Judges

“God speaks to us: not only to move us to do what he wants, but to enable us to know him so that we may love him.  Therefore, God sends his word to us in the character of both information and invitation. It comes to woo us as well as to instruct us; it not merely puts us in the picture of what God has done and is doing but also calls us into personal communion with the loving Lord himself.”

JI Packer, Knowing God, 110.

“For this is the will of God: your sanctification.”

1 Thessalonians 4:3

“The point of all this learning is to prepare to add one’s own contribution to the supreme reformation project, which is God’s restoration of all things that have been corrupted by evil . . . When Christians strive to make God’s purposes their own, they tilt forward to God’s restoration of all things, the final coming of the kingdom. They think about it, pray for it, study and work in ways that accord with it. Thinking personally as well as globally, they want the kingdom to come in their own hearts as well as in the whole world.”

Cornelius Plantinga

“When you’re so ashamed that you could die, God believes in you.  And you can’t do right even though you try, God believes in you. Blessed are the ones who grieve, the ones who mourn, the ones who bleed. In sorrow you sow but in joy you reap. God believes in you.”

Pierce Pettis

“God speaks to us: not only to move us to do what he wants, but to enable us to know him so that we may love him.  Therefore, God sends his word to us in the character of both information and invitation. It comes to woo us as well as to instruct us; it not merely puts us in the picture of what God has done and is doing but also calls us into personal communion with the loving Lord himself.”

JI Packer, Knowing God, 110.

“I wish you’d see yourself as beautiful as I see you. Why can’t you see yourself as beautiful as I see you?”

The Avett Brothers, “Will You Return?”

“Worship is the strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God.”

Eugene Peterson

“Words and music did for me what solid, even rigorous religious argument could never do, they introduced me to God, not belief in God, more an experiential sense of God.”

Bono

“Hymns are not only powerful, they sneak into our soul. As William Cowper sings, ‘Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings; it is the Lord who rises with healing in His wings.’ William Cowper was well aware of the power of hymns, as he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘It is a noble thing to be a poet. It makes all the world so lively. I might have preached more sermons than even Tillotson did and better, and the world would have been still fast asleep. But a volume of verse is a fiddle that puts the universe in motion.’ Hymns have this ability to sneak in undetected and surprise us! And we desperately need the truth of the mercy of God to break through, to reform us, to restore our sanity, to open our eyes to help us see Jesus as beautiful and believable—in short, to shape us as a people of God.”

Kevin Twit

“There is no attribute more comforting to His children than that of God’s Sovereignty. Under the most adverse circumstances, in the most severe trials, they believe that Sovereignty has ordained their afflictions, that Sovereignty overrules them, and that Sovereignty will sanctify them all . . . it is God upon the throne that we love to preach.  It is God upon His throne whom we trust.”

Charles Spurgeon

“It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. And great mystery: to redeem our brokenness and lovelessness the God who suffers with us did not strike some mighty blow of power but sent his beloved son to suffer like us, through his suffering to redeem us from suffering and evil. Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.”

Nicholas Wolterstorff

“When opponents do their worst, and we’re still standing for Christ, that is ‘a clear sign,’ a prophetic warning, that God is with us. For example, when the Empress Eudoxia, in the fourth century, threatened John Chrysostom with banishment, he told her, ‘You cannot banish me, for this world is my Father’s house.’ ‘But I will kill you,’ she said. ‘No, you cannot, for my life is hidden with Christ in God.’ ‘Then I will take away your treasures.’ ‘No, you cannot, for my treasure is in heaven, and my heart is there.’ ‘But I will drive you away from your friends, and you will have no one left.’ ‘No, you cannot, for I have a friend in heaven from whom you cannot separate me. I defy you, for there is nothing you can do to harm me.’”

Ray Ortlund

“The love of Christ is rich and free;
Fixed on His own eternally;
Nor earth, nor hell, can it remove;
Long as He lives, His own He’ll love.
His loving heart engaged to be
Their everlasting Surety;
Twas love that took their cause in hand,
And love maintains it to the end.
Love cannot from its post withdraw;
Nor death, nor hell, nor sin, nor law,
Can turn the Surety’s heart away;
He’ll love His own to endless day.”

William Gadbsy

“How strange it is that a widow with only a handful of meal should be commanded to offer hospitality! It is once again the impossible that is set before us.  It would have been a dull commonplace to have fed the prophet from the overflowing larder of the rich man’s palace. But to work from an almost empty cupboard – that is the surprising way of the LORD!  He delights to hang great weights on apparently slender wires, to have great events turn on seeming trifles, and to make poverty the minister of the unsearchable riches of Christ.”

J.H. Jowett

“Humans beings can bear an incredible amount of meaningful deprivation but only a very little meaningless affluence.”

Erazim Kohak

“Behind every agonizing ‘No’ from God is his ‘Yes’ to something better, his ‘Trust Me’ with the timing, and his ‘I AM with you right now’”.

Walter Henegar

 “When the scriptural people of God seek redemption, they want personal salvation, and they express their desire in what sounds like a cry of the heart.  But to them redemption goes far beyond personal salvation. When biblical people want God to redeem, what they want is freedom and righteousness throughout the land.  They want God to unseat Pharaoh or Caesar. They want God to drive the Midianites back across the border. They’re Exodus people, after all. They’re Passover people. They have a history of being squeezed by Egypt, Babylon, or Rome.  In their eyes, God’s redemption means justice is coming, liberation is coming, the King of all the earth is coming!”

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World 

“Answer me this question, and I will tell you — Has God the Spirit taught you that you are accursed? Has he made you feel the bitterness of sin? Has he made you cry, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner?’ Then, my dear friend, Christ was cursed for you; and you are not cursed. You are not cursed now. Christ was cursed for you. Be of good cheer; if Christ was cursed for you, you cannot be cursed again.”

Charles Spurgeon

“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, Exclusion and Embrace

“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

This life, therefore, is
not righteousness but growth in righteousness
not health but healing
not being but becoming
not rest but exercise.
We are not what we shall be, but we are growing toward it.
The process is not yet finished, but it is going on;
This is not the end, but it is the road.
All does not gleam in glory but all is being purified.

Martin Luther

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God, except precisely that point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, then I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him.  Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefront besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”

Martin Luther

“You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth.  You can point with it, too.”

Anne Lamott

“. . . always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.”

1 Peter 3:15

“And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

G.K. Chesterton

“Grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.”

Dallas Willard

“‘Yet even now,’ declares the Lord, ‘return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.’”

Joel 2: 12-13

“Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause . . . The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience . . . Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable…. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Flannery O’Connor

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them! But the line dividing good and evil cuts through every human heart. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.”

1 Timothy 1: 15-16