Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem
“The night I fell in sorrow I knew I was alone.
A dozen good-time friendships but my heart is still unknown.
I thought I saw your footsteps in the sand along the shore
And I mumbled empty phrases that sang so well before.
Now inches from the water about to disappear,
I feel you behind me, but how did you find me here?”
David Wilcox, “How Did You Find Me Here?”
“The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.”
Jesus, Luke 19:10
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
Colossians 3:1-4
“Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable will remain.”
CS Lewis, The Great Divorce
“God does not make junk, and God does not junk what he made.”
Al Wolters, Creation Regained
“Heaven means sharing in the blessedness of God so that in the very depths of our being there is divine contentment, joy, and fulfillment. There is total shalom: a sense of sheer well-being. Every need is met. Every longing is fulfilled. Every goal is achieved. Every sense is satisfied. We see him. We are with him. He holds us and hugs us and whispers, ‘This is forever.’”
Donald Macleod
“Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.”
Thomas Moore
“Death and the hells of dereliction and abandonment eat people up, exhaust them, scrape them out, and bring them to nothing. Jesus is already empty, already poor, already nothing, for God is everything in him; and so the inexhaustible life of God meets death and eats it up and exhausts it.”
Rowan Williams, A Ray of Hope
“I find that Holy Week is draining; no matter how many times I have lived through his crucifixion, my anxiety about his resurrection is undiminished – I am terrified that, this year, it won’t happen; that, that year, it didn’t. Anyone can be sentimental about the Nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer.”
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
“Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”
Frederick Buechner
“Doubt is the ants-in-the-pants of faith; it keeps it alive and moving.”
Frederick Buechner
“Awake, sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns;
Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth;
Unfold thy forehead, gathered into frowns;
Thy Saviour comes, and with Him mirth:
Arise, arise;
And with His burial-linen dry thine eyes:
Christ left His grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
Draws tears, or blood, not want a handkerchief.”
George Herbert, from ‘The Dawning” in Herbert: Poems, 131.
The One who gives the calm of lakes and pools, the freshness of brooks and streams, the majestic depths of seas and oceans, the glory of pounding surf, the might of Niagara and the sprinkle of the garden fountain, the One from whose being flows the gift of the water of eternal life – this is the One who is dying of a terrible thirst on the Cross for the love of his lost sheep.
Fleming Rutledge
“I dare not come and drink,” said Jill. “Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion. “Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.” “There is no other stream,” said the Lion.
C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
See the streams of living waters, springing from eternal love,
Well supply thy sons and daughters, and all fear of want remove;
Who can faint while such a river ever flows their thirst t’assuage?
Grace, which like the Lord, the giver, never fails from age to age.
John Newton, “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken”
“If I am told over and over to repent, to change, to orient my life to God, nothing will ever happen. I will cling to the Gucci luggage—not that I could afford it—and the earthly status symbols more desperately than ever. I don’t need to hear exhortations to repent. I need power from outside myself to make me different . . . A power from outside is coming, a power that is able to make a new creation out of people like us, stones like us, people who have no capacity of ourselves to save ourselves.”
Fleming Rutledge
“How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh, that life itself became life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that, or it means nothing. It is either the most devastating disclosure of the deepest reality of the world, or it is a sham, a nonsense, a bit of deceitful playacting. Most of us, unable to cope with saying either of those things, condemn ourselves to live in the shallow world in between.”
N.T. Wright
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
Zechariah 9:9
“There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command. It has been customary to speak of ‘the missionary mandate.’ This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point. It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel. 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. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact?”
Lesslie Newbigin
“In service which Thy will appoints, there are no bonds for me;
For my inmost heart is taught “the truth” that makes Thy children “free;”
And a life of self–renouncing love is a life of liberty.”
Anna Waring
“The hardest task for people who believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ is in ‘living the sort of life that makes people say, ‘Ah, so that’s how people are going to live when righteousness takes over our world.’ The hardest task is simple, persistent faithfulness in our work and in our attitudes – the kind of faithfulness that shows we are being drawn forward by the magnet force of the kingdom of God.”
Cornelius Plantinga
“No one will leave an addiction or compulsion unless a competing passion is offered that gives a taste of what the soul is meant to endure. Only Heaven is a big enough passion to draw us away from petty distractions and cheap addictions of this sorry world.”
Dan Allender, Bold Love
“The more you say no to self in the way that Jesus teaches us to, you become more yourself. You don’t cease to have a personality. The more you deny self, the more the ‘real you’ you become—the you that God intended you to be—the you that you sense in your better moments you should be. The you that God thought up in the first place.”
Sam Allberry, “Is God Anti-Gay?”
“[People with intellectual disabilities] are essentially people of the heart. When they meet others they do not have a hidden agenda for power or for success. Their cry, their fundamental cry, is for a relationship, a meeting heart to heart. It is this meeting that awakens them, opens them up to life, and calls them forth to love in great simplicity, freedom and openness. When those ingrained in a culture of winning and of individual success really meet them, and enter into friendship with them, something amazing and wonderful happens. They too are opened up to love and even to God. They are changed at a very deep level. They are transformed and become more fundamentally human.”
Jean Vanier
“Salvation is membership in the family of God . . .The creation of a family with children is the reason for all of God’s activity. This is how he intends to show his glory . . . Our sonship to God is the apex of creation and the goal of redemption . . . The story of Paradise lost becoming Paradise regained is the story of God’s grace bringing us from alienation from him to membership in his family . . . Our self-image, if it is to be biblical, will begin just here. God is my Father (the Christian’s self-image always begins with the knowledge of God and who he is!); I am one of his children (I know my real identity); his people are my brothers and sisters (I recognize the family to which I belong and have discovered my deepest ‘roots’).”
Sinclair Ferguson
“You sum up the whole of the New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the Holy Creator. In the same way, you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means the he does not understand Christianity very well at all.”
J.I. Packer
“If the love of the father will not make a child delight in him, what will?”
John Owen
“People who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present.”
N.T. Wright
“For centuries, philosophers, theologians, novelists, and artists have described the human predicament and then prescribed a cure, or at least a salve. They have then estimated the likelihood that the prescription will work. That is, they’ve offered a prognosis. Hope is the reach of our hearts for the cure. It’s the reach of our hearts toward what we think will fulfill us, secure us, save us – and not just us, but also the whole world. To be a Christian is to participate in this very common human enterprise of diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis, but to do so from inside a Christian view of the world, a view that has been constructed from Scripture and that centers on Jesus Christ the Risen Savior.”
Cornelius Plantinga
“O Israel, hope in the LORD!”
Psalm 130:7
“You can get all A’s and still flunk life.”
Walker Percy
“Can I see another’s woe, and not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief, and not seek for kind relief?”
William Blake, “On Another’s Sorrow”
“…[Compassion] means not indifference to our times and our neighbors: it means absorption in time. And absorption in our neighbors. It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means entering into every man’s hopes and fears, longing and despairs … It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives – bind ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours.”
B.B. Warfield
