Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem
12 So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom.
13 Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
14 Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
15 Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Psalm 90:12-15
26 Then God said, “Let us make man[a] in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Genesis 1:26-28
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
Genesis 2:1-3
1 Lord, you have been our dwelling place
in all generations.
2 Before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
3 You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!”
4 For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.
10 The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.
12 So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom.
13 Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
14 Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
15 Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil.
16 Let your work be shown to your servants,
and your glorious power to their children.
17 Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands upon us;
yes, establish the work of our hands!
Psalm 90:1-4, 10, 12-17
“God’s patience is not placidity, any more than his fierce anger is loss of control, his laughter cruelty or his pity sentimentality. When his moment comes for judgment, in any given case, it will be by definition beyond appeasing or postponing.”
Derek Kidner
“If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence, that God would not be worthy of worship . . . If I don’t believe that there is a God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation. Only if I am sure that there’s a God who will right all wrongs and settle all accounts perfectly do I have the power to refrain.”
Miroslav Volf
“Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might towards strangers? Far from it . . . Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference . . . God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer . . . which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.”
Rebecca Manley Pippert
“He left His Father’s throne above, so free, so infinite His grace!
Emptied Himself of all but love; and bled for Adam’s helpless race.
‘Tis mercy all, immense and free, for O, my God, it found out me!
Amazing Love, how can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”
Charles Wesley
“Christians live by faith in Jesus Christ, and when their faith leans forward toward the coming of the Kingdom, they call it hope. The person who pursues [vocation] in hope, and who then shapes his or her life accordingly for service in the kingdom – such a person has a calling that will outlast every recession.”
Cornelius Plantinga
“There is nowhere we can go where God isn’t already there. There is nowhere we can leave where God does not stay. Every bit of our skin, bone, thought, imagination, and feeling, every minute pleasure of our prosperity, every glass shard of our adversity is held, governed, and seen through to us by God. Life under the sun is a God-inhabited life. The bent world rests and rebels within the arms of God. The whole earth is full of his glory.”
Zack Eswine
“The picture of Jesus as the coming Judge is the central feature of another absolutely vital and non-negotiable Christian belief: that there will indeed be a judgment in which the creator God will set the world right once and for all. The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and postliberal world. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.”
N.T. Wright
“Guilt is our inner police force, but if we give it too much emotional power, we risk turning into a police state.”
Ruth Whippman, “Guilt Trip,” The New York Times
“Repentance is as necessary to salvation by faith as the ankle is to walking. The one does not act apart from the other. … Faith is trusting in Christ; repentance is turning from sin. They are two sides of the same coin of belonging to Jesus.”
Sinclair Ferguson, The Grace of Repentance
“God has really forgiven you. He’s not like the person who forgives, but somehow you know you’d better not do it again because they won’t forgive you a second time. He doesn’t grant you a temporary truce and wait to get you later. God has really accepted you and made you his child.”
Jack Miller, Saving Grace
“Getting saved is easy; becoming a community is difficult – damnably difficult.”
Eugene Peterson
“I didn’t come to the conviction easily, but finally there was no getting around it; there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself. Community, not the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting in which Christ is at play.”
Eugene Peterson
“If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even when there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Love the one you’re with.”
Stephen Stills
“Our ‘inconsolable secret,’ says C.S. Lewis, is that we are full of yearnings, sometimes shy and sometimes passionate, that point us beyond the things of earth to the ultimate reality of God.”
Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World
“The first step forward in knowing God better is the awareness that you do not yet know him fully. It is ‘thirsting’ for God. It is discovering that he has water which can satisfy our deepest longings. It is saying to him: ‘Lord, give me this water’ (John 4:15).”
Sinclair Ferguson, Grow in Grace
O, heart bereaved and lonely,
Whose brightest dreams have fled
Whose hopes like summer roses,
Are withered crushed and dead
Though link by link be broken,
And tears unseen may fall
Look up amid thy sorrow,
To Him who knows it all.
O, cling to thy Redeemer,
Thy Savior, Brother, Friend
Believe and trust His promise,
To keep you till the end
O watch and wait with patience,
And question all you will
His arms of love and mercy,
Are round about thee still.
Fanny Crosby
“Of the evils that infect God’s world (moral and spiritual perversity, waste of good, and the physical disorders and disruptions of a spoiled cosmos), it can summarily be said: God permits evil; he punishes evil with evil; he brings good out of evil; he uses evil to test and discipline those he loves; and one day he will redeem his people from the power and presence of evil altogether. . . The doctrine of providence teaches Christians that they are never in the grip of blind forces (fortune, change, luck, fate); all that happens to them is divinely planned, and each event comes as a new summons to trust, obey and rejoice, knowing that all is for one’s spiritual and eternal good.”
JI Packer
“The vulnerability that leads to flourishing requires risk, which is the possibility of loss – the chance that when we act, we will lose something we value. Risk, like life, is always about probabilities, never about certainties. To risk is to open ourselves up to the chance that something will go wrong, that something will be taken from us – without knowing for sure whether that loss will come to pass or not. To be vulnerable is to be exposed to the possibility of loss – and not just loss of things or possessions, but loss of our own self. Vulnerable at root means woundable – and any wound deeper than the most superficial scratch injures and limits not just our bodies but our very sense of self. Wounded, we are forced to become careful, tender, tentative in the way we move in the world.”
Andy Crouch
“I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free,
For His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.”
Civilla Martin
“Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage: anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”
Saint Augustine
“If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence, that God would not be worthy of worship. . . If I don’t believe that there is a God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation. Only if I am sure that there’s a God who will right all wrongs and settle all accounts perfectly do I have the power to refrain.”
Miroslav Volf
“Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.”
1 Peter 2: 21-23
“Doubt is the ants-in-the-pants of faith; it keeps it alive and moving.”
Frederick Buechner
“A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.”
Tim Keller, The Reason For God
“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
“Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’”
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
