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Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem

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You are here: Home / Archives for The Language of the Heart

The Language of the Heart

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Choose Wisdom – Live Wisdom

September 1, 2019 | David Speakman

“The Christian life after all is a life, it is a power, it is an activity. This is the thing we so constantly tend to forget. It is not just a philosophy, it is not just a point of view, it is not just a teaching that we take up and try to put into practice. It is all that, but it is something infinitely more. The very essence of the Christian life, according to the New Testament teaching everywhere, is that it is a mighty power that enters into us; it is a life, if you like, that is pulsating in us. It is an activity, and an activity on the part of God.”

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

“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.”

J.I. Packer, Knowing God, 110.

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, that part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.  And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature, either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and other creatures and with itself or else into one that is in a state of war with God and with other creatures and itself.  To be the one kind of creature is heaven, that is joy and peace and knowledge and power.  To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.  Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Choose Wisdom

August 25, 2019 | David Speakman

“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.

“People often think of Christianity as a kind of bargain in which God says “If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t, I’ll do the other thing.” I don’t think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, that part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature, either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and other creatures and with itself or else into one that is in a state of war with God and with other creatures and itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven, that is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The Wisdom We Need

August 18, 2019 | David Speakman

“The practice of gaining wisdom and becoming wise is a path that is traveled, not a door that is opened. We usually want the door.”

Les Newsom

“The fear of God is that affectionate reverence, by which the child of God bends himself humbly and carefully to his Father’s law.”

Charles Bridges

“Wisdom is for the humbly eager – one might almost say, for the lover, the suitor . . . It is not for the man ‘wise in his own eyes’: he thinks that he has arrived – and indeed he has, for he will never get a step further. His trouble is not intellectual; he is no fool . . . It is that he does not seriously want to be a better person; whereas the wise person is teachable to the end, open to God’s commands and chastening.”

Derek Kidner

The Language of the Heart: Praying Our Guilt

August 11, 2019 | Ethan Smith

“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

The Language of the Heart: Praying Our Life Together

July 28, 2019 | John Bourgeois

“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

The Language of the Heart: Praying our Depression

July 21, 2019 | David Speakman

“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

The Language of the Heart: Praying our Vulnerability

July 14, 2019 | David Speakman

“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

The Language of the Heart: Praying our Anger

July 7, 2019 | David Speakman

“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

The Language of the Heart: Praying our Doubts

June 30, 2019 | David Speakman

“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

The Language of the Heart: Praying our Trouble

June 23, 2019 | David Speakman

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”

Frederick Buechner

“As we might guess, far from gradually becoming extinct in adulthood, our fears increase throughout our lives. What was once a small family of worries quietly conducts an aggressive breeding program to become a teeming community of palpable fears and private anxieties. The code by which fear and anxiety live is primal: multiply. As we possess more things, care about more people, accumulate more bad experiences, and watch the evening news, it is as if we absorb fear. If they are not obvious in your own life, perhaps it’s because you have been living in a war zone your entire life. At first you noticed every gunshot. After a while the mayhem blends in with the rustle of the trees, the TV, and the children playing in the other room. Fear gradually becomes the background noise of everyday life.”

Ed Welch, Running Scared

“Fear can sit in the car, but it sits in the back, and it can’t pick the music.”

Elizabeth Gilbert

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