving,
and rejoicing in, his own essence and perfections. J Edwards
“The covenant of grace is not another covenant made with man upon the abrogation of [the
covenant of works], but a covenant made with Christ to fulfill [the covenant of works],. And for
this end came Christ into the world, to fulfill the law, or covenant of works, for all that receive
him.” J Edwards
We shall be saved freely and for nothing if we will but accept of Christ, but we are not able to do
that of ourselves, but it is the free gift of God. J. Edwards
God’s mission in human history, then, is to advance this cause of gathering together all things
and causing all things to partake of his glory…the work of redemption continues to advance in
real-time history through the work of the Spirit of Jesus. And the Spirit works through cyclical
outpourings of himself, bringing reformation and revival. Sean Michael Lucas God’s Grand
Design on J. Edwards
The way in which the greatest things have been done towards carrying on this work always has
been by remarkable pourings out of the Spirit at special seasons of mercy. Jonathan Edwards
“True faith is always aware how small and inadequate it is.” James Edwards “Mark”
John Howard Yoder
Tolstoy calls the “key” to the scripture message: the cure for evil is suffering.
“it is a vision of God’s rule and the church’s participation in it, both in this world and the one to
come. It is a communal vision, rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus and empowered by the
Holy Spirit, that encompasses the entirety of humanity.”
The cross of Jesus is the extreme demonstration that agape seeks neither effectiveness nor
justice, and is willing to suffer any loss or seeming defeat for the sake of obedience….the key to
the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience.
His call to an ethic marked by the cross, a cross identified as the punishment of a person who
threatens society by creating a new kind of community leading a radically new kind of life.
The believer’s cross is, like that of Jesus, the price of social non-conformity
We understand Jesus only if we empathize with this three-fold rejection: the self-evident,
axiomatic, sweeping rejection of both quietism and establishment responsibility, and the difficult
constantly reopened, genuinely attractive option of the crusade.
It is because a transformed individual will definitely behave differently that the preaching of the
gospel to individuals is the surest way to change society.
Christians are witnesses to a person, to God who in Jesus Christ has become our neighbor and
teacher and servant, a person whom we must in every act either confess or disavow.
Following Jesus really means basing our actions on our participation in Christ’s very being.
The distinctness of the church of believers is prerequisite to the meaningfulness of the gospel
message.
A church that is not “against the world” in fundamental ways has nothing worth saying to and for
the world.
By refusing to extend the chain of vengeance, we break into the world with good news.
When God lets down from heaven the new Jerusalem prepared for us, we want to be the kind of
persons and the kind of community that will not feel strange there.
The ethic of discipleship is not guided by the goals it seeks to reach, but by the Lord it seeks to
reflect. It is no more interested in “success” or in “effectiveness” than he.
Gospel and Tradition Sesboue
The existential risk, always inherent in the act of faith, demands to be expressed, so that today
faith is an “exposed” faith (Rahner). This exposed and fraternal faith does not shelter the believer
from the anxiety which crosses every human life, does not give an immediate response to
everything, and does not save a slow and difficult search. This vulnerable faith, which is not to
say uncertain, is a faith which wishes to live and progress by always moving forward to the space
of freedom which it is offered. This fraternal faith towards every person, humble yet joyful,
praying the Lord to come to the help of his or her weakness, is able to give witness that the
Gospel places the believer in truth and freedom and makes them able to commune with every
question which arises in the human heart.
Every generation of Christians is confronted with its own tasks, But to each of these tasks
corresponds a grace, for, according to Augustine’s saying, “God gives what he ordains,” which
enables him to ordain what he will. To obey the Gospel, then, is to encounter God’s grace, to
place oneself within reach of the divine magnetic field. But tasks and graces need to be sought
out.
Tradition is the active transmission of faith in the Gospel
Every time the Church goes to new peoples, it encounters and receives a new grace of light.
Every time Christians compare the Gospel to the cultural questions of their time, there are new
areas of human conscience which are evangelized.
We are convinced, from the Scriptures and after praying for thousands of people to receive the
baptism in the Holy Spirit over ten years, that there is no believer who cannot speak in tongues,
if he or she is properly prepared, and really ready to trust the Lord. Dennis and Rita Bennett “The
Holy Spirit and You.”
"My role is to equip them to minister, then to support them as they are doing it. The paperwork
just has to pile up. My primary responsibility is to spend time with people, either equipping
them or encouraging them as they are using those gifts." Pastor qtd by Barna in User-Friendly
Churches
Growing churches consistently practiced what they preached. The people who comprised their
congregations were not the least bit self-conscious about their behavior. Barna
To be a servant of Christ means getting in the trenches of ministry and doing what needs to be
done to further God’s kingdom—using the gifts He has given us. To be part of the church means
accepting the responsibility to be a minister on behalf of the church. It also means that the
church, usually through discerning leaders, has the responsibility not only to articulate the
servant principle but to point out and affirm individual gifts. Barna
We are called to the vision of relentless hopefulness in the lives of others. Chuck DeGroat
Vincent Donovan, a Catholic priest and missionary to Tanzania for 17 yrs in the late 20th century
writes of his conviction that “the gospel itself, untied to any social service or other inducement,
is a message filled with power and fertility and creativity and freedom.” “I believe missionary
work is that work undertaken by a gospel oriented community, of transcultural vision, with a
special mandate, charism, and responsibility of spreading and carrying that gospel to the nations
of the world, with a view of establishing the church of Christ.” Christianity Rediscovered
“This poverty of spirit is what is called for in a missionary, demanding that he divest himself of
his very culture, so that he can be a naked instrument of the gospel to the cultures of the world.”
“The goal of evangelization, and the basis for its urgency, is to put all things under the dominion
of Christ.”
There will always be a cross somewhere in the midst of the Christian solution to evil, a cross of
the pain involved in not returning blow for blow; a cross of the natural, human bitterness felt in
the experiencing of hatred and returning love in its place, of receiving evil and doing good; a
cross reflected in the near impossibility of counting oneself blessed in the midst of persecution,
or of hungering and thirsting for justice, or in being merciful and peacemakers in a world which
understands neither….There is on one hand, a moral, human, political solution to evil in the
world. And there is a Christian solution. The gospel, which contains the latter, will always be
compromised by identifying it with the former.
Alexander Schmeman, the Orthodox theologian, calls intercession the “absolutely essential act”
in which we make the intercessions of Christ our own.
“Intercession is the sacred duty of all baptized people of God, a priestly activity of high dignity
for those in communion with God in Christ.” Ormonde Plater Intercession
Intercessor – Rees Howell early 20th century – “The intercessor receives the authority of a place
of prevailing prayer with God. His or her responsibility is to crucify the flesh and give himself to
the Spirit for prayer until he or she is released. It is a true dying to self that bears fruit.”
marius
“The great churches are those that have learned the art of accepting ‘unacceptable persons.’ In
the eyes of God, no person is unacceptable. Kennon Callahan
Effective, successful churches live in the confidence of God’s promise that some of their best
years are yet to come….God is not simply in the past. God is in the present and the future
leading and drawing us toward newness of life. Hope is stronger than memory. K. Callahan
Most people have four life searches: for individuality, community, meaning and hope. Callahan
The purpose of the church is to involve people in God’s mission in the world, to involve them in
worship that is corporate and dynamic and in a group wherein they experience significant
relationships of sharing and caring. Callahan
I am afraid there are Calvinists, who, while they account it a proof of their humility that they are
willing in words to debase the creature, and to all the glory of salvation to the Lord, yet know not
what manner of spirit they are of…Self righteousness can feed upon doctrines, as well as upon
works; and a man may have the heart of a Pharisee, while his head is stored with orthodox
notions of the unworthiness of the creature and the riches of free grace. John Newton
People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate
toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith and delight in the Lord. We drift toward
compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift
toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it
relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped
legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated. D.A.
Carson “For the love of God”
We should actively break down our reticence and renounce the lies which would prevent us from
exercising spiritual gifts….When a person senses that the Lord desires to speak through him, he
should turn to Jesus, tell him that he wants to obey, and watch for the right time to speak.
Sometimes we are afraid that we might make a mistake, but mistakes are nothing to fear. The
Lord knows our heart’s desire to serve him without mistakes. He will speak through our
imperfect prophecy and teach us how to exercise the gift without errors. Equipped with faith in
Jesus and surrounded by the love of brothers and sisters, we can learn to use the charisms
effectively. Bert Ghezzi “Build with the Lord”
James f. Engel’s research demonstrated that in most societies there is always a group of people
who are on the verge of converting to Christianity, and their openness to it involves both
intellectual and attitudinal factors. John Wimber Power Evangelism
As Christians, the most fundamental choice that we make is to submit our lives to the control of
the Holy Spirit… Wimber
For some do certainly and truly drive out devils, so that those who have thus been cleansed from
evil spirits frequently join themselves to the Church. Others have foreknowledge of things to
come: they see visions, and utter prophetic expressions. Others still, heal the sick by laying their
hands upon them, and they are made whole. Yea, moreover, as I have said, the dead even have
been raised up, and remained among us for many years. And what shall I more say? It is not
possible to name the number of gifts which the Church, throughout the whole world, has
received from God, in the name of Jesus Christ. Irenaeus Against Heresies.
“Worship according to the gospel is the celebration of the presence of the crucified Lord who
comes to us by the power of the Spirit to take us deeper into his risen life and further into his
messianic mission. Worship is a personal and communal experience of being loved by God and
expressing love to God. I yearn for sustained periods of sung worship, glossolalia, prophecy,
healing, woven into the movement of liturgical worship by Spirit-led leaders. I hunger for the
biblical symbols of the grace of the gospel – bread, wine, water, oil, light – to be received with
prayer and thanksgiving and used faithfully and joyfully. I desire all things God has given to the
church – the wisdom of the liturgical inheritance, the enlivenment of the Spirit, the powerful
teaching of Scripture – all serving the grace of the gospel and helping us to celebrate the
presence of the risen Christ with his people. God, through the Spirit, gifts the members of
Christ’s body to minister the grace of Christ. God, through his Spirit, takes the ordinary things
of human life to communicate the extraordinary life of Christ.” Christopher Cocksworth
Anne Rice about writing books reflecting her journey through atheism writes that an element of
this was “the struggle of brothers and sisters in a world without credible fathers and mothers.”
If any one “thing” in all my studies led me back to Christ, it was His people, the Jews. Anne Rice
on her return to Christianity and belief in God.
