“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
Mark Twain
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Jesus
Luke
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Seven Miles with Jesus
“Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story. … If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.”
Ivan Illich
“If you win this golf tournament today, if you lose this golf tournament by 10 shots, if you never win another golf tournament again, I’m still going to love you. You’re still going to be the same person. Jesus loves you. And nothing changes.”
Meredith Scheffler
“Food may not be the answer to world peace, but it’s a start.”
Anthony Bourdain
The Living from the Dead
“The most fantastic of all Christian claims is thot Jesus Christ rose from the dead. It strains our credulity to the limit. Human beings have tried with all possible ingenuity both to defy and to deny death. But only Christ has claimed to conquer it, that is, to defeat it in his own experience, and, to deprive it of its power over others.”
John Stott
“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
“Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall . . .
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.”
John Updike
The Father’s Hands
44 It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, 45 while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 46 Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last. 47 Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God, saying, “Certainly this man was innocent!” 48 And all the crowds that had assembled for this spectacle, when they saw what had taken place, returned home beating their breasts. 49 And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance watching these things.
Luke 23:44-49
The Measure of a King
“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.
I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.”
Zechariah 9:9-10
“Jesus bursts into tears . . . in them is distilled an eternity of grief. And although we know something of the brimming surface of those tears, we know nothing of the depths from which they are drawn. Nothing of the pain that lies at the watery depths of his heart. Nothing of the sorrow. Or of the sadness . . . He is going to his death. A horrible, shameful, humiliating death. He knows the pain will be unbearable . . . He knows the blessings outside the gate will turn to curses within. He knows the hands of praise will become fists of punishment. He knows the reverently placed palms will become a mocking reed scepter. But knowing all of this, Jesus does not weep for himself. He weeps for Jerusalem.”
Ken Gire
Lost and Found: the Possible Impossibility
“Human beings can bear an incredible amount of meaningful deprivation but only a very little meaningless affluence.”
Erazim Kohak
“We are all born into this world looking for someone looking for us.”
Dr. Curt Thompson
“You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own. Surely that is why, in Jesus’ sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle’s eye. Because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything that he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift. He does not see that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept, even from God himself, a helping hand.”
Frederick Buechner
A Litany of Lost Things
“When the younger son returns, Christ reports for us the words of the son to his father, but does not give anything about a speech of the father to his son. For in reality, the father substitutes kisses for words and replaces assertion with expression and eyes speak for the tongue.”
Rev. Dr. Ibrahim Sa’id, Quoted in Poet & Peasant by Kenneth Bailey
“For my entire life I had been quite responsible, traditional, and homebound. But, I suddenly saw my jealousy, my anger, my touchiness, doggedness and sullenness, and, most of all, my subtle self-righteousness. I saw how much of a complainer I was and how much of my thinking and feeling was ridden with resentment. I was the elder son for sure, but just as lost as his younger brother, even though I had stayed ‘home’ all my life.”
Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son
“These parables are truly a reassurance to those lost sheep who have strayed. But they are also a warning – and this aspect of their message is generally missed. Men and women everywhere prefer to build communities that affirm their choices, that share their values, that keep out those who might bring unrighteousness to their neighborhoods.”
Gary Burge, Jesus, The Middle Eastern Storyteller
The Wide Mercy of the Narrow Door
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
“I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
“No evangelical, I think, need hesitate to admit that in his heart of hearts he would like universalism to be true. Who can take pleasure in the thought of people being eternally lost? If you want to see folk damned, there is something wrong with you! Universalism is thus a comfortable doctrine in a way that alternatives are not. But wishful thinking, based on a craving for comfort and a reluctance to believe that some of God’s truth might be tragic, is no sure index of reality.”
J.I. Packer
Dare to Call Him Father
“Prayer is an expression of who we are . . . We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.”
Thomas Merton
“If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life . . . Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.”
Paul Miller
“Believers do not pray with the view of informing God about things unknown to him, or of exciting him to do his duty, or of urging him as though he were reluctant. On the contrary, they pray in order that they may arouse themselves to seek him, that they may exercise their faith in meditating on his promises, that they may relieve themselves from their anxieties by pouring them into his bosom; in a word, that they may declare that from him alone they can hope and expect, both for themselves and for others, all good things.”
John Calvin
“God, of your goodness give me yourself, for you are enough for me. And only in you do I have everything. Amen.”
Lady Julian of Norwich
Through the Cross to the Crown
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“The cross comes before the crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning.”
C.S. Lewis
“A religion that costs you nothing is worth nothing. A cheap Christianity without a cross will prove in the end a useless Christianity without a crown.”
JC Ryle
“Christ leads me through no darker rooms
Than He went through before;
He that unto God’s kingdom comes
Must enter by this door.”
Richard Baxter