God’s New Humanity

“How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life, if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life?”

—Christopher Wiman

“One way or another, we are always remembering, of course. There is no escaping it even if we want to, or at least no escaping it for long, though God knows there are times when we try to, don’t want to remember. In one sense the past is dead and gone, never to be repeated, over and done with, but in another sense, it is of course not done with at all or at least not done with us. Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep in us somewhere whether we like it or not, and sometime it doesn’t take much to bring it back to the surface.”

—Frederick Buechner

“Forgetfulness leads to exile, while redemption is the secret to redemption.”

—Baal Shem Tov

“Sin is a breach of trust, the illicit reach of unbelief, an assertion of autonomy.”

—Bruce Waltke

“Grace doesn’t sell well; you can hardly even give it away, because it works only for losers and no one wants to stand in their line.”

—Robert Farrar Capon

“Come with thy heart hard, dead, cold, full of wickedness; come as a blood-red sinner; this is the way to come to Christ!”

—John Bunyan

“When God pardons, he does not say he understands our weakness or makes allowances for our errors; rather he disposes of, he finishes with, the whole of our dead life and raises us up with a new one. He does not so much deal with our derelictions as he does drop them down the black hole of Jesus’ death. He forgets our sins in the darkness of the tomb. He remembers our iniquities no more in the oblivion of Jesus’ expiration. He finds us, in short, in the desert of death, not in the garden of improvement; and in the power of Jesus’ resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home . . . The work of redemption is done entirely by the redeemer, and not at all by the redeemed.”

—Robert Farrar Capon

“What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it – the fact that he knows me.  I am graven on the palms of his hands.  I am never out of his mind.  All knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me.  I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me.  He knows me as friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment therefore when his care falters.  This is momentous knowledge.  There is unspeakable comfort – the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates – in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.  There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love for me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.”

—J. I. Packer, Knowing God

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth.”

—Jeremiah 9:23-24

“Knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a person’s heart.”

—J. I. Packer

“Why is power a gift? Because power is for flourishing.  When power is used well, people and the whole cosmos come more alive to what they were meant to be.  And flourishing is the test of power . . . I pray that when you put [this book] down, you will be one step closer to the flourishing for which you were created, and that as we, together, make something of the world, the cosmos itself would groan a bit less and sing a bit more, as the whole creation awaits the revealing of the children of God.”

—Andy Crouch, Playing God

“Great Father of mercies, Thy goodness I own,
And the covenant love of Thy crucified Son;
All praise to the Spirit, Whose whisper divine
Seals mercy and pardon and righteousness mine.”

—John Stocker

“The movement of God’s Spirit is very gentle, very soft – and hidden. It does not seek attention. But that movement is also very persistent, strong and deep.”

—Henri Nouwen

“He who dwells in a house, keeps the house in repair; so the Spirit dwelling in a believer, keeps grace in repair.  Grace is compared to a river of the water of life (John 7:38).  This river can never be dried up because God’s Spirit is the spring that continually feeds it.”

—Thomas Watson

“All these civilizing goods — from television to supermarkets — are merely means which smooth our path through the world and make it easier to travel. But what will it profit us, if we make smooth social and technical progress on this level road and no longer know where we are going, in whose name we are living, and what the goal of our destiny is? For then perfectionism in the way in which we master life leads precisely to a life which has not been mastered. Then we shall be wandering aimlessly over a smooth and level plain.

May it not be that our neuroses and our predilection for psychiatrists derive from the fact that we have become a heap of misery in this great empty plain? What good are our refrigerators, what good is the well-oiled apparatus of our style of living, if we no longer know what we are living for?

Albert Einstein once said that we live in an age of perfect means and confused ends. The question which is inherent in that statement I consider to be the most important question of our times. It has to do with the boredom which is deadly, with the emptiness which frightens us, but also with the fulfillments which make life worth living. It has to do with the crucial task which has been set for us, namely, to distinguish between the “means,” which make our life easier, and the “meaning” of our life, which is the only thing that makes life possible. Even the person who has perfectly solved the problem of the means can still perish in suicide because a life without meaning is dreadful. And this dreadfulness actually increases as the outward course of this life grows smoother.

I can express what I mean by this as a Christian in the words of our Lord: “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” All the means of mastering the world can turn a man into a fool if he overlooks the crucial question. That this should not happen, I consider the most important question of our time.”

—Helmut Thielicke

“There’s one more voice you may need to adjust. It’s the voice in your head whispering, There’s not enough. Not enough resources, spots in the best schools, teacher’s attention, opportunities, friends who will provide the right type of influence. Not enough hours in the day, funds in the account, time to protect the planet, chances to do things over. Fear of scarcity is alive and blooming inside the minds of most parents. That’s what sends their voices into the pinched and panicky zone. Fear is behind the rushing, hovering, chiding, and pleading that sours our conversations with our children . . .   For as long as I have practiced therapy with families, parents have been worried about scarcity . . . Relinquish the fear and you open a door to enchantment.”

—Wendy Mogel, Voice Lessons, 4.

“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

“The LORD God is a sun and a shield; the LORD bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.”

—Psalm 84: 11

“Everything You Wanted to Know About Predestination, But Were Afraid to Ask.”

“Nobody can emerge from a careful reading of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians with a privatized gospel. For Ephesians is the gospel of the church. It sets forth God’s eternal purpose to create through Jesus Christ a new society which stands out in bright relief against the sombre background of the old world. For God’s new society is characterized by life in place of death, by unity and reconciliation in place of division and alienation, by the wholesome standards of righteousness in place of the corruption of wickedness, by love and peace in place of hatred and strife, and by unremitting conflict with evil in place of a flabby compromise with it.”

—John Stott

“The Gospel does not become public truth for a society by being propagated as a theory or as a worldview and certainly not as a religion. It can become public truth only insofar as it is embodied in a society (the church) which is both “abiding in” Christ and engaged in the life of the world.”

—Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 39.

“Our church communities ought to be cities of refuge for sinners, busy with the traffic of forgiveness, busy with people learning the ‘craft’ of forgiveness–ordinarily by getting apprenticed to a master forgiver or two. The idea is that saints ought to teach forgiveness to saints-in-training. In the holy catholic church (the communion of saints), we should be rehearsing the forgiveness of sins like pianists, practicing the hard parts over and over till we get them right.”

—Cornelius Plantinga Jr.