It wasn’t too long at all before I came to see the distinct personality of each Gospel
writer, and to reach the inevitable conclusion—in contradiction to much sophisticated
scholarship—that the Gospels were indeed first-person witness, and that they contained our
earliest and most accurate knowledge of Christ Himself. The novelist in me responded to the
internal and effortless unity of each Gospel, the kind of unity that emerges in any heartfelt
written account….
The gospels, once I plunged into them and let them really talk to me, came across as
distinct and fascinating original works. Nowhere does one see the “smoothing” of an editor or a
group of collaborators. Too many mysteries are woven into the fabric of the work.
Also something has happened to me in the study of these documents. I find them
inexhaustible in a rather mysterious way.
I’m at a loss to explain the manner in which every new examination of the text produces
some fresh insight, some new cascade of connections, some astonishing link to another part of
the canon, or to the Old Testament backdrop which enfolds the whole.
The interplay of simplicity and complexity seems at times to be beyond human control.
Picking up the Gospel on any given morning is picking up a brand new book.
There is something so explosive about this body of work that it not only dwarfs the
fragile assumptions of the skeptics, it dissolves them into nothingness…
In sum, there’s no visible bottom to this well of meaning. It’s unlike my experience with
any other written text.
Frequently, so frequently to be disconcerting and humbling, I feel myself on the verge of
some response to the words that will carry me beyond where reason has led. To say the words
are evocative doesn’t cover it. The words push one to the brink of mystical realizations. The
words never stop inspiring responses that are beyond words…
The novelist in me has found this complex web of truth and meaning in these books
when, frankly, I did not expect to find anything so powerful at all…
It is not enough to read Scripture. It is not enough to go over and over the beautiful
words and phrases and events of Our Lord’s life.
What does it mean to be a child of this Christ of Scripture? What does it mean to be a
believer in Him?...
I began to realize that the message of Christ was for me: to love my friends and to love
my enemies. From Anne Rice in Called out of Darkness on reading the Bible
Loghlan Sofield & Carroll Juliano Principled Ministry
“The vision and mission of the Church is to be an evangelizing community, bringing the Good
News into every segment of society.” Loghlan Sofield & Carroll Juliano Principled Ministry
Leaders must be people of vision and leaders must have a passionate and energizing commitment
to that vision.
People listen more willingly to witnesses than to teachers. When they do listen to teachers, it is
because they are witnesses.
The major criterion for discerning your effectiveness is how many individuals have you
empowered to assume leadership for what you have been hired to do.
Effective leaders are characterized by their ability to animate the gifts of others, which is at the
heart of collaboration.
Why Christians attempt to remove pain…Frequently, of course, we are motivated by a genuine
compassion and desire to help. At other times, we attempt to remove another’s pain because the
pain in the other makes us uncomfortable and forces us to confront our own humanness,
mortality, and vulnerability. So, attempting to take the pain away from others is often an
unconscious attempt to bring relief to oneself. At still other times, the desire to eliminate
another’s pain is really an unconscious way of increasing one’s own sense of potency: “Look at
how powerful I am. I can take away pain.” The lower the self-esteem, the more likely this is to
be a key motivator.
Leadership of groups frequently produces anxiety. A frequent response to anxiety is to revert to
what one knows best. In the case of [ministers trained primarily in preaching and teaching] they
revert to their teaching and preaching skills when the situation calls for something else.
Any change in the present, resurrects the “unfinished business” from previous losses…Dealing
with change means dealing with the painful unfinished business.
The chance for accepting change is enhanced when individuals believe that they have been listed
to and understood
Early Christian Fathers ed by Cyril Richardson
Hence we should give up empty and futile concerns, and turn to the glorious and holy rule of our
tradition. Let us not what is good, what is pleasing and acceptable to Him who made us. Let us
fix our eyes on the blood of Christ and let us realize how precious it is to his Father, since it was
poured out for our salvation and brought the grace of repentance to the whole world. Clement’s
first letter
We ask you, Master, be our “helper and defender.” Rescue those of our number in
distress; raise up the fallen; assist the needy; heal the sick; turn back those of your people who
stray; feed the hungry; release our captives; revive the weak; encourage those who lose heart.
“Let all the nations realize that you are the only God,” that Jesus Christ is your Child, and “that
we are your people and the sheep of your pasture.”
You brought into being the everlasting structure of the world by what you did. You,
Lord, made the earth. You who are faithful in all generations, righteous in judgment, marvelous
in strength and majesty, wise in creating, prudent in making creation endure, visibly good, kind
to those who trust in you, “merciful and compassionate,” – forgive us our sins, wickedness,
trespasses, and failings. Do not take account of every sin of your slaves and slave girls, but
cleanse us with the cleansing of your truth, and “guide our steps so that we walk with holy hearts
and do what is good and pleasing to you.”
Yes, Master, “turn your radiant face toward us” in peace, “for our good,” that we may be
shielded “by your powerful hand” and rescued from every sin “by your uplifted arm.” Deliver
us, too, from all who hate us without good reason. Give us and all who live on the earth
harmony and peace, just as you did to our fathers when they reverently “called upon you in faith
and truth.” And grant that we may be obedient to your almighty and glorious name, and to our
rulers and governors on earth
We praise you, who alone are able to do this and still better things for us, through the
high priest and guardian for our souls, Jesus Christ. Through him be the glory and the majesty to
you now and for all generations and forevermore. Amen. Clement’s first letter
“Thus, united in your submission, and subject to the bishop and the presbytery, you will be real
saints. Ignatius’ letter to Ephesians
Try to gather together more frequently to celebrate God’s Eucharist and to praise him…At these
meetings you should heed the bishop and presbytery attentively, and break one loaf, which is the
medicine of immortality, and the antidote which wards off death but yields continuous life in
union with Jesus Christ. “
Everyone must show the deacons respect. They represent Jesus Christ, just as the bishop has the
role of the Father, and the presbyters are like God’s Council and an apostolic band. You cannot
have church without these..Whoever does anything without bishop, presbytery, and deacons does
not have a clear conscience. Ignatius to the Trallians
What I need is gentleness by which the prince of this world is overthrown. “
The greatness of Christianity lies in its being hated by the world, not in its being convincing to it.
Ignatius to Romans
When the heathen hear God’s oracles on our lips they marvel at their beauty and greatness. But
afterwards when they mark that our deeds are unworthy of the words we utter, they turn from
this to scoffing, and say that it is a myth and a delusion. Clement’s 2nd Letter
We warn you in advance to be careful, lest the demons whom we have attacked should deceive
you and prevent your completely grasping and understanding what we say. For they struggle to
have you as their slaves and servants, and now by manifestations in derams, now by magic
tricks, they get hold of all who do not struggle to their utmost for their own salvation—as we do
who, after being persuaded by the Word, renounced them and now follow the only unbegotten
God through his Son. First Apology of Justin
We have learned from the prophets, and declare as the truth, that penalties and punishments and
good rewards are given according to the quality of each man’s actions. If this were not so, but
all things happened in accordance with destiny, nothing at all would be left up to us. For if it is
destined that one man should be good and another wicked, then neither is the one acceptable nor
the other blameworthy. And if the human race does not have the power by free choice to avoid
what is shameful and to choose what is right, then there is no responsibility for actions of any
kind. But that man walks upright or falls by free choice we may thus demonstrate. “
He is ever leading the human race to reflection and remembrance, showing that he cares for it
and provides for men. “
We speak of God, of the Son, his Word, and of the Holy Spirit; and we say that the Father, the
Son, and the Spirit are united in power. For the Son is the intelligence, reason, and wisdom of
the Father, and the Spirit is an effluence, as light from fire. Athenagoras’ Plea
After D Day, an anxious infantry officer told war correspondents, “When I saw one of our boys
in our landing craft nonchalantly reading a copy of Superman, I knew everything would be all
right.” From Superman by Larry Tye
The very notion of “orthodoxy” breeds a historical triumhalism or arrogance that should be
avoided at all costs. DH Williams from The Great Tradition – A Great Labour
Origen conveyed the Pagan intellectual Celsus’ objection to Chrisianity. Celsus reproached
Christians by saying “having grown in numbers and being widely dispersed, they are further split
and divided; every body wants to have his own party.” “
Origen responded that Christians on all sides believed the Scriptures were divine utterances but
some in their attempt for reverence interpreted doctrine differently. “
Could it be that we are fearful of too luminous a meeting with God?...Casual worship can be a
pre-emptive move to mitigate our fear. Edith Humphrey “”
We are bold because God has, in Christ, made us his very own children. Children can be “at
home” in God’s house. “”
The Holy Spirit cannot be domesticated by our liturgy, but rather comes to enliven the liturgy.
Simon Chan “”
For both Scripture and Christian Tradition, the modern emphasis on the individual who stands
against the community asserting his or her own independence is nothing short of a life of idiocy.
D. Stephen Long “”
That the church is apostolic means that it must always relate to, and therefore be “in conformity
with the origins of Christianity. “”
When I came to the mission, I had the very strongest hopes with regard to a kind of social work,
reaching the people through all sorts of channels—one would not trouble much about anything
else if only the people were “reached.” Experience brings a stern schooling, but a very
convincing one…Three main principles gradually came out clear—1. Anything that was merely
popular in order to attract masses of people, without the mark of sacrifice on it, is to be sternly
repressed. 2. To build on a clear and definite religious basis, made intelligible to the people by
constant teaching. 3. To loyally carry out every part of the Prayer Book in the daily life of the
people. Charles Booth Life and Labour of the People in London 1902. The accout of an
Anglican Minister on an “evangelistic gateway” The ministry was transformed by relearning the
habits of prayer, catechism and discipline.
There must be intensity before extension. “”…sooner or later people would be reached…their
respect for Religion would have gown as they saw its seriousness, its sacrifice, its true and
definite mark of the Cross, instead of mere popular attractiveness. “”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Life Together
The fact is we are sinners…He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. He gave his followers
the authority to hear the confession of sin and to forgive sin in his name Jn 20:23 When I go to
my brother to confess I am going to God. Since the confession of sin is made in the presence of a
Christian brother, the last stronghold of self-justification is abandoned. The sinner surrenders; he
gives up all his evil. He gives his heart to God, and he finds the forgiveness of all his sin in the
fellowship of Jesus Christ and his brother. Forgiveness of sins is the sole goal of confession.
It is not the experience of life but experience of the Cross that makes on a worthy hearer of
confessions.
