Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem
“I believe that God made me for a purpose—[to be a missionary to] China. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”
Chariots of Fire
“Play is meaningful in itself. It justifies and rewards itself…. It pushes us to explore the world and to form bonds with new people. Play offers respite from the tyranny of work and routine.”
Dan Doriani
“The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is to cry Father! from a full heart.”
George MacDonald
“It is high time that Christians should rediscover that the very heart of their faith is that Jesus Christ did not come to make a contribution to the religious storehouse of mankind, but that in him God reconciled the world unto himself.”
Dr. W.A. Visser’t Hooft, first General Secretary to the World Council of Churches.
“Jesus is not ‘the Great’; he is the only. He has no peers, no rivals, and no successors.”
John Stott
“I am grateful for Shinto, for Buddhism, and for Confucianism. I owe much to these faiths . . . Yet these three faiths utterly failed to minister to my heart’s deepest needs. I was a pilgrim journeying upon a long road that had no turning. I was weary. I was footsore. I wandered through a dark and dismal world where tragedies were thick . . . Buddhism teaches great compassion . . . but since the beginning of time, who has declared, ‘this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many unto the remission of sins’?”
Toyohiko Kagawa
“The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore – on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”
Dorothy Sayers
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.”
Annie Dillard
“The meritocracy gives you brands to attach to—your prestigious school, your nice job title—which work well as status markers and seem to replace the urgent need to find out who you are.”
David Brooks
“[we] are overwhelmed by a sense of frustration and bewilderment and a general loss of direction in life…[we] ask about the purpose of living. Do we exist merely in order to eat, drink, sleep, work, and die? Or is there meaning to life?… Why [are we] here in this world? Skillfully using a well-known passage in Psalm 8, our author reminds his readers that man is not as he was meant to be.”
Raymond Brown
“We’re all gonna die.”
Sufjan Stevens
“The certainty and completeness of God’s mercy [is] the magnet of confession . . . we run to his arms with our sin-sick hearts because we know there is grace sufficient, boundless, and free already there. We repent because we are forgiven, not to gain forgiveness . . . we are forgiven because he was forsaken, not because our contrition is adequate . . . we are cherished children of God despite our constant waywardness and the inevitable inadequacy of our confession.”
—Bryan Chapell
“Absolution is neither a response to a suitably worthy confession, nor the acceptance of a reasonable apology. Absolvere in Latin means not only to loosen, to free, to acquit; it also means to dispose of, to complete, to finish. When God pardons, he does not say he understands our weakness or makes allowances for our errors; rather he disposes of, he finishes with, the whole of our dead life and raises us up with a new one. He does not so much deal with our derelictions as he does drop them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. He forgets our sins in the darkness of the tomb. He remembers our iniquities no more in the oblivion of Jesus’ expiration. He finds us, in short, in the desert of death, not in the garden of improvement; and in the power of Jesus’ resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home . . . The work of redemption is done entirely by the redeemer, and not at all by the redeemed.”
—Robert Farrar Capon
“What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness. I have nobody to forgive me.”
—Margaret Laski
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 an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible 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 own 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 plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. —David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water”
In the ancient world, the anchor was the symbol of hope. Epictetus says: “a ship should never depend on one anchor, or a life on one hope.” Pythagoras said: “Wealth is a weak anchor; fame is still weaker. What then are the anchors which are strong? Wisdom, great-heartedness, courage – these are the anchors which no storm can shake.” The writer to the Hebrews insists that the Christian possesses the greatest hope in the world. —William Barclay, The Letter to the Hebrews
