Category Archives: quotes

March 4, 2011 · 3:40 am

Tha place of the unexpected

“To stay sharp, we need things to happen. We need unexpected events to crash into our lives and disturb our complacency; we need surprises; we even need emergencies if we are to be fully functionIng, mature and balanced adults. Learning to deal with the hard stuff- illness, failure, bereavement, retrenchment, disapppointment, disaster- teaches us far more about ourselves than we can ever learn from breeding through the easy stuff. Why else do peopls who suffer traumatic upheavals in their lives so often recount those events as if they were highlights?”

Hugh Mackay, What Makes Us Tick, p.255

What do you reckon?

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February 28, 2011 · 5:18 am

dehumanisation

“When we forget who God truly is, it is but a short step to forgetting who we are and who our neighbour is…. a disintegration and dehumanisation takes place in the aftermath of a departure from the Living God.”

Provan, Ex Auditu, 28, cited in J.Hardyman, Idols (Nottingham:IVP, 2010), 143.

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December 20, 2010 · 11:34 pm

Christmas and the heart…

“If Christmas time cannot ignite within us again something like a love for holy theology, so that we—captured and compelled by the wonder of the manger of the Son of God—must reverently reflect on the mysteries of God, then it must be that the glow of the divine mysteries has also been extinguished in our heart and has died out.”
Bonhoeffer

h/t Justin Moffatt

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January 20, 2010 · 12:01 am

webb on rebellion from God & injustice



Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth! For the LORD has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.” Isaiah 1:2

“The rebellion referred to in verse 2 is now specified: worship had been divorced from justice, and the fatherless and the widow had become the chief victims (v.17). Such disregard for justice was a fundamental violation of the Sinai covenant for which no amount of cultic observance [ie. sacrifices at the temple, etc.] could compensate. The exodus itself had flowed out of God’s concern for the oppressed, and from the very beginning he had demanded that his people should have a special conern for the poor and defenceless among them. Furthermore, it is a requirement which has been intensified rather than diminished under the new covenant within which we ourselves now stand. If proof is required we need look no further than Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan, or James’ description of ‘religion thatGod our Father accepts as pure and faultless’. The cross places us under a far greater obligation to love than the exodus ever could.”

B.G.Webb, The Message of Isaiah (Leicester: IVP, 1996), 43.

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November 23, 2009 · 10:39 pm

the blindness of greed

Reading to prepare this Sunday’s sermon on James 4:1-12, I came across this quote, which I think is equally true for Sydney-siders:

Why can’t anyone in the grip of greed see it? The counterfeit god of money uses powerful sociological and psychological dynamics. Everyone tends to live in a particular socioeconomic bracket. Once you are able to afford to live in a particular neighbourhood, send your children to its schools, and participate in its social life, you will find yourself surrounded by quite a number of people who have more money than you. You don’t compare yourself to the rest of the world, you compare yourself to those in your bracket. The human heart always wants to justify itself and this is one of the easiest ways. You say, “I don’t live as well as him or her or them. My means are modest compared to theirs.” You can reason and think that no matter how lavishly you are living. As a result, most Americans think of themselves as middle class, and only 2 percent call themselves “upper class.” But the rest of the world is not folled. When people visit here from otehr parts of the globe, they ae staggered to see the level of material comfort that the majority of Americans have come to view as a necessity.

Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it. Therefore we should all begin with a working hypothesis that “this could easily be a problem for me.” If greed hides itself so deeply, no one should be confident that it is not a problem for them.

Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2009), 52-53.

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July 30, 2009 · 1:39 am

identity

In preparing the St Paul’s Men’s Challenge Conference talks, I came across this great thought well expressed, by a former teacher of mine, Keith Condie:
How we perceive ourselves profoundly shapes our behaviour. If you are unsure how to answer the question, ‘Who Am I?’, or if you have an unhelpful answer to that question, it will impact on your marriage. Some of the most selfish people I have met are those who have very low self-esteem; they are so caught up with themselves and what people think of them, they lack the freedom to love. But those who have a sober estimation of themselves can give to others from a position of inner strength.
Christians are loved and accepted by God. He is the safe haven for us. We are people of immense worth and value simply by virtue of being created in God’s image and being redeemed through the death of his Son. God the Father hasn’t just forgiven us, he’s welcomed us into his family as his beloved children and heirs.
You may know this, but do you know this? Is it a truth that shapes your life and self-perception? It’s not meant to swell our heads with pride and arrogance; its humbling because its only of his grace. We need to wholeheartedly take this truth on board. It sounds strange, but even low self-esteem is about pride. Beneath self-pity and feelings of failure and rejection lurks the desire to be somebody – to be recognized as a significant and worthwhile person. The research suggests that strong (ie. emotionally together) individuals create string marriages. When two people who understand who they are in Christ come together, that gives great strength to their marriage. The gospel of grace shapes our identity, so the more you grasp the truth of who you are in Christ, the better it will be for your relationship.