The day of the Lord’s Supper is an occasion of joy for the Christian community. Reconciled in
their hearts with God and the brethren, the congregation receives the gift of the body and blood
of Jesus Christ, and, receiving that, it receives forgiveness, new life, and salvation….The
fellowship of the Lord’s Supper is the superlative fulfillment of Christian fellowship. As the
members of the congregation are united in body and blood at the table of the Lord so will they be
together in eternity. Here the community has reached its goal. Here joy in Christ and his
community is complete. The life of Christians together under the Word has reached its
perfection in the sacrament.
Luther: When I admonish you to confession, I am admonishing you to be a Christian.
Francis MacNutt Deliverance from Evil Spirits
In one respect the practical loss of confessing to another Christian in our contemporary culture
has led to an almost complete loss of the sense of sin. In another respect, it has hindered the
assurance of forgiveness and absolution for our sins leading to a cowardice in facing spiritual
warfare. Essentially, failure to confess sins can lead to pride or shame.
Satan is a vicious legalist, and if any unconfessed sin is connected to the demonic infestation, the
invading spirit will probably not leave when you pray, or it may leave for a short time but will
come right back and invade the area of weakness.
John Jewell 16th century on Confession to other men:
The sort of confession made unto men I do not condemn. It may do much good, if it be well used.
James 5 commends it among the faithful. He speaks not of priest or minister, but of every one of
the faithful. Every Christian may do this help unto another, to take knowledge of the secret and
inner grief of the heart, to look upon the wound which sin and wickedness has made, and, by
godly advice and earnest prayer for him, to recover his brother. This is private exhortation, and
as it were catechizing or instructing in the faith, and a means to lead us by familiar and special
conference to examine our conscience, and to espy wherein we have offended God. The use and
practice hereof is not only to be allowed, but most needful and requisite, [if the superstition and
necessity which many have fondly used and put there in be taken away.]
"the God who can turn something as ugly as a crucifixion into something as beautiful as a
resurrection can surely provide for the revival of our marriages." Tim Savage No Ordinary
Marriage
We must take up the pick-ax and dig deeply into God’s word. Savage
Having an involved father is the strongest predictor of a child’s eventual level of empathy. Teach
Your Children Well Madeline Levine.
Over the last 20 yrs, kids have lost close to two hours of play every day, most of that
unstructured play. And it is unstructured play that provides opportunities for kids to be curious,
creative, spontaneous, and collaborative. Teach Your Children Well Madeline Levine.
The need for religions to bring their most treasured claims for moral and social life into the
public arena has never been greater in our increasingly postmodern and secular age. Lewis
Winkler
In the passage where the New Testament says that every one must work, it gives as a reason "in
order that he may have something to give to those in need." Charity-giving to the poor-is an
essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it seems
to be the point on which everything turns. Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be
unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be producing a society in which
there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce that
kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the
meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality. I do not believe one can settle
how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the
standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving
away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too
small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable
expenditure excludes them. I am speaking now of "charities" in the common way. Particular
cases of distress among your own relatives, friends, neighbours or employees, which God, as it
were, forces upon your notice, may demand much more: even to the crippling and endangering
of your own position. For many of us the great obstacle to charity lies not in our luxurious living
or desire for more money, but in our fear-fear of insecurity. This must often be recognised as a
temptation.Sometimes our pride also hinders our charity; we are tempted to spend more than we
ought on the showy forms of generosity (tipping, hospitality) and less than we ought on those
who really need our help.
--Mere Christianity
When I look into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely
deeper than hell. And it appears to me, that were it not for free grace, exalted and raised up to the
infinite height of all the fullness and glory of the great Jehovah, and the arm of his power and
grace stretched forth, in all the majesty of his power and in all the glory of his sovereignty; I
should appear sunk down in my sins infinitely below hell itself, far beyond sight of everything,
but the piercing eye of God’s grace, that can pierce even down to such a depth, and to the bottom
of such an abyss. J. Edwards personal notes and narratives
I charge you by Him that shall judge the quick and the dead, whose I am and whom I
serve, who is the searcher of all hearts—choose this day whom you will serve! If sin is best,
serve sin and reap its wages! If you can make your bed in Hell; if you can endure eternal
burnings, be honest with yourself and look at the wages while you do the work!
But if you would have Heaven; if you would be among the many who shall be glorified
with Christ, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Believe now! Today! “If you will hear His voice,
harden not your hearts as in the provocation.” “Kiss the Son, lest He be angry and you perish
from the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little.” Brothers and Sisters, Mothers and Fathers,
believe and live! Cast yourself at Jesus’ feet, put your trust in Him—
“Renounce your works and ways with grief,
And fly to this most sure relief,”
giving up all, you are to come to Him to be saved by Him now and saved eternally! O Lord, bless
my weak but earnest appeal, for Christ’s sake! Amen. Spurgeon Sermon 191CHRIST
GLORIFIED AS THE BUILDER OF HIS CHURCH 1858
Turtullian on Gen 2:24: What a blessed thing is the marriage of two believers, of one hope, one
discipline, servants of the same Master! Where there is one flesh, there is also one spirit.
Together they pray, together they prostrate themselves, together they fast, teaching each other,
exhorting each other, supporting each other. They are together in God’s Church, together at
God’s feast, together in straits, persecutions and consolations.
Richard Hays: The love that binds man and woman in Christian marriage is the love of the
cross…Marriage is a sacrament in the true essence of the word: it is both a sign and vehicle of
God’s grace.
Charity and its Fruits J Edwards ed Kyle Strobel
The goal of the sermon is not to empower but rather to leave one with no foothold or handhold
other than Christ. Kyle Strobel describing John Edwards' preaching
Since the canon of the Scripture has been completed, and the Christian church fully founded and
established, those extraordinary gifts have ceased. Edwards --miraculous, prophecy, tongues,
The saving grace of God in the heart, working a holy and divine temper of soul in the gift of faith
and love must doubtless be the greatest blessing that ever men receive in this world; greater than
any of the gifts of natural men, greater than the greatest natural abilities, greater than any
acquired endowments of mind, greater than any attainments in learning, greaer than any outward
worth or honor, and a greater privilege than to be kings and emperors. Edwards
Christians expression of envy 1. Undermine the worthiness of the person envied. 2. Claim that
the envy arises from a love of justice. 3. Undermine the honor of the person envied by
questioning his use of prosperity, and 4. Question whether the person envied is spiritually mature
enough to prosper. Edwards
The natural genuine fruit of love to God is obedience. Edwards
If you are a Christian, you must learn that you will undoubtedly feel all kinds of trials and evil
inclinations in your flesh. For if faith is present. A hundred more evil thoughts and a hundred
more new trials come than were there before. Only see to it that you are a man and do not let
yourself be taken captive by them. Resist constantly and say: “I will not! I will not!” .. A true
Christian life is never at rest. Luther
Worship as Repentance. Walter Sundberg
“To go forward to reform a broken church, the church must go back to the roots of its penitential
practice, to the great catholic consensus of worship as repentance.”
If one accepts a fallen world, subject to the devil, deserving of judgment, where people waste
their lives and find no ultimate satisfaction. Into this world comes the promise of release, the
offer of the grace of God. To receive this grace requires one thing and one thing only:
repentance.
Worship as repentance is the center of Christian identity.
Liturgical worship, at its best, has this purpose: to call Christians to repentance; to warn them to
be under no illusion as to who they are and how far they fall short when they stand before God
and holy things; to teach them to worship God in humility; to feed them the Bread of Life; to
make them ready to give testimony to Christ in world and deed.
Human beings take great comfort in being allowed to locate the eternal in the midst of their lives.
If nothing is required of faith, why practice faith at all?
Most people spend their lives avoiding serious decisions.
The churching of America was accomplished by aggressive churches committed to vivid
otherworldliness. Stark and Finke The Churching of America.
At any time and at any place, God can break into human life like a thief in the night. When he
does this he can be full of surprises.
Worship is meant to change the person in heart and action
Worship grounded in a theology of repentance was powerful instrument for witness and an
engine for growth.
Holiness in the early church was a moral imperative.
Like the early church, the Middle Ages and the Reformation taught in no uncertain terms that
worship is grounded in repentance.
“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking
outward together in the same direction”Antoine De Saint-Exupery
James Dunn “We cannot claim to accept the authority of the NT unless we are willing to accept
as valid whatever form of Christianity can justifiably claim to be rooted in one of the strands that
make up the NT.”
Only a spiritual ear attuned to God’s voice and ways might be able to identify order in the
“chaotic” (in our view) ways that God sometimes acts. William Atkinson
Believing must be to the degree of trust before it is saving. Edwards
by purchasing the Spirit for the elect, Christ purchases communion and participation in the very
life of God. Kyle Strobel on Edwards’s teaching
Strobel also discusses Edwards’s view on the Spirit’s involvement in conversion: “the Spirit, as
the love of God, is the bond of love which unites the elect to Christ. the Spirit illumines the
person so that he can rationally respond to Christ as Savior and Lord…the Spirit is infused into
the person as grace itself.”…For a believer to have faith there has to be a movement of the Spirit
to illumine a person so that he/she can truly receive Christ.
One glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God, and supreme amiableness of Jesus Christ,
shining into the heart, overcomes and abolishes this opposition, and inclines the soul to Christ, as
it were, by an omnipotent power. J.Edwards
Rhys Bezzant writes that Edwards firmly promoted justification by grace, the righteousness of
Christ and the sovereign sanctifying work of the Spirit, all of which allowed no room for either
salvation through works or salvation without works.
The first and worse cause of errors, that prevail in such a state of things (Awakening), is spiritual
pride. This is the main door by which the devil comes into the hearts of those who are zealous
for the advancement of religion. Edwards
No light in the understanding is good that does not produce holy affection in the heart. Edwards.
Though Christian fortitude appears, in withstanding and counteracting the enemies that are
without us; yet it much more appears, in resisting and suppressing the enemies that are within us;
because they are our worst and strongest enemies, and have greatest advantage against us. The
strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ appears in nothing more, than in steadfastly
maintaining the holy calm, meekness, sweetness, and benevolence of his mind, amidst all the
storms, injuries, strange behavior, and surprising acts and events of this evil and unreasonable
world. Edwards
Our “chief end” must always be the same – to maximize glory and honor to our “beautiful
Savior.” Samuel Logan Jr on J. Edwards
“Tis only faith without works that justifies, yet the Christian Religion secures Obedience to God
and Good Works. “ Edwards on Galations 5:6…By definition, justifying faith is “faith that is
accompanied by works.”
