From a conversation with a Facebook friend who lives this quote:

"I will never give up on the wandering soul."

Thank God for people who will leave the 99 for the 1.

"Warning: If you treat your church like a business, you will treat other churches like your competition."

From Jared. I look forward to when he's famous so I can be one of the fawning lackeys in his entourage.

Great quote regarding this most recent round of pop Che Guevera worship:

I can’t imagine what it must be like to hold an ideology where Wal-Mart outrages me more than the slaughter of 600 people.

[From Libertas, via Brandywine Books]

In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things, the figure of him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (HT: Dying Church)

When was the last time someone accused you of proclaiming another president, namely Jesus?
-- N.T. Wright (HT: BHT)

"Life is best when it's not all about you."

"If I spend enough time with God, I will inevitably begin to look at the world with a point of view that more resembles God's own. What is faith, after all, but believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse?"

- from Phillip Yancey's Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference?

"God who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing—or should we say ‘seeing?’ There are no tenses in God—the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven trough the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves."

- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

The following is from chapter 15 of Philip Yancey's Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference?. I read this last night and wanted to share it with you. I apologize for the length of the quote.

I know a woman who did not pray for more than a year, benumbed by the fear that she must have committed the unpardonable sin. Thomas Green, a wise spiritual director, dispels that fear. We judge as immature, he says, a friend who pulls away wounded but refuses to reveal what we might have done to hurt him or her. Surely the God of love as revealed in Jesus does not act in such a childish way. Green recommends the following prayer:

Lord, you care for me more than I care for myself. I cannot believe that you are playing guessing games with me. If the dryness I experience is due to some failing of mine, you make it clear to me and I will try to remedy it. But I will not entertain vague doubts; unless and until you make my failing clear to me, I will assume that is not the reason for the dryness

I take some comfort in the fact that virtually all the masters of spirituality recount a dark night of the soul. Sometimes it passes quickly and sometimes it persists for months, even years. I have yet to find a single witness, though, who does not tell of going through a dry period. Teresa of Avila spent twenty years in a nearly prayerless state before breaking through to emerge as a master of prayer. William Cowper had prayer times in which he thought he would die from excess of joy; but later he described himself as "banished to a remoteness from God's presence, in comparison with which the distance from the East to the West is vicinity."

. . .

Religious radio and television, as well as certain books and magazines, say little of God's silence. By their accounts God seems to speak volubly, commanding this minister to build a new sanctuary and that housewife to launch a new Web-based company. God represents success, good feelings, a sense of peace, a warm glow. To an audience regaled by such inspiring stories, an encounter with the silence of God hits like a shocking exception, and stirs up feelings of inadequacy.

The exception, in fact, is the cheery optimism of modern consumer-oriented faith. For centuries Christians learned what to expect on the spiritual journey from the bumbling pilgrim in Pilgrim's Progress, from John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul, from Thomas a Kempis's challenging Imitation of Christ.

. . .

If I suffer a time of spiritual aridity, of darkness and blankness, should I stop praying until new life enters my prayer? Every one of the spiritual masters insists, No. If I stop praying, how will I know when prayer does become alive again? And, as many Christians have discovered, the habit of not praying is far more difficult to break than the habit of praying.

We must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world -- and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is no redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.

-- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

From the advance copy of Jared's Unvarnished Jesus book:

“I am the way, the truth, and the life, and if you want to get to God, you have to go through me.”

Nothing else gets us to God, nobody else gets us to God. God in the flesh gets us, and in the flesh we get to see God.

This is the fundamental question he asks us, the question that ends with a question mark shaped like a cross: Will you be satisfied in Christ alone?

From the end of chapter 2: Jesus the Prophet

Now that's just good, good stuff. . .

"In necessariis unitas
in dubiis libertas
in omnibus caritas"

(In necessary things unity
in doubtful things liberty
in all things charity)

- Motto of the Cartellverband der katholischen deutschen Studentenverbindungen. Often misattributed to Augustine of Hippo.

We are immersed in great and marvelous realities -- Creation! Salvation! Resurrection! -- but when we come up dripping out of the waters of baptism and look around we observe to our surprise that the community of the baptized is made up of people just like us -- unfinished, immature, neurotic, stumbling, singing out of tune much of the time, forgetful and boorish. Is it credible that God would put all these matters of eternal significance into the hands of such as us? Many, having taken a good look at what they see, shake their heads and think not. But this is the perpetual difficulty of living a life of love in the community of the beloved. We had better get used to it.

-- Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

“We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not going to be able to picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be - the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning.”

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, “The Perfect Penitent”

Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it . . .

This gets to something I've been rolling around in my mind (and unsuccessfully trying to communicate to people on occasion) for awhile. It's the realization that God is an "other".

In other words, I think that often times people's disappointments with God stem from the fact that He acts very differently from the way the god they have imagined in their own mind would act. You can see this throughout history, and in our own lives often as well. Jesus confounded the people of his own time; he came as the Messiah, but not the Messiah that they had imagined.

Of course, from our perspective this side of the Resurrection, the Messiah Jesus was (and is) is far higher, above, beyond, and more eternal than the Messiah they imagined and wanted. The Redeemer of their imagination was as far as they could reach, which wasn't very far; they could not imagine, they could not fully understand, and they certainly did not anticipate the Redemption that Jesus brought.

If God were imaginary, what he did and does would be imaginable. He might even be what we consider "tame".

What we have, instead, is a God who is an other, who does audacious, confusing things - things such as the Incarnation. He is not us, he doesn't live in our imaginations. He is above us, with ways higher than our ways, and thus often times he is absolutely confounding. Because he acts in ways that are higher than the little god of our imagination.

And thank goodness for that!

[Thanks to Trevin Wax for reminding me of this C.S. Lewis quote today]

Bumper sticker I saw yesterday:

"Jesus had a mullet"

Just in time - since I'm teaching the Sermon on the mount (or part of it) this weekend - this guy lays this great quote on me.

Me loving my neighbor is not the Gospel, but my neighbor being loved by me is.

(I recommend you read the whole thing for the context.)

I love to read. I hate to be interrupted. And the worst kind of interruption is one created by an author.

I'm reading two books right now that have the same problem: Habits of the Mind by James Sire and Ready for Anything by David Allen.

Both decided what they had to say was so unimportant that it was necessary to interrupt their writing the random placement snappy quotations from other writers on just about every flippin' page. It drives me nuts. Does the quote fit in directly with what you're writing about? Yes? Then why isn't it part of your main text? No? Then why is it even on the page?

I can only figure that it's designed to draw in un-serious readers. I wish they'd cut it out. On the flip side, I love it when authors use a quotation to set the stage for a new chapter. George Grant is a master at it.

Endnotes rub me wrong, too. Especially when there's an endnote marked in the text, and I run to the reference at the back of the book, only to discover he's not citing anybody, he's just writing some more.

Though no local church is perfect, and the universal Church often looks more like a cheating spouse than a faithful bride, I identify myself with this bungling bunch of believers. The church is home. The church is God’s beloved. The church has been bought with precious blood.

Though the presence of the Kingdom is not as intensely felt in the church as I would like, it is the sign of the Kingdom in this age, faults and all. And if Jesus is content to give his life for an unruly Church, I must find satisfaction in serving his church with all my heart and soul. Because he died for her, I live for her.

- Trevin Wax

This post got me thinking about this:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinners—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat, the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory