Moses: “I can’t speak.”
Job: “I have no peace.”
David: “I am a worm.”
Isaiah: “I am a man of unclean lips.”
Elijah: “I have had enough, Lord.”
Paul: “I am the chief of sinners.”
In our inadequacy, God is always adequate!
Dustin Benge
God has never done all He can do. He always has one more move.
PR.
"The beauty of the church is the reflection of another—God. ... To come face-to-face with God’s transcendent beauty is to ascend to the peak of our deepest longing and the fulfillment of our greatest desires.”
Dustin Benge
The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian makes me a different kind of woman.
~Elisabeth Elliot~
Screwtape Logic
In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis’s fictitious work on devils, humans, and the mud holes of sin we’re so prone to waller in, Lewis imagines just how the whizz-bang-inducing scent of a rosebush can be fashioned into something more akin to a crown of thorns. In the narrative, Screwtape, the veteran tempter, writes letters to his nephew and the rookie devil, Wormwood.
Screwtape offers advice to Wormwood, shares how the devil minor might draw his patient into the southern lake of fire. In one of those letters, Screwtape discusses the sacramental pleasures of God:
[God’s] a hedonist at heart. All those facts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. Or only like foam on the seashore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are “pleasures forevermore.” Ugh! I don’t think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He’s vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s of any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.
It’s a work of fiction, sure, but doesn’t it ring true? The things created by God — the Stuff of Earth — don’t always lead to dependency, attachment, or addiction. (I’m not addicted to wine at the moment, for example.) But through Screwtape’s subtle twisting of the pleasures, we come to chase the whizz-bang instead of the giver of the whizz-bang. And when we lose sight of the purpose of the whizz-bang, when we elevate the created over the Creator, the pleasure becomes its own dead end.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 83. 56
“Life can only be understood backward; it must be lived forward.” —
Soren Kierkegaard
A rejoicing heart soon makes a praising tongue.
~C.H. Spurgeon~
Receive the comfort of Christ in your sorrow, but hold fast to the promise that the sorrow you feel in the night makes way for joy in the morning.
Max Lucado
Anxiety is a word of unbelief or unreasoning dread. We have no right to allow it. Full faith in God puts it to rest.
~Horace Bushnell~
What becomes of the brokenhearted?
The lyrics to that old song are haunting. They speak of broken dreams, disillusion, and confusion. A broken heart is a wound to the soul. Loss, betrayal, misunderstandings, and fear of the unknown can affect you so deeply that you feel pain in your chest and wonder how you will bear it. Sometimes we grieve for another’s sorrow or pain and make it our own.
Jesus is the answer! written by William Weatherspoon, Paul Riser, and James Dean, recorded at Hitsville USA, 1966.
There’s nothing in this evil world that’s a match for the supremacy of Christ.
Dustin Benge
We who follow the Lord Jesus Christ are "ministers of the new covenant." The term "minister" means servant. The phrase "new covenant" speaks of relating to God by grace. Thus, we are those who serve God by the resources of His grace.
Bob Hoekstra
You don't always have to tell your side of the story.
TIME WILL.
Jason Robinson
“God specifically chose His unremarkable evangelists so that they would never be the explanation for the work of the gospel. He doesn't want His people to get confused about who is performing the transforming work of salvation in sinners' lives”
(John MacArthur).
New covenant living-it is the same reality as "Christian discipleship," "the Spirit-filled life," and "the abundant life."
Bob Hoekstra
Waiting for God in prayer doesn’t give us an excuse to do nothing.
Dustin Benge
You see a person’s true character when you’re no longer beneficial to them.
Jason Robinson
We want the acceptance and approval of God, yet still, get to scratch that tingly “sin” itch we all have.
C. S. Lewis
Theology 101: If Scripture doesn’t have the answers to your theological questions, you may be asking the wrong ones.
Dr. Michael J. Svigel
Comments