In a Christian community everything depends on whether each individual is an indispensable
link I a chain. Only when even the smallest link is securely interlocked is the chain unbreakable.
Every Christian community must realize that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that
the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of fellowship.
Not self-justification, which means the use of domination and force, but justification by
grace, and therefore service, should govern the Christian community. Once a man has
experienced the mercy of God in his life he will henceforth aspire only to serve. The proud
throne of the judge no longer lures him; he wants to be down below with the lowly and the
needy, because that is where God found him. Bonhoeffer Life Together
The very content of revelation is to teach us precisely that we are indeed a dependent people.
Haurwas
Christian leadership is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness
and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest. Henri
Nouwen
There is no tidy doctrine of the Spirit found in Acts or for that matter in the whole New
Testament. Michael Green
Sleep would not come to me. Instead, quite out of the blue, the spirit of praise came upon my
soul. All seemed to be release. All seemed to be freedom…He seemed to be bubbling up from
within, surrounding from without, ascending from below, and descending from above. Michael
Cassidy describing a refreshing/baptism of the Holy Spirit in The Prayer Jesus Prayed
"This Gospel continues with a special situation. The same Peter who confessed Jesus Christ,
says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. I will follow you, but let us not speak of the
Cross. This has nothing to do with it.” He says, “I’ll follow you on other ways, that do not
include the Cross.” When we walk without the Cross, when we build without the Cross, and
when we profess Christ without the Cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are worldly, we
are bishops, priests, cardinals, Popes, but not disciples of the Lord.
I would like that all of us, after these days of grace, might have the courage - the courage
- to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the Cross of the Lord: to build the Church on the
Blood of the Lord, which is shed on the Cross, and to profess the one glory, Christ Crucified. In
this way, the Church will go forward." Pope Francis
A sense of failure and profound inadequacy is unavoidable in ministry. Brian A. Williams The
Potter’s Rib
No cult of personality is acceptable in ministry. Williams
Anything you say will be more convincing if it is part of a story. A story has a beginning, middle
and end and it is brought to life by its details. A story grounded in real events will always trump
an answer that amounts to a recitation of platitudes. Paul Frieberger “When Can You Start?”
“And as we by our prayers vanquish all demons who stir up war…we in this way are much more
helpful to the kings than those who go into the field to fight for them.” Origen
“For fallen human beings viewing other humans as persons of sacred worth and inviolable
dignity is not at all ‘natural.’” Christians must follow Christ’s teachings in obedience and
engage in “active, compassionate mercy on behalf of the poor, the weak, the powerless, the sick,
the suffering, and any others who cannot fully protect their own interests, which is all of us some
of the time and some of us all of the time.” David P. Gushee
Spiritual Warriors make tough choices, confidently, about who, how, and where they will focus
their internal attention. They live from the inside—funneling the energy and revelation they
receive from the Holy Spirit out into the world. Graham Cooke Qualities of a Spiritual Warrior
God has this intense desire that we would share in His holiness. Cooke
Living in a vulnerable way before the Holy Spirit, being God-conscious before the Father as
Jesus lived, having our hearts fixed on Jesus—this is the only way to live. Cooke
Spiritual warriors save all their anger for the enemy. They live to destroy the works of the devil.
When they see God’s people trapped in sin, religious practices and unbelief, they do not rage
against the people. Like Jesus they have a compassion that asserts itself but also a directness of
speech and action that engages people with God. We come to set prisoners free. Cooke
The first rule of warfare is that we cannot take ground from the enemy if he has ground in us. Sin
gives him a legal right over us until we renounce it and are cleansed. Cooke.
God will speak more to a person in silence than He will in conversation; he has a way of
inhabiting an environment that speaks volumes. Cooke
What you think about God is the most important thought you are ever going to have about
anything. Cooke
Spiritual warriors are totally convinced that the Father is utterly incapable of letting them down.
Cooke
The testimony of the Spirit is an inward impression on the soul, whereby the Spirit of God
directly ‘witnesses to my spirit that I am a child of God’; that Jesus Christ hath loved me, and
given himself for me; that all my sins are blotted out, and I, even I, am reconciled to God. John
Wesley
He that now loves God—that delights and rejoices in him with an humble joy, an holy delight,
and an obedient love—is a child of God. Wesley
The fact we know: namely, that the spirit of God does give a believer such a testimony of his
adoption that while it is present to the soul he can no more doubt the reality of his sonship than
he can doubt of the shining of the sun while he stands in the full blaze of his beams. Wesley
The Scriptures describe the being born of God, which must precede the witness that we are his
children, as a vast and mighty change, a change ‘from darkness to light’, as well as ‘from the
power of Satan unto God’; as a passing from death unto life’, a resurrection from the dead.
Wesley
By the fruits which he hath wrought in your spirit you shall know the ‘testimony of the Spirit of
God.’ (Gal 5.22) And the outward fruits are the doing good to all men, the doing no evil to any,
and the walking in the light—a zealous uniform obedience to all the commandments of God.
(and spiritual gifts I think)….the immediate result of this testimony is the ‘fruit of the Spirit’’
namely, ‘love, joy, peace; longsuffering, gentleness, goodness. Wesley
We are not designed to have merely functional relationships in the Kingdom. God is highly
relational, and so intimacy must be the highest priority of life in the Spirit…The biggest battle in
the church at this time is the battle for intimacy with God. The modern church is too functional
to be intimate with the Lord. Worship is seen only as a means to an end. Graham Cooke
In his essay, “Beginning Afresh with Christ in the Search for Abundant Life in Africa,” The Rev.
Dr. Stan Chu Ilo writes,
Christ is that true home that Africans seek, night and day, as an answer to the deepest needs of
their souls and the strongest concerns of their temporal reality…I am convinced that if the
Church speaks more of Christ and not of herself, and that if the Church speaks convincingly of
Christ as he is and presents him as he is through the life of the Church and that of Christians,
she will have more appeal not only to Africans but to the whole world. It will demand that the
way of being Church in Africa should be the way that shows the face of Christ and leads to
Christ.
“The word or deed that stands out, like that of Christ, must relate to the deepest concerns of men
and women about the meaning of their lives, and their ultimate destiny.” Ilo
“The prophetic ministry to which the Church and Christians are called to embrace will inevitably
call for sacrifice and pain—and sometimes death—but the forces of evil cannot stop the reign of
God from coming about in Africa, if the people hold onto Christ and follow his path as shown by
the Church.” Ilo
Experts tell us that Christianity is growing faster in Africa than on any other continent, at the
same time the people are rapidly becoming poor and the moral and the social fabrics of society
are disintegrating. Christianity is not making a significant difference to African nations. Why
should this be so? The main reason is that we…failed to apply the gospel to the whole life and
limited it to spiritual life only. We read the Scriptures selectively, placing emphasis on those
verses that talked about salvation and neglecting those that talked about justice and material well
being. George Kinoti – Kenyan author.
Unless the Church, its members and organizations, express God’s love for man by involvement
in the present conditions of man, then it will become identified with injustice and persecution. If
this happens, it will die—and, humanly speaking, deserve to die—because it will then serve no
purpose comprehensible to modern man. Julius Nyerere, former President of Tanzania
It is a problem when you do not know anyone in the same pew with you at church. Rev Bekeh
Ukelina Utietiang, Catholic priest from Nigeria in West VA
Feeling compelled to perform in order to live up to your own standard is a hallmark of unhealthy,
obsessive passion. Jake Breeden
We humans had better be good at the thing software can’t do so well, yet: authentic, humaman
interaction. Breeden
Christianity tells a true story about humanity, which makes sense of all the stories that humanity
tells about itself. Alister McGrath in CS Lewis A Life
If Theism had done nothing else for me, I should still be thankful that it cured me of the timewasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary. CS Lewis
As the eye is little in comparison of all the members, and the pupil, small as it is, is a great
vessel, because it sees at one glance sky, star, sun, moon, cities and other creatures, and likewise
these things, seen at the glance, are formed and imaged in the little pupil of the eye ; so is the
mind in the heart, and the heart itself is but a little vessel, and yet there are dragons, and there are
lions, and there are venomous beasts, and all the treasures of wickedness ; and there are rough
uneven ways, there are dangerous chasms ; there likewise is God, there are the angels, there are
life and the kingdom, there are light and the apostles, there the heavenly cities, there the treasures
of grace, there are all these things. St. Macarius of Egypt HOMILY XLIII 273
The church does not yet live in the full daylight of the kingdom of God, but shares with the
world a life under the shadow of divine judgment. Oliver O’Donovan
The desire to rule is the mother of heresies John Chrysostom
One of the central tasks of the theologian is to preserve the understanding of God as mystery (as
inexhaustibly intelligible.)…Mystery conditions everything we say about God. Richard Miller –
Catholic Theologian
We are not ultimately in control of our own existence. That is what it is to be a creature, and the
reaction to the discovery of our creatureliness is all too often horror, anger, rebellion, and
despair. Fr. Michael J. Hines Catholic theologian
The Christian Tradition does not simply affirm that Jesus suffers with us. It maintains that
because he suffers with us everything is changed. Hines
Faith enables us to hold with equal strength the reality of our suffering and the conviction that
God’s will is always love. ..God wills one thing and one thing only—love, agape, self-gift. ..As a
believer, my calling is not to surrender either pole of my experience, not to deny either God’s
love or my suffering. Hines
Any discussion of suffering must exist concretely “on the ground” and in our guts as well as in
our ideas and words about it. Even the best words about suffering always remain inadequate.
Elizabeth Dreyer Catholic theologian
The Christian life demands that we act to prevent, remove, and heal suffering. Dreyer
Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner: “Wherever you come across someone who is dying, you find me,
the one who is dying on the cross.”
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
Churchill
Saving sustaining sovereign grace is not grace to bar what is not bliss
Nor flight from all distress but this: the grace that orders our trouble and pain
and then in the darkness with all his heart and with his infinite soul is there to sustain
and bring you to a point where one day there will be nothing but joy. Piper
"Successful people do not drift to the top. It takes focus, discipline and energy--all of which the
Lord Jesus has in abundance!" Graham Cooke
The sum of all good things is that God's Name be glorified through my life. For above all, I
think, we should pray and regard it as the sum of prayer, that the Name of God should not be
blasphemed but rather be glorified and be hallowed through our way of life. In us then, according
to the Divine Word, the Name of God and His Lordship, which we invoke, should be hallowed
so that others may see our good works and glorify the Father who is in heaven (Mt 5:16).
