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
26 Then God said, “Let us make man 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
“We are sinners with the capacity to do great damage to ourselves and our relationships. We need God’s grace to save us from ourselves. But we are also God’s children, which means that we have great hope and potential—not hope that rests on our gifts, experience, or track record, but hope that rests in Christ. Because he is in us and we are in him, it is right to say that our potential is Christ.”
Timothy Lane and Paul David Tripp, Relationships: A Mess Worth Making
“A life of hospitality begins in worship, with a recognition of God’s grace and generosity. Hospitality is not first a duty and responsibility; it is first a response of love and gratitude for God’s love and welcome to us.”
Christine Pohl, Making Room
“It is not merely that the rich man is obliged to meet the needs of those who are less well off than he is but also that each one of us must use the gifts which we have received either by nature or by the Holy Spirit, so that no one may say that we are keeping these things to ourselves and refusing to share them with our neighbors.”
Andreas, Catena
“What more sublime can be said of friendship, what more true, what more profitable, than it ought to, and has proved to, begin in Christ, continue in Christ, and be perfected in Christ.”
Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship
“It is not, then, God the grand co-commiserator who gives us the freedom to cry out, but God the Rock. This is the God we can trust with our pain, our confusion, and grief even when he gives no answers, precisely because he is big enough to be the only answer we need.”
Derek Rishmawy, “The God Who Hears Our Lament”
“Did you know Creation is talking to you?
Wherever you go and whatever you do?
God will keep giving you clue after clue
So you won’t forget to remember what’s true …
Let the whole earth remind you of what God has said
From the moment you wake up ’till you go to bed
Oh and even on days you forget what is true
Don’t forget to remember, God won’t forget you”
Ellie Holcomb, “Don’t Forget to Remember”
“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”
Westley, The Princess Bride
“The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.”
Buddy the Elf
“Advent begins in the dark and yearns for the light. Advent aches for the day when we shall not learn war anymore…. And when [Jesus] comes, we shall sob. Sob with relief at his return. Sob with humiliation and sadness at what we have done to one another. But he shall not turn away to let us get ourselves together. He shall gather us up in his arms, with laughter in his eyes, and rise with us to the life immortal. And our dark hearts will no longer be dark. Our deepest desire will be to be ruled by him, who rules with grace. We will love him because he has loved us.”
Paul N. Walker
“We need communal rhythms that make deliberate space for both grief and joy. For me, the old saying rings true: Hunger is the best condiment. Abstaining, for a moment, from the clamor of compulsive jollification, and instead leaning into the reality of human tragedy and of my own need and brokenness, allows my experience of glory at Christmastime to feel not only more emotionally sustainable but also more vivid, vital and cherished.”
Tish Harrison Warren
“We live in a noisy culture where we often feel we have to scream just to be heard, where the din of social media outrage overpowers the call of our embodied communities, where it seems impossible to hear a still, small voice. Advent bids us to quiet down, repent, and lean into longing. Redemption is sneaking into our corner of the universe, just as it was announced to some unsuspecting shepherds on the night of Christ’s birth. Returning to Christ and resting in him isn’t an escape from the darkness of the world. It’s a proclamation that, in the midst of darkness, there remains another way—the only way.”
Tish Harrison Warren, “Practicing Advent in a Time of Turbulence”
“Augustus’s empire is like a well-lit room at night: the lamps are arranged beautifully, they shed pretty patterns, but they have not conquered the darkness outside. Jesus’ kingdom is like the morning star rising, signaling that it is time to blow out the candles, to throw open the curtains, and to welcome the new day that is dawning.”
NT Wright, “The Most Dangerous Baby”
“He so loved us that, for our sake, he was made man in time, although through him all times were made. He was made man, who made man. He was created of a mother whom he created. He was carried by hands that he formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, he the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.”
Augustine of Hippo
“Before grace renews the heart, there is grace preparing us for grace.”
Charles Spurgeon
“The gospel declares that no matter how dutiful or prayerful we are, we can’t save ourselves. What Jesus did was sufficient.”
Brennan Manning
“I didn’t start out understanding that hospitality was this robust practice. I thought of it more as entertaining, coffee and donuts or casseroles or whatever, but hospitality is significant when you look at the Scriptures. It’s significant, and it wasn’t coffee and donuts. It was struggling with Jews and Gentiles and how people were going to get along together and be in the church together and be one body.”
Christine Pohl
“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
“I wince when I write the word father. I am one. It is my proudest calling. It is my deepest failure. There is no joy, no pain, no greater futility or pride, no dream, no nightmare that is deeper than my being a father. There is no forgiveness I long for more, nor accolade that will ever mean more to me than one of my children blessing me as a father.”
Dan Allender
“Most of the time we aim too low. We walk in shoes too small for us. We spend our days shooting for a little burst of approval or some small career victory. But there’s a joyful way of being that’s not just a little bit better than the way we are currently living; it’s a quantum leap better. … [Spiritual] joy is a delicious, if painful, longing. It starts with a taste of something eternal and then the joy consists of longing for that taste again.”
David Brooks, The Second Mountain
“God came down and lived in this same world as a man. He showed us how to live in this world, subject to its vicissitudes and necessities, that we might be changed—not into an angel or a storybook princess, not wafted into another world, but changed into saints in this world. The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”
Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quiet Heart
“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