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March 9, 2009 · 3:20 am

coming together

“…when we come together as Christians on Sunday mornings, we do not gather merely to have our own personal devotions together. The church service is not just your quiet time. We do not gather to pray, sing and read Scripture like we do the other days of the week at home except that on Sundays with more people around because it is more encouraging. No, we come to participate in the life of our church.

And when we come, we come not as individual consumers to do our spiritual shopping for the week, seeing what’s of use down this aisle of singing or down that aisle of prayer, looking over the sermon special, browsing through post-service conversations, and taking it home in our carts for personal use. We actually assemble as a living instistution, a viable organism, one body.”

Mark Dever, The Message of the New Testament: Promises Kept (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005) , 170

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March 4, 2009 · 7:06 am

the meaning of life is not ’42’

Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favour money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality. When Jesus said you must lose yourself in service to find yourself (Mark 8:35), he was recounting what the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout eternity.

You will, then, never get a sense of self by standing still, as it were, and making everything revolve around your needs and interests. Unless you are willing to to experience the loss of options and the individiual limitation that comes from being in committed relationships, you will remain out of touch with your own nature and the nature of things.

Tim Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, 216-217.

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March 3, 2009 · 10:16 pm

Keller on the 2 ways sin plays out

Sin and evil are self-centredness and pride that lead to oppression against others, but there are two forms of this. One form is being very bad and breaking all the rules, and the other form is being very good and keeping all the rules and becoming self-righteous.
There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. The first is by saying, ‘I’m going to live the way I want.’ The second is described by Flannery O’Connor, who wrote about one of her characters, Hazel Motes, that “he knew the best way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.” If you are avoiding sin and living morally so that God will have to bless and save you, the ironically, you may be looking to Jesus as a teacher, model and helper but you are avoiding him as Savior. You are trusting in your own goodness rather than in Jesus for your standing with God. You are trying to save yourself by following Jesus.
That, ironically, is a rejection of the gospel of Jesus. It is a Christianized form of religion. It is possible to avoid Jesus as Savior as much by keeping all the biblical rules as by breaking them. Both religion (in which you build your identity on your moral achievements) and irreligion (in which you build your identity on some other secular pursuit or relationship) are, ultimately, spiritually identical courses to take. Both are “sin”.
Self-salvation through good works may produce a great deal of moral behaviour in your life, but inside you are filled with self-righteousness, cruelty and bigotry, and you are miserable. You are always comparing yourself to other people, and you are never sure you are being good enough. You cannot, therefore, deal with your hidesousness and self-absorption through the moral law, by trying to be a good person through an act of the will. You need a complete transformation of the very motives of your heart.
Tim Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Penguin, 2008), 177.

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January 26, 2009 · 10:20 pm

Musings on Exodus #3

“You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Ex 20:4-6)

“Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose names in Jealous, is a jealous God.” (Ex 34:14)

“What does this mean? We usually think of jealousy as spiteful envy, but how could such an attitude be worthy of God? The answer is that there is more than one kind of jealousy. Of course, jealousy can be sinful, and with us, it usually is. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word ‘jealous’ as ‘afraid, suspicious, or resentful of rivalry in love.’ This is the way we tend to be: resentful of rivalry. But the primary definition of the word is ‘fiercely protective’. And although God is neither suspicious nor resentful, he certainly is protective, especially when it comes to his relationship with his people. There is nothing God guards more jealously than his love for us and our love for him in the covenant.

According to J.I.Packer, ‘God’s jealousy is not a compund of frustration, envy, and spite, as human jealousy so often is, but appears instead as a praiseworthy zeal to preserve something supremely precious.’ When God told Moses that his name is Jealous, ‘He meant that He demands from those whom he has loved and redeemed utter and absolute loyalty, and will vindicate His claim by stern action against them if they betray His love by unfaithfulness.’ “

P.G.Ryken, Exodus: Saved for God’s Glory (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005), 1054-5.

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