Gregory of Nyssa on the Lord’s Prayer
My soul, have you found what you are looking for? You were looking for God, and you have
discovered that He is the supreme being, and that you could not possibly imagine anything more
perfect. You have discovered that this supreme being is life itself, light, wisdom, goodness,
eternal blessedness and blessed eternity. Anselm
In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One
reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us
from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield
better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s
because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the
common elements of rejection and heartbreak.
To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and
well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of
medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running
patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced,
desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely
presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant
interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know
what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.”
“It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.” From “What Makes Us
Happy?” The Atlantic, June 2009. Joshua Shenk on the Harvard Grant study w/ George
Valliant
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-ushappy/307439/?single_page=true
A fool is someone who becomes wise too late. Spurgeon
The bread you store up belongs to the hungry; the cloak that lies in your chest belongs to the
naked; the gold you have hidden in the ground belongs to the poor. St. Basil the Great.
God is the only source to be found of any good things, but especially of those which make a man
good and those which will make him happy.” Augustine
Maybe the most difficult challenge for Christians is to actually believe that God is fundamental
to human flourishing. That I think is today’s most fundamental challenge for theologians,
priests, and ministers, and Christian lay people: to really mean that the presence and activity of
the God of love, who can make us love our neighbors as ourselves, is our hope and the hope of
the world—that God is the secret of our flourishing as persons, cultures, and interdependent
inhabitants of a single globe. Miroslav Volf “Human Flourishing”
The same Everlasting Father, who takes care of you today, will take care of you tomorrow. He
will either shield you from suffering, or give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace then,
and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations. Francis de Sales 17th Century Catholic
Bishop of Geneva
Perhaps the greatest contrast between the early church and the modern Western church is the
absence of spiritual power. Equally, a huge contrast between the world fifty years ago and the
world of today is the general disappearance of prayer in the average evangelical church. Os
Guiness.
One of the newer colleges in Oxford is named after Thomas Linacre, who was Henry VIII’s
doctor, the founder of the Royal College of Surgeons, and a friend of Erasmus and Thomas
More. Prior to the Reformation, only the clergy had access to the Bible, and there is a faous
account of the time when a priest gave Linacre a copy of the four Gospels. As an expert in
Greek, he read them quickly, and handed them back with the comment, “Either these are not the
Gospels or we are not Christians.” Os Guiness.
The fact that Christianity has to be learned must itself now be learned all over again, first and
foremost, I think, by those who call themselves evangelicals. JI Packer
The discipline of learning the faith is needed to complement the discipline of teaching it, and the
parties need to be committed to each other in the shared task of spiritual advance together.
Packer
Today’s catechist, like Paul, needs to be a convincing, winsome example of living by the Holy
Spirit in the power of the truth being taught, and in a way that consistently reflects the example
of Christ. Catechizing is for continuous conversion; it seeks to shape us into faithful worshipers
of God in Jesus Christ, devoted and disciplined followers of our Lord, self-denying servants of
God in his church, clear-headed travelers through this often hostile world, and passionate
outreachers to those benighted, misguided, and lost. And it is vital that catechists themselves be
good role-models of all this. Packer
The church is the community where the “individual-as-chooser” never quite feels at home.
Church is a place that infringes upon choices, and eventually everyone feels like an outsider
because they have bumped into people who make different choices than they do. Pastors that
don’t recognize this in-built network of potential frictions are ripe for burnout. Parishioners that
hope they will eventually find a church where everyone will choose as they do are bound to feel
restless in every church they choose. The church does not exist because people choose to join it,
but rather because God has chosen to gather his people into communities that belong to him.
The gospel is about belonging, not to ourselves, but to the Triune God and because of that
belonging to others. Impossible communities become possible in the gospel. Richard Lints.
The church is the divinely appointed context wherein God ministers new life via his word and
Spirit. Strictly speaking, “Scripture” makes no sense apart from the community whose life,
thought, and practice it exists to rule and shape. Kevin Vanhoozer
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, teachings from the 5-6th Centuries
Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my Little Office.
I fast a little. I pray. I meditate. I live in peace and as far as I can. I purify my thoughts. What
else am I to do?”
“What else,” Abba Lot says, “can I do?” Then the old man stood up, stretched his hands
towards heaven and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire, and he said to him, “If you will,
you can become all flame.”
Young professionals who aspire to and achieve purpose-driven goals in life tend to be more
satisfied, experiencing lower anxiety and less depression than those who achieve extrinsic goals
such as wealth, fame, or status. Research shows that people who seek and then achieve extrinsic
goals tend to have more anxiety and depression. Chatham Sullivan
The primary responsibility of leadership, is to take responsibility. Choice, to be made
authentically, must be formed from the leader’s ability to own the burden that accompanies
power. Clarity attracts others. Sullivan
Children are completely dependent; left to themselves, they are psychologically incapable of
coping with life. They need to be accepted and protected by someone else. Not until then will
they feel safe and able to deal with life. Children must feel that someone is so concerned about
them that they have been drawn, so to speak, into the safety of the orbit of that someone’s life.
Only then is the void of dependency filled, only then are they in a condition in which natural
growth and development can take place. Conrad Baars & Anna Terruwe MD’s Healing the
Unaffirmed.
Only too infrequently does one encounter individuals who are blessed with the wisdom of
“forgiving others for being other,” ditto
The most typical characteristic of mature human love is tenderness, whether manifested in the
tone of voice, words, touch, or the way one looks at the beloved. People are tender because they
sense another’s goodness and beauty, because they realize how precious the other is. …
Opposite of human love in tenderness”criticizing, nagging, fault-finding, belittling, pointing out
and reminding one of past mistakes and present shortcomings. These acts are direct and explicit
denials of the other’s goodness.” Ditto
“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there
is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody
worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe
choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or
the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical
principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship
money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have
enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual
allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a
million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's
been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story.
The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.” ― David Foster Wallace
We are called to be people who learn to hear God’s voice speaking today within the ancient text,
and who become vessels of that living word in the world around us. Wright
The outline of John’s Gospel pressed down to one sentence: The force that conceived and bore
all things came here among us,, proved his identity in visible human acts, was killed by men no
worse than we, rose from death, and walked again with his early believers, vowing eternal life
beside him to those who also come to believe that he is God and loves us as much as his story
shows. None of the other active world religions says anything remotely similar or comparable.
John’s story, which became the orthodox Christian faith, is in fact repugnant to Judaism, Islam,
Buddhism, and to all the indigenous beliefs of India and Japan. There is likewise no parallel in
the theologies of John’s contemporaries—the dead myths of Greece or Rome, with their
demigods and deified bureaucrats. John hands us a new thing. It is a work of madness or a
blinding revelation. Reynolds Price “Three Gospels”
The Bible stories had begun to engage me steadily in silence and to draw me toward the singular
claim at their burning heart—Your life is willed and watched with care by a god who once lived
here. Reynolds Price “Three Gospels”
A strong argument can easily be made that Mark is the most original narrative writer in history,
an apparently effortless sovereign of all the skills and arts of durably convincing storytelling.
Reynolds Price “Three Gospels”
With their intense focus on consecutive action, significant speech, and the life-transforming
urgency of the claims they make for their human subject, the gospels are fundamentally unlike
earlier forms of narrative. Reynolds Price “Three Gospels”
If two thousand years of pious handling had not dimmed both John’s story and its demand, his
gospel would still be seen as the burning outrage it continues to be, a work of madness or
blinding revelation. Its plain but supremely daring verbal strategies, the human acts it portrays,
and the claim it advances—from the first paragraph—demand that we make a hard choice. If we
give John the serious witness it wants, we must finally ask the question it thrusts so flagrantly
toward us. Does it bring us a life-transforming truth; or is it one gifted lunatic’s tale of another
lunatic, wilder than he?...And it stands unchallenged as the crown of firsthand witness to a life as
shocking, and as crucial to the history of the world, as any life known. Reynolds Price “Three
Gospels”
For one man to thrust through the Hebrew dread of eating blood and of human sacrifice and
apparently to demand the actual consumption of his physical body is a deed that cries for drastic
response—exile, confinement for lunacy, immediate stoning. Or obedience. Reynolds Price
“Three Gospels”
From The Liturgical Vision of Pope Benedict XVI by Mariusz Biliniewicz
We trust Scripture and we base ourselves on Scripture, not on hypothetical reconstructions which
go behind it and, according to their won taste, reconstruct a history in which the presumptuous
idea of our knowing what can and cannot be attributed to Jesus plays a key role. Joseph
Ratzinger
The manner in which God is to be worshipped is not a question of political feasibility. It
contains its measure within itself, that is, it can only be ordered by the measure of revelation, in
dependency upon God. JR
The events of Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection, which took place some 2,000 years ago in
Jerusalem, have two layers which could be called ‘historical’ and ‘trans-historical.’ The event
which is called ‘the Paschal Mystery’ is not only a unique, once-for-all, unrepeatable act, but
also a transcendental reality which goes beyond history and reaches to all times and places where
it is being re-enacted in the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist. Biliniewicz
Priesthood is about representing the mysteries of faith through the power that does not come
from oneself or from the community and that cannot be obtained in any natural way. The power
that constitutes priesthood comes from God and represents God; therefore, it requires of the
priest that he be ‘invisible’ in his ministry in order to focus everybody’s attention on God. Thus
priesthood and the power that comes from it is something that has very little to do with the
personality of the priest, but has a lot to do with the priest’s ability to step back and allow God to
be encountered. Biliniewicz on Pope Benedict
“No one eats that flesh without first adoring it; we should sin were we not to adore it.” St.
Augustine
Receiving the Eucharist means adoring Him whom we receive. Only in this way do we become
one with him, and are given, as it were a foretaste of the beauty of the heavenly liturgy. The act
of adoration outside Mass prolongs and intensifies all that takes place during the liturgical
celebration itself. Benedict
There can be no active participation in the sacred mysteries without an accompanying effort to
participate actively in the life of the Church as a whole, including a missionary commitment to
bring Christ’s love into the life of society. Pope Benedict
Grace heals a corrupted nature rather than perfects a good nature. Biliniewicz
Wherefore in this sacrament, (if it be rightly received with a true faith,) we be assured that our
sins be forgiven, and the league of peace and the testament of God is confirmed between him and
us, so that whosoever by a true faith doth eat Christ’s flesh, and drink his blood, hath everlasting
life by him. Which thing when we feel in our hearts at the receiving of the Lord’s Supper, what
thing can be more joyful, more pleasant, or more comfortable unto us. Archbishop Thomas
Cranmer
Gafcon Communique 2013
The gospel alone has the power to transform lives. As the gospel is heard, the Holy Spirit
challenges and convicts of sin, and points to the love of God expressed in his Son, Jesus Christ.
The sheer grace of God in setting us free from sin through the cross of Christ leads us into the
enjoyment of our forgiveness and the desire to lead a holy life. This enables the relationship with
God that Jesus makes possible to flourish. Moreover, just as individual lives can be transformed,
so can the life of churches. We therefore commit ourselves and call on our brothers and sisters
throughout the Communion to join in rediscovering the power of the gospel and seeking boldness
from the Holy Spirit to proclaim it with renewed vigour.
Without an element of importunity and persistence, or urgency and almost a holy violence with
God, we have little right to expect that God will hear our prayer and answer it. Lloyd-Jones
The trouble with preaching lies deep in our actual spiritual condition, in a pathological condition
of our Christian existence. Helmut Thielicke
Because the sermon is a risk, even an adventure, it needs the corrective of the liturgy and the
stationary element that is inherent in it. Here the Holy Scriptures are read and the ancient
prayers of the church are said. Here are the responses which have become the common treasure
of the church. Thielicke
The liturgy too requires careful correction and modernizations. But these will be only variations
and paraphrases of the abiding, the permanent. And this abiding element the hearers who are
present will receive into themselves, and through them it will become a present reality. For it is
precisely as the abiding element that the liturgy should pass over into the flesh and blood of the
actual, present church. But it can do this only on two conditions, first that it be understood, and
second, that it be constantly repeated, from childhood to old age, that it become as familiar as the
voice of one’s mother. Helmut Thielicke
One must be able to let things grow, because it is only the devil who has no time. Helmut
Thielicke
It is certainly not too much to say that one of the services which God demands of churches is that
they relentlessly question themselves and grow more mature in the process. Helmut Thielicke
It is not anxiety about preaching itself that gives cause for concern, but rather the kind of anxiety.
For if all appearances are not deceiving, our anxiety is not a spiritual anxiety, not a dread of the
overwhelming power of what is promised, but rather the pusillanimity of the natural
homunculus, whose datebook is already filled with other engagements, the empty windbag who
is afraid of being completely punctured and of betraying his futility. For the preacher betrays
himself to a degree that no one else does. And he who has nothing will in the pulpit lose even
what he thinks he has. … Godly sorrow is present when we are frightened by the overwhelming
power of the promise but nevertheless on the strength of that promise open our mouths to speak.
But how can the mouth speak with authority if the heart has not first been exposed to that which
here calls for an instrument and a herald. Helmut Thielicke
The celebration of the Eucharist as the “summit towards which the activity of the Church is
directed” and “the fountain from which all her power flows.” Vatican II “Constitution and
Sacred Liturgy”
Where there is a hungry person in the world, the Eucharist is incomplete. Father Pedro Arrupe
Active Eucharistic memorial must translate into the witness of lived experience…Eucharistic
memorial demands no less of the baptized woman or man than to be sacrament of Christ in the
marketplace. Carmel Pilcher
Authentic Christian sacrifice can never be something that someone does to, or demands from,
someone else. Robert Daly “Sacrifice Unveiled”
Heaven and earth and all things tell me to love you. My Lord whatever I behold on the earth, or
above the earth, it all speaks to me and exhorts me to love you; because all things tell me that
you have made them for the love of me. St. Augustine
Revelation of God is the defined goal of the present events of history. Pannenberg
Worrying about your ability makes you much more likely to ultimately fail. Countless studies
have shown that nothing interferes with your performance quite like anxiety does—it is the
creativity killer. Heidi Grant Halverson
The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits. Joshua
Foer
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in
freedom. Einstein
When you take charge of a project, start by inspiring people with your vision. And make sure all
those involved are crystal clear about their responsibilities and non-negotiable deliverables. But
don’t micro manage or insist they do everything your way. If you really want to get the best out
of them, leave plenty of gaps for them to fill in with their own creativity and initiative. Mark
McGuinness
Humans have a strong tendency to overestimate both the pain of failure and how negatively
others perceive our mishaps. Michael Schwalbe
Most people are strongly wired to be intolerant of uncertainty. We experience it as pain, fear,
anxiety and doubt. When faced with the need to coexist, or horror of horrors, act in the face of
great uncertainty, we recoil. The enemy of creativity is not uncertainty; it is inertia. Jonathan
Fields.
The challenge was for churches to provide practical inspiration, usable advice, and psychological
insights for dealing with the difficulties of daily life—or risk irrelevance. Mitch Horowitz One
Simple Idea. P112
Congregants from mainline churches increasingly demanded that problems with money,, alcohol,
marital relations, and self-image be addressed from the pulpit and in church programs. 113
Horowitz
The formula that revitalized the Protestant churches grew from the precedent laid down by New
Thought—namely that faith ought to serve as a source of self-improvement. …New Thought’s
most dynamic voices had long promoted a vision of therapeutic spirituality. And their efforts
altered America’s religious landscape. Horowitz 113
We must try to think of a god who can be the greatest sufferer of all and yet still be god Paul
fiddes
There is only one broad strategy possible for any theodicy It is to suggest that the worlds
suffering is nor gratuitous but a necessary contribution to some greater good which could only be
realized in this mysterious way. Polinkinghorne
When one is pitted against professionals it is best to behave like one. Daniel Silva
So Jesus confronts us with himself, sets before us the radical choice between obedience and
disobedience, and calls us to an unconditional commitment of mind, will and life to his teaching.
John Stott The Message of the Sermon on the Mount 205
What is taught [in the Sermon on the Mount] is symptoms, signs, examples, of what it means
when the kingdom of God breaks into the world which is still under sin, death, and the devil.
You yourselves should be signs of the coming kingdom of God, signs that something has already
happened. Joachim Jeremias
“The Sermon on the Mount is addressed to the entire world, the entire present and future, and yet
it demands discipleship and can be understood and lived out only by following Jesus and
accompanying him on his journey…What the Beatitudes mean cannot be expressed in purely
theoretical terms; it is proclaimed in the life and suffering, and in the mysterious joy, of the
disciple who gives himself over completely to following the Lord.” Joseph Ratzinger Jesus of
Nazareth
“The Sermon on the Mount remains the greatest moral document of all time.” Jeroslav Pelikan
An ethic [Kingdom of Heaven ethic] can only be lived out in community (the kingdom
manifestation in the church) and through the power of the Spirit now at work. Scot McKnight
Sermon on the Mount 13
Reading or teaching or preaching the Sermon on the Mount is evangelism. McKnight 25
Jesus is the one who says who is and who is not blessed McKnight 36
The three central moral themes of the Beatitudes are humility, justice and peace. McKnight 38
Jesus blesses three kinds of people: those who are the humble poor, those who pursue
righteousness and justice, and those who create peace 51
The best way to preach the Sermon on the Mount is to preach what it is: a demand on the
disciple. McKnight 54
"This word of Jesus isn't legalism ramped up to the highest level, but confrontation with the
messianic King, who offers his citizens the way to live the gospel-drenched life in the kingdom."
McKnight 220
Union with Jesus Christ is the origin and source of all spiritual blessings and all discipleship. 263
The Country Parson is generally sad, because he knows nothing but the Cross of Christ, his mind
being defixed on it with those nails wherewith his Master was; or if he have any leisure to look
off from thence, he meets continually with two most sad spectacles, Sin and Misery; God
dishonoured every day, and man afflicted. Nevertheless, he sometimes refresheth himself, as
knowing that nature will not bear everlasting droopings, and that pleasantness of disposition is a
great key to do good; not only because all men shun the company of perpetual severity, but also
for that when they are in company of perpetual severity, but also for that when they are in
company, instructions seasoned with pleasantness both enter sooner and root deeper. George
Herbert the Country Parson
In the novel Hostage by Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy is walking with his Father. Both are Orthodox
Jews, and the father is a survivor of Auschwitz.
Together, hand in hand, united by ties that seemed indestructible, father and son went to a
Hasidic shrine for the service. Along the way, his father asked him his usual question: “What
have you done w ith your days and evenings during this whole past week, my dearly beloved
son?”
“I listened.”
“Whom did you listen to.”
“Reb Moshe-Hayim the Melamed, the tutor.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that our Sages not only knew how to express themselves well, but also how to
listen well.”
“What else?”
“He said that God also listens, but He alone understands.”
Proud and happy, the father stroked his son’s head and said: “Remember that’s the most
important lesson you’ll have learned in life.”
“Why?”
“Because, with it, you’ll be able to build palaces in time and cultivate gardens in your
mind.” P12
from Grounded by Bob Rosen
Buffeted From Every Direction: (here he is discussing the pressures to business leaders;
however, I would say all of these also apply to church leaders.)
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One of the more powerful forces is speed—people can’t keep up with the pace of change.
Another force is the constant state of impermanence and instability.
Complexity in the business world is also adding pressure to your job.
You are facing increasing demands for transparency, along with more scrutiny and a
greater need for integrity.
Almost every leader must content with intense competition.
The globalization of markets, peoples and communities.
If we had to point to one quality within a leader that can almost guarantee the prospect of
success, it is the belief in the power of self-awareness and adaptability. 19-20
Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of Lego Group: “There’s no single answer to anything anymore.”
