Mark

“The sins I once feared to lose became a delight to dismiss. You turned them out and took their place, pleasanter than any pleasure.” 

Saint Augustine

“A religion that costs nothing is worth nothing! A cheap Christianity, without a cross, will prove in the end a useless Christianity, without a crown.” 

J.C. Ryle

“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

“Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing – the reason they can fly.” 

Mary Oliver, “Storage”

“The cross comes before the crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning.”

C.S. Lewis

“The religious see God as useful; gospel-believing Christians see God as beautiful.”

Tim Keller

“To bind a Roman citizen is a crime, to flog him is an abomination, to kill him is almost an act of murder: to crucify him is – What? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed.”

Cicero

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”

Abraham Kuyper

“In Jesus Christ we witness the long-awaited vindication and effective demonstration of God’s kingship in the world. The coming of Christ is the climax of the whole history of redemption as recorded in the Scriptures. The rightful king has established a beachhead in his territory and calls on his subjects to press his claims ever farther in creation.”

Al Wolters, Creation Regained

“Laudetur Iesus Christus – Praise be to Jesus Christ!”

Edith Stein, responding to German soldiers greeting her in her church with the customary “Heil Hitler” salute.

“Fatherlike he tends and spares us
Well our feeble frame he knows.
In his hands he gently bears us
Rescues us from all our foes.”

Henry Lyte, “Praise My Soul the King of Heaven”

“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

“If the love of the father will not make a child delight in him, what will?”

John Owen