quotes
The command to love my neighbour as myself still retains its claim upon me
I don’t always find myself warmed by the writings of Charles Spurgeon, but my friend Michael Terry sent me this bit yesterday, to which I can only give a hearty Amen!
We have seen such a one limping about with a long doctrinal leg, but a very short emotional leg. It is a horrible thing for a man to be so doctrinal that he can speak coolly of the doom of the wicked, so that, if he does not actually praise God for it, it costs him no anguish of heart to think of the ruin of millions of our race. This is horrible!
I hate to hear the terrors of the Lord proclaimed by men whose hard visages, harsh tones, and unfeeling spirit betray a sort of doctrinal desiccation: all the milk of human kindness is dried out of them. Having no feeling himself, such a preacher creates none, and the people sit and listen while he keeps to dry, lifeless statements, until they come to value him for being “sound”, and they themselves come to be sound, too; and I need not add, sound asleep also, or what life they have is spent in sniffing out heresy, and making earnest men offenders for a word. Into this spirit may we never be baptized!
Whatever I believe, or do not believe, the command to love my neighbour as myself still retains its claim upon me, and God forbid that any views or opinions should so contract my soul, and harden my heart as to make me forget this law of love! The love of God is first, but this by no means lessens the obligation of love to man; in fact, the first command includes the second. We are to seek our neighbour’s conversion because we love him, and we are to speak to him in loving terms God’s loving gospel, because our heart desires his eternal good.
This comes from Spurgeon’s book The Soul Winner. I love both the spirit and the sense of humor displayed here. Good stuff.
I Rest in the Grace of the World
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
--“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry
[I needed this today. HT: Richard Beck]
Graffiti vs. real change
Matt Chambers has a piece up today in light of this week’s ongoing arguments about gay marriage, and this paragraph jumped right off the screen:
As it is, we, as Christians / Christ-followers / Believers / Born Agains / [insert latest trendy religious title here], seem to be much more comfortable trying to find a way to use all our energies up in plastering the kingdoms of the world with graffiti that says, “heaven” than actually pouring ourselves out to see God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.
Trouble is, graffiti doesn’t fool anyone.
Boom.
Celebration is a craft I need to learn
Sarah Clarkson has a beautiful post over on The Rabbit Room today about, as she says, “the grave importance” of celebrations, and how they remind us that God cares for our joy - not just the joy that we find from spiritual hope in the midst of trouble, but also in the fully-embodied, rollicking joy of song, food, and friendship.
Satan, I think, strikes a few of his best blows when he can persuade us that God is boring. That life with our Savior is a dull and dutiful upward climb toward a summit of righteousness always a little out of reach. We are close to defeat when we start to believe that God cares nothing for joy, that holy people are wage slaves to long days of righteousness. Work, pray, endure, and pay your bills, check off that list of upright deeds. And the image of God in our weary minds becomes that of a long-faced master whose only concern is our efficient goodness. We forget that we are called to a King who laughs and creates, sings and saves. That our end is a kingdom crammed with our heart’s desires. We forget that our God is the Lord of the dance and the one whose new world begins with a feast.
Going after the dove sellers
The point being, while we know that Jesus was upset about economic exploitation going on in the temple, his focus on the dove sellers sharpens the message and priorities. Jesus doesn’t, for instance, go after the sellers of lambs. Jesus’s anger is stirred at the way the poor are being treated and economically exploited.
Second-guessing God
Stringfellow is just full of good stuff. Still in Chapter Two of An Ethic for Christians an Other Aliens in a Strange Land, he says this about trying to understand God:
Biblical ethics do not pretend the social or political will of God; biblical politics do not implement “right” or “ultimate” answers. In this world, the judgment of God remains God’s own secret. … It is the inherent and redundant frustration of any pietistic social ethics that the ethical question is presented as a conundrum about the judgment of God in given circumstances. Human beings attempting to cope with that ethical question are certain to be dehumanized. The Bible does not pose any such riddles nor aspire to any such answers; instead, in biblical context, such queries are transposed, converted, rendered new. In the Bible, the ethical issue becomes simply: how can a person act humanly now? … Here the ethical question juxtaposes the witness of the holy nation - Jerusalem - to the other principalities, institutions and other nations - as to which Babylon is a parable. It asks: how can the Church of Jesus Christ celebrate human life in society now?
The freedom to chill the heck out
Just found a link to a great thought that Jared Wilson posted back in January. Given that it’s only a paragraph, and it’s a good one, I’ll quote it in its entirety.
Yes, people watch too much TV and play too many video games and spend too much time on the Internet and what-have-you. But the proper response to our media over-saturation is not a rigorous attention to the explicitly “spiritual” in every margin of life. Be a Christian, not an ascetic. Don’t be lazy, but realize that Jesus Christ did not die and rise for you so that you would stress out about whether you’re being spiritual enough. So take a nap. Watch some television. The gospel frees you to chill the heck out.
Beautiful quote from a friend today
…after I declared I was socially stunted because of my intense dislike for calling people that I don’t know on the phone :
“Social stunting is God’s way of keeping engineers from ruthlessly running roughshod over society.”
Thanks, Geof.
C. S. Lewis on Consistency in the Worship Service
Pastor Richard gave me this wonderful (if a bit long) quote from C. S. Lewis regarding consistency in the worship service:
I think our business as laymen is to take what we are given and make the best of it. And I think we should find this a great deal easier if what we were given was always and everywhere the same.
To judge from their practice, very few Anglican clergymen take this view. It looks as if they believed people can be lured to go to church be incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements, simplifications, and complications of the service. And it is probably true that a new, keen vicar will usually be able to form within his parish a minority who are in favour of his innovations. The majority, I believe, never are. Those who remain - many give up churchgoing altogether - merely endure.
Is this simply because the majority are hide-bound? I think not. They have a good reason for their conservatism. Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they don’t go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best - if you like, it “works” best - when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice… The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.
But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshiping. The important question about the Grail was “for what does it serve?” “Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the God.”
A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question “What on earth is he up to now?” will intrude. It lays one’s devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, “I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.”
Thys my whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship.
-- from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
Something to think about...
“I’ve noticed that when God wants me to follow Him in a particular direction, He usually doesn’t get me to do it by sending people to scream at me, argue with me, threaten me or poke me with sticks. He does it by heading off in that direction and relying on my new heart’s desire to be with Him. Maybe we should try to be more like God when it comes to getting people to follow us.” – Jim Nicholson
[HT: BHT]
The Pursuit of God in the Company of Friends
Dick Staub on the Staublog (which needs to move to some software that supports RSS in an awful way) today notes a phrase that caught my ear:
People like that I sign my correspondence “yours for the pursuit of God in the company of friends.” When I was younger I thought a lot about “doing” things for the kingdom of God. Now I think more about loving people in my day.
I like that phrase. “The pursuit of God in the company of friends.” Sounds like what I want to be doing.