128
Edelman Consulting, a global public relations firm, conducts a trust and credibility survey of
people around the world. Its 2013 Trust Barometer survey polled 25,000 people and found that
less than one in five respondents believe that a business or government leader will actually tell
the truth when confronted with a difficult issue. In 2013 this represented the biggest decline from
a previous year since the survey began. 139
Cognitive neuroscientists conclude that the self-conscious mind contributes only 5 % of a
person’s cognitive activity. The implication of this is that people are largely unaware of 95% of
their thoughts, feelings, decisions, and instincts. For you to expand this 5% requires you not
only to examine your internal dialogues but also to elevate them from instinctive, survival-driven
fear reactions and automatic thinking patterns into deliberate self-awareness, into full
consciousness. 312
The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ by St. Alphonsus Liguori
St. Bonaventure called the wounds of Jesus Christ wounds that cut through the most senseless
hearts, and which inflame the most frigid souls. How many arrows of love come forth from
those wounds, to strike the hardest hearts! What flames issue from the burning heart of Jesus
Christ, setting on fire the coldest souls! And how many chains come from that wounded side to
bind the most rebellious hearts. 7
So we must be persuaded that a soul can neither do, nor think of doing, anything more gratifying
to Jesus Christ than to take Communion with a disposition befitting so great a guest whom we
have to receive into our heart. 18
Who upon seeing a crucified God dying for our love, could resist loving him? Those thorns cry
out too loudly, those nails, that cross, those wounds, and that blood, all seeking to make us love
him who has loved us so much. One heart is too little with which to love this God who is so in
love with us. 33
5 signs that a person engaged in spiritual matters works only for God: 1. we are not bothered by
the failure to reach our goals, because seeing that God does not wish it, neither do we. 2. If we
rejoice at the good done by others, as if we had done it. 3. we do not desire one assignment over
another but gladly accept what obedience to superiors requires. 4. If after our actions we seek
neither thanks or approval from others; and so, if others complain or disapprove we will not be
upset but satisfied simply because we have pleased God. 66
5 means for escaping tepidity and setting out on the path to perfection: 1. The desire of
perfection. 2. The resolution to attain it. 3. Meditation 4. Frequent Communion 5. Prayer.75
The Lord speaking to St. Theresa of Avila: “I would speak to many souls, but the world makes
so much noise in their ears that they cannot hear my voice. Oh! If only they would stand a little
apart from the world.!”112
When souls enjoy the loving presence of God, then all of the sufferings, ignominy, and
mistreatments by others, rather than afflicting them, console them, giving them grounds for
offering God a pledge of their love. 185
To evangelize is to so present Christ Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come
to put their trust in God through Him, to accept Him as their Savior, serve him as their King in
the fellowship of His church. Anglican Archbishop’s Committee on Evangelism 1918 Lausanne
Committee for World Evangelisation.
The devil is but another name for our impatience. We want bread, we want to force God's hand
to rescue us, we want peace-and we want all this now. But Jesus is our bread, he is our salvation,
and he is our peace. That he is so requires that we learn to wait with him in a world of hunger,
idolatry, and war to witness to the kingdom that is God's patience. Stanley Hauerwas. Matthew
(p. 55). Kindle Edition.
To admire Satan is to give one's vote for a world of misery and a world of lies and propaganda,
wishful thinking and incessant autobiography. Yet the choice is possible and hardly a day passes
without some slight movement towards it in each one of us. That is what makes Paradise Lost
such a serious poem. The thing is possible, and the exposure of it is resented. (Lewis Preface
102)
"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to
disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy
interest in them." (Lewis SL preface)
"Reasoned judgment" is what is needed, Justice Anthony Kennedy said. "Our obligation
is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code," he wrote in a
convoluted passage. "At the heart of liberty," he said, "is the right to define one's
own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of
human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood
were they formed under compulsion of the State." This is jurisprudence worthy of
Murphy Brown, advancing a definition of liberty so radical as to suggest that law is
impossible and chaos our destiny. 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey
The world is insane. It tries to get rid of its insanity by the use of wisdom and reason; and it
looks for many ways and means, for all sorts of help and advice on how to escape this distress.
Luther
I can tell how much God you have by how much entertainment you need. A.W. Tozer
“If you want to control a man, kill his intimacy.” Anatoly Lunacharsky (In March 1917 he joined
Lenin and Trotsky in Russia and was appointed peoples’ commissar for education.) Qtd by
Archimandrite Roman Braga in Exploring the Inner Universe
In his Preface to Milton’s Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis describes Satan’s world as “a world of
misery and a world of lies and propaganda, wishful thinking and incessant autobiography.”
Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish Christian theologian, wrote “The matter is quite simple. The bible
is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to
be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are
obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except
pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be
ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship.
Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to
ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh,
priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the
living God. Yes it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”
The Assault on Priesthood by Lawrence Porter
“We are not to believe that anything was done or said which did not represent the grace of the
gospel, if they are properly understood.” Bede the Venerable on the OT accounts of the
priesthood. Liii introduction
While he (a priest) is, in a sense, sent to serve the people of God, in a more primary sense he is
sent to serve the will of God and to make it clear to the people…It is the Word of God and not
the voice of the people that must prevail if a priest is to be a true servant of both God and the
people. 17.
"We cannot live without this thing of the Lord!" Emeritus. This Christian man answered his
interrogator's question asking why he and others had violated the Roman Emperor's command
not to worship Jesus and celebrate Eucharist even under the threat of torture and death. The
"thing" he proclaimed they could not live without was the body and blood of Jesus in the
Eucharist. He and 48 others were tortured and put to death for celebrating Holy Communion in
304 A.D. I encourage you not to go without the life-giving Christ this Sunday on Easter when he
has freely given himself to you.
“When towns and villages were slow to pay an extraordinary levy of tribute imposed on Syria
and Palestine, the warlord Cassius sold village elders as slaves and enslaved the people of four
district towns in Judea, including Emmaus (and Magdala) (53-52 BCE). (Antiquities 14.271-75)
The Roman reconquest of Galilee and Judea to put down the revolt after Herod’s death in 4 BCE
wrought extensive destruction and terrorization of the people. (War 2.66-75; Antiquities 17.28895). Led by Varus, Romans legions advancing through Galilee burned the town of Sepphoris,
near Nazareth, and enslaved its peple. In Judea, Varus ordered the town of Emmaus destroyed,
then scoured the countryside for leaders of the insurrection and had 2,000 crucifed.” John Jesus
and the Renewal of Israel Horsley & Thatcher p 20
The sense of the gift of a Divine Sonship, the sense of the love of a Divine Father, the sense of a
Divine communion, are but the prismatic colours of one perfect light. Edwin Hatch sermon on
the Trinity.
“It was the entertainment of God himself, his delight, his contemplation, for those infinite millions
of generations when he was without a world, without creatures, to joy in one another, in the
Trinity. It was the Father’s delight to look upon himself in the Son; and to see the whole
Godhead, in a threefold and an equal glory. It was God’s own delight, and it must be the delight of
every Christian, upon particular occasions to carry his or her thoughts upon the several persons of
the Trinity.” John Donne, Anglican Priest & Poet
The temptation to accept mediocrity—or worse—often proves irresistible. Scaling up Excellence.
Sutton & Rao 13
When it comes to getting people to rally behind a “hot cause,” the key is creating experiences that
generate “communities of feeling.” 70
Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar calculated that when enough people and small groups
compose an organization so it has more than about 150 people (between 100 – 230), the demands
outstrip what the human mind can handle. In Sutton & Rao. 100
Studies of married couples show that the absence of negative interactions is far more important to
their relationsips than the presence of positive interactions—and predict if couples stay married or
get divorces. “For a relationship to succeed, positive and good interactions must outnumber the
negative and bad ones by at least 5 – 1.” Psychologist John Gottman in Sutton & Rao 221
“only a philosophy of freedom and love can account for our existence. Hans von Balthasar
Jurgan Moltmann The Trinity and the Kingdom
There are unsettled theological problems for which every new generation has to find its own
solution if it is to be able to live with them at all. Xiii
What we call ‘tradition’ is not a treasury of dead truths, which are simply at our disposal. It is
the necessary and vitally continuing theological conversation with men and women of the past,
across the ages, in the direction of our common future. Xiv
Truth is universal. Only the lie is particularist. Xv
The history of the world is the history of God’s suffering. At the moments of God’s profoundest
revelation, there is always suffering. 4
God suffers with us – God suffers from us – God suffers for us: it is this experience of God that
reveals the Triune God. 4
The expression ‘experience of God’ therefore does not only mean our experience of God; it also
means God’s experience of us. 4
The reduction of faith to practice has not enriched faith; it has impoverished it. 8
The sole omnipotence which God possesses is the almighty power of suffering love. 31
In the history of the world’s suffering, the crucified Christ is our sole means of access to
knowledge of God. 40
If [God] longs for this other, it is not out of deficiency of being; it is rather out of the
superabundance of his creative fullness. 45
True freedom is not the ‘torment of choice,’ with its doubts and threats; it is simple, undivided
joy in the good. 55
If God is love he is at once the lover, the beloved and the love itself. 57
For Jesus, the gospel of the kingdom is a messianic message of joy, not an apocalyptic threat to
the world. 69
The creation is a work of divine humility. 99
The outward incarnation presupposes inward self-humiliation 119
Warren asserts, “If you are serious about changing your life in any significant way, you are going
to have to get into the Bible. You need to read it, study it, memorize it, meditate on it, and apply
it (John 8:32)…Sometimes learning the truth about ourselves first makes us miserable – because
we want to deny it—but ultimately, the truth is liberating.“ The Daniel Plan
“Dedicate your body to God. Ask for his help, and get involved in a small group of some kind that
will support you on your journey. Then start making healthy choices – replacing donuts with fresh
fruit and making exercise a part of your daily routine. Make whole foods a regular part of your
diet. Live a more active lifestyle. Get more sleep. Cut down on your stress. It’s just good
common sense…Physical health influences your mental health, your spiritual health, your
emotional health, your relational health and even your financial health.” Rick Warren
These are five truths that Warren expounds:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Lasting change requires building your life on the truth
Lasting change requires making wise choices.
Lasting change requires new ways of thinking.
Lasting change requires God’s Spirit in your life.
Lasting change requires honest community.
Four topics which I have found scattered throughout the Scriptures appear to me to deserve
mention, and according to these everyone should organize their prayer. The topics are as
follows: In the beginning and opening of prayer, glory is to be ascribed according to one’s ability
to God, through Christ who is to be glorified with Him, and in the Holy Spirit who is to be
proclaimed with Him. Thereafter, one should put thanksgivings: common thanksgivings – into
which he introduces benefits conferred upon men in general – and thanksgivings for things
which he has personally received from God. After thanksgiving it appears to me that one ought
to become a powerful accuser of one’s own sins before God and ask first for healing with a view
to being released from the habit which brings on sin, and secondly for forgiveness for past
actions. After confession it appears to me that one ought to append as a fourth element the
asking for great and heavenly things, both personal and general, on behalf of one’s nearest and
dearest. And last of all, one should bring prayer to an end ascribing glory to God through Jesus
Christ in the Holy Spirit. Origen “On Prayer” 20
Leading neuroscientist, “The brain seeks to find examples of what it already believes, whether
those beliefs are true or not, helpful or hurtful.” Brian Martin Invincible
"Determination is more predictive of real-world success than intellect or talent…Determination
demands many things – a strong motivation to succeed, self-confidence, commitment to
completing a task, a belief in the power of hard work, and a focus on the future rather than the
present. But at its core more than any other capacity, determination requires self-regulation. The
ability to control our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors is what enables us to stay focused,
especially when things get difficult, unpleasant or tedious." Laurence Steinberg Age of
Opportunity p 120-21
The most important environmental contributor to self-regulation is the family. P 124
Christian priorities:
Submit and glorify the Lord because he is Lord
Study to show yourself approved
Pray for Provision & Protection
Praise for Faith and Opening of Doors
Worship for Filling with the Holy Spirit
Commune for Sanctification and Intimacy
Listen for counsel and correction
Be Still for healing
Fellowship for the joy of the Lord
Obey for fruitful labor
Contemplation is only possible through grace. Cloud of Unknowing tr Carmen Alcevedo Butcher
When persons are motivated by love to reduce themselves to nothing, they will also have a
strong desire that God be all. “
The whole life of a good Christian is nothing but holy desire. Augustine
We must all learn to suffer well because each of us will experience the absence of pleasant things
needed by the body and the presence of painful remorse, that unpleasant but beneficial godly
sorrow that our spirits must embrace. We must also teach ourselves self-control for two reasons:
so that we don’t lust after the wonderful necessities of life and so that we don’t rejoice too much
in the absence of unpleasant but soul-nourishing godly sorrow. Cloud of Unknowing.
