Responding to Jesus the King

“There is more in you of good than you know.”

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

“I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”

—Anne Lamott

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every    direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine   mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

—C.S. Lewis

“Oh how I wish insight were the cure!”  —Patricia DeYoung

“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

“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

“If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the final analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” —Frederick Buechner

“The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me.” —Donald Miller

“The most precious part of each day for me is the 30-40 minutes I spend each morning before breakfast with the Bible.  All the rest of the day I am bombarded with the stories the world is telling about itself.  As I take time to immerse myself in the story the Bible tells, my vision is cleared, and I see things in another way.  I see the day that lies ahead in its place in God’s story.” —Lesslie Newbigin