Witness Unhindered

“We all long for Eden and are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature is soaked with the sense of exile.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

 “The enthusiasms of my conversion have worn off. For whole stretches since the dream, since the baptism, my belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone…. Once upon a time, I thought I had arrived. Now I have arrived at a middle.”

Lauren Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

 “In Jesus Christ we witness the long-awaited vindication and effective demonstration of God’s kingship in the world.  The coming of Christ is the climax of the whole history of redemption as recorded in the Scriptures. The rightful king has established a beachhead in his territory and calls on his subjects to press his claims ever farther in creation.”

Al Wolters, Creation Regained

 “Is there nothing to sing about today? Then borrow a song from tomorrow; sing of what is yet to be.”

Charles Spurgeon

“Ministry is not first about telling people what to do, but about telling them who they are, so that obedience will flow out of celebration.”

Paul David Tripp

“It shouldn’t be an easy walk from the pew to the weight bench, but it is made easy by a Christianity that looks more like a spiritual fitness program than a Gospel balm . . . The church is not like CrossFit; it is more like the hospital, or even the morgue. It is not a place where bad people go to be made good, but a place where bad people are loved in their badness.”

Conor Gwin, “My Church is Not CrossFit”

“The church is not in the world to teach sinners how to straighten up and fly right. That’s the world’s business; and on the whole it does a fairly competent—even gleefully aggressive—job of it. The church is supposed to be in the forgiveness business. Its job in filling pulpits is to find derelict nobodies who are willing to admit that they’re sinners and mean it. It’s supposed to take sheep who can be nothing but lost … and stand them up to proclaim that lostness, deadness, uselessness, and nothingness are God’s cup of tea. The church’s job is not to go around implying that those desperate states are conditions we must get over as quickly as possible once we’ve been found; its true work is to invite us all to go moonstruck over the news that the one operative consideration in our life is the Passion of the Finder to find.”

Robert Farrar Capon

“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

“Longing for God arises in every human soul because it is part of the soul’s standard equipment. We have been endowed by our Creator with a sensus divinitatis (‘a sense of divinity’), wrote John Calvin, and everywhere in the world, even when it expresses itself as idolatry, the sense of divinity is the seed of religion. God has made us for himself. Our sense of God runs in us like a stream, even though we divert it toward other objects. We human beings want God even when we think that what we really want is a green valley, or a good time from our past, or a loved one. Of course we do want these things and persons, but we also want what lies behind them. 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

“You don’t experience God; you get to know him . . . You enjoy him. He is, after all, a person.”

Paul Miller

“Grace is free, but it ain’t cheap.”

Pierce Pettis

“No one has helped to provide salvation; God has done it all himself. The banquet of mercy is served up by one host.”

Charles Spurgeon

“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof grace–bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home free before they started… Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale.”

Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three

“No room remains empty for long.  If God is driven out, the gods come trooping in.”

Lesslie Newbigin

“Idols are non-gods and as such are much more congenial to us than God, for we not only have the pleasure of making them, using our wonderful imaginations and skills in creative ways, but also of controlling them.  They are gods with all the God taken out so that we can continue to be our own gods.”

Eugene Peterson

“Those who make idols become like them; so do all who trust in them. O Israel, trust in the LORD!”

Psalm 115: 8-9a

“Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love . . . Salvation belongs to the LORD!”

Jonah 2: 8-9

“World evangelization requires the whole church to take the whole Gospel to the whole world.”

The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization

 “Mission means inviting all the peoples of the earth to hear the music of God’s future and dance to it today.”

Christopher J.H. Wright

“C.T. Studd, born to privilege, gifted athletically, and trained at Eton and Cambridge, turned his back on wealth and served Christ for decades against unimaginable odds, first in China and then in Africa. He penned these words:

Some want to live within the sound
of church or chapel bell;
I want to build a rescue shop
within a yard of hell.”

D.A. Carson

“And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”

1 Corinthians 2: 1-5

“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

“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

“Probably more trouble is caused in the Christian life by an inadequate or mistaken view of [the doctrine of justification by grace through faith] than any other.  When the child of God loses his sense of peace with God, finds his concern for others dried up, or generally finds his sense of the sheer goodness and grace of God diminished, it is from this fountain that he has ceased to drink. Conversely, if we can gain a solid grounding here, we have the foundation for a life of peace and joy.”

Sinclair Ferguson, The Christian Life, p. 80

“It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world.  Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission . . . The idea of a missional church is far from a new idea . . . If we understand the church from our biblical theology as that community of people chosen and called since Abraham to be the vehicle of God’s blessing to the nations, what else can the church be but missional? This is who we are and what we are here for. Indeed, as a friend of mine said recently, ‘All this talk of “missional church” sounds to me like talking about a “female woman”. If it’s not missional, it’s not church.’”

Christopher Wright

“The church’s great news to a dying world is that there is a living God, whose love for his creation is inexhaustible . . . The church has no other and no better message. This is her great declaration.”

Lewis Allen

“There’s a direct correlation between the accuracy of our memory and the effectiveness of our mission.  If we’re not teaching people how to be saved, it’s perhaps because we’ve forgotten the tragedy of being lost. If we’re not teaching the message of forgiveness, it may be because we don’t remember what it was like to be guilty. And if we’re not preaching the cross, it could be that we’ve subconsciously decided that—God forbid—somehow we don’t need it.”

Max Lucado

“Beautiful people do not just happen.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command.  It has been customary to speak of ‘the missionary mandate.’ This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point.  It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel. If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another impression.  Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy. The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed. It must be told. Who could be silent about such a fact?  The mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is more like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving.”

Lesslie Newbigin