The Lord’s Supper: Luke 22:15-20; 1 Cor 10:16 & 11:23-26
Received as a spiritual nourishment, [Holy Communion] is the ‘health of soul and body, the cure
of every spiritual malady. By it, our vices are cured, our passions restrained, temptations are
lessened, grace is given in fuller measure, and virtue once established is fostered; faith is
confirmed, hope is strengthened, and love kindled and deepened.’ Thomas a Kempis Imitation
of Christ
At all times but especially in our troubled and confused era, every Orthodox revival has had its
source in the “rediscovery” of the Sacraments and sacramental life, and above all in a Eucharistic
revival…And that today this Eucharistic and sacramental revival knocks at the doors of our
Church should hearten us as a sign that the fateful crisis of “secularism” can be
overcome…Ideally, of course, the whole life of a Christian is and should be preparation for
Communion, just as it is and should be the spiritual fruit of Communion. In the early Church it
was precisely the rhythm of that participation in the Eucharist—the living in the remembrance of
the one and in the expectation of the next—which truly shaped Christian spirituality and gave it
its true content: the participation, while living in this world, in the new life of the world to come
and the transformation of the “old” by the “new.” Alexander Schmemann Great Lent
Try to gather together more frequently to celebrate God’s Eucharist and to praise him…At these
meetings you should heed the bishop and presbytery attentively, and break one loaf, which is the
medicine of immortality, and the antidote which wards off death but yields continuous life in
union with Jesus Christ.” St. Ignatius
Receiving the Eucharist means adoring Him whom we receive. Only in this way do we become
one with him, and are given, as it were a foretaste of the beauty of the heavenly liturgy. Pope
Benedict
The fellowship of the Lord’s Supper is the superlative fulfillment of Christian fellowship. As the
members of the congregation are united in body and blood at the table of the Lord so will they be
together in eternity. Here the community has reached its goal. Here joy in Christ and his
community is complete. The life of Christians together under the Word has reached its
perfection in the Sacrament. Bonhoeffer Life Together
“The fact that I am able to participate in the Lord’s Supper—indeed, that Jesus invites me to
come—is a vivid reminder and visual reassurance that Jesus Christ loves me, individually and
personally. When I come to partake of the Lord’s Supper, I thereby find reassurance again and
again of Christ’s personal love for me.” Wayne Grudem
“It reveals the grandeur of the Father’s love, shows how precious man is in God’s eyes and how
priceless the value of his life.” Pope John Paul II
In the Lord’s Supper there is truly given unto the believing the body and blood of the Lord, the
flesh of the Son of God, which quickeneth our souls, the meat that cometh from above, the food
of immortality, grace, truth, and life; and the Supper to be the communion of the body and blood
of Christ, by the partaking whereof we be revived, we be strengthened, and be fed unto
immortality, and whereby we are joined, united, and incorporate unto Christ, that we may abide
in him, and he in us. Bp John Jewell Defense of the Church of England
Wherefore in this sacrament, (if it be rightly received with a true faith,) we be assured that our
sins be forgiven, and the league of peace and the testament of God is confirmed between him and
us, so that whosoever by a true faith doth eat Christ’s flesh, and drink his blood, hath everlasting
life by him. Which thing when we feel in our hearts at the receiving of the Lord’s Supper, what
thing can be more joyful, more pleasant, or more comfortable unto us. Archbishop Thomas
Cranmer
Billy Graham: Leading with Love by Matt Woodley
The word character derived from a word that was used in connection with tools for engraving or
branding. Thus, a person’s character “marked” him or her. Xi
The test of Graham’s soul, indeed, lay not in adversity, but in how he coped with success. David
Aikman, Time magazine.
“Consecrate, then concentrate.” DL Moody
His commitment to his mission was so strong and so clear. The utter simplicity of his agenda is a
powerful factor. 34
I’ve learned through the years that I’m much better off keeping quiet on certain subjects in order
that I may appeal to a wider group of people in my presentation of the gospel. Graham 34
Billy learned not only to pursue his primary God-given calling; he also learned to avoid what he
was called not to do. 35
When the goals are clear, each team member understands how to contribute, and each team
member has burdens to bear and challenges to confront. 71
This brief speech still has the power to “do what words are raely able to do: invoke an eloquent
silence…There is an overpowering immediacy in these plain words.” NY Times editorial in
11/19.13 on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg address 90
We don’t actually need a plausible theory of the origin of life, and we might even be a bit
anxious if a too plausible theory were to be discovered. Richard Dawkins. 421 The Greatest
Show on Earth.
The Eucharist by Tolkien
“Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love
on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and
the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death.
"By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the
taste—or foretaste—of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love,
faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance,
which every man’s heart desires.
"The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always itself, perfect and
complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in
any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise.
"Frequency is of the highest effect.
"Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.
Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your
Communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a
proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children—
from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is
opened sit back and yawn—open-necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair
both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them).
"It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and
shared by a few devout and decorous people.
"It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand—after which our Lord
propounded the feeding that was to come.”
Can be found in The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings, p.
219.
Lloyd – Jones Preaching and Preachers
Man’s real trouble is that he is a rebel against God and consequently under the wrath of God. 38
[The Church’s] primary purpose is to put man into the right relationship with God, to reconcile
man to God. 41
What the natural man needs above everything else is to be humbled. 61
What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this. It is to give men and women a sense
of God and His presence. 110
There is no greater fallacy than to think that you need a gospel for special types of people. 141
The business of salvation is not merely to get rid of particular problems but to put the ‘whole
man’ right in his relationship with God. 145
Our Lord attracted sinners because He was different. They drew near to Him because they felt
that here was something different about Him—His purity, His holiness, His love. This idea that
you are going to win people to the Christian faith by showing them that after all you are
remarkably like them is theologically and psychologically a profound blunder. 150
The chief fault of the young preacher is to preach to the people as we would like them to be,
instead of as they are. 157
The main danger confronting the pulpit in this matter is to assume that all who claim to be
Christians, and who think they are Christians, and who are members of the Church, are therefore
of necessity Christians. This, to me, is the most fatal blunder of all; and certainly the
commonest…This idea that because people are members of the church and attend regularly that
they must be Christian is on oe the most fatal assumptions, and I suggest that it mainly accounts
for the state of the Church today. 159, 161
What I needed was preaching that would convict me of sin and make me see my need, and bring
me to true repentance and tell me something about regeneration. 159
The greatest need in the Church today is to restore this authority to the pulpit…The prime and
greatest need in the pulpit is spiritual authority. 170
The most important task is to prepare himself, not his sermon. 178
“one of the great rules for a preacher is to safeguard the mornings. 179
Our faith should not be in the sermon, it should be in the Holy Spirit Himself.242
All I am trying to say is that our business is to make sure that what moves the people is the Truth
and not our imagination. 249
The most one can say for the place of humor is that it is only allowable if it is natural. The man
who tries to be humorous is an abomination and should never be allowed to enter al pulpit. The
same applies to the man who does it deliberately in order to ingratiate himself with the
people…We must be equally careful not to over-correct to such an extent as to become dull,
colourless, and lifeless. 252 I find it very difficult to be humorous in the pulpit. I always feel in
the pulpit that I am in the terrible position of standing between God and souls that may go to hell.
That position is too appalling for humor. 257
Watch your strength. Not so much your weaknesses: it is your strength you have to watch, the
things at which you excel, your natural gifts and aptitudes. They are the ones that are most likely
to trip you because they are the ones that will tempt you to make a display and to pander to
self…the greatest of all the temptations that assail a preacher is pride. 270-271
Self is the greatest enemy of the preacher, more so than in the case of any other man in society.
And the only way to deal with self is to be so taken up with, and so enraptured by, the glory of
what you are doing, that you forget yourself altogether. 278
So many modern Christians have trouble praying because they do not see how it can make sense
in this complex modern world. 11 Morton Kelsey The Other Side of Silence
Open Mind Open Heart by Thomas Keating:
Contemplative prayer is a process of interior transformation, a conversation initiated by God and
leading, if we consent, to divine union. One’s way of seeing reality changes in this process. A
restructuring of consciousness takes place which empowers one to perceive, relate and respond
with increasing sensitivity to the divine presence in, through, and beyond everything that exists.
4
Nothing can stand still on the spiritual journey. 7
CP is part of a dynamic process that evolves through personal relationship rather than by
strategy. 15
The purpose of CP is to facilitate the process of inner transformation 45
To receive God is the chief work in CP 71
Pure faith consents and surrenders to the Ultimate Mystery just as He is. 83
Our training and education have programmed us for reflection. But one can be so absorbed in an
experience that one does not reflect. Have you ever enjoyed something so much that you didn’t
have time to think of what you were enjoying? If you do, you reduce the experience to something
that you can understand, and God isn’t something you can understand. The awareness of God is
shot through with awe, reverence, love and delight all at once. 87-88
There is a conviction deep inside of us that if we ever stop reflecting on ourselves, we will
disintegrate or suffer some similar fate. That is not true. If we ever stop reflecting on ourselves,
we will move into perfect peace. 91
When we commit ourselves to the spiritual journey, the first thing the Spirit does is start
removing the emotional junk inside of us. He wishes to fill us completely and to transform our
entire body-spirit organism into a flexible instrument of divine love. 96
The triumph of grace enables people to live their ordinary lives divinely. 104
We receive the Eucharist in order to become the Eucharist. 128