Amazing Grace

"Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." -Eugene O'Neill

"Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected." -Jonathan Edwards

"As the grace grows nearer my theology is growing strangely simple, and it begins and ends with Christ as the only Savior of the lost." -Henry Benjamin Whipple

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Humility

The true way to be humble is not to stoop till thou art smaller than thyself, but to stand at thy real height against some higher nature that will show thee what the real smallness of thy greatness is.

--Phillips Brooks

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Discipline

To live a disciplined life is to live in such a way that you want only to be where God is with you.

--Henri Nouwen

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Not a Dispenser

The Bible does not teach that Christ has salvation and dispenses it like a benevolent master giving gifts to his servants who obey him. Christ is our salvation and gives Himself to us as our salvation. He is our life; He is our strength; He is our peace; He is our joy; He is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

-George W. Peters,
A Biblical Theology of Missions (Chicago: Moody Press, 1972), 65

What God Hath Joined Together

With a weak faith and a fearful heart, many a sinner stands before the Lord. It is not the strength of our faith, but the perfection of Christ's sacrifice that saves! No feebleness of faith, nor dimness of eye, no trembling of hand can change the efficacy of Christ's blood. The strength of our faith can add nothing to it, nor can the weakness of our faith take anything from Him. Faith (weak or strong) still reads the promise, "the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin." If at times my eye is so dim that I cannot read these words, through blinding tears or bewildering trials, faith rests itself on the certain knowledge of the fact that THE PROMISE IS THERE, and the blood of Christ remains in all its power and suitableness upon the altar, unchanged and unaffected. God says that the believer is justified. What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

-Horatius Bonar (1808-1889)

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He is Enough

Eventually we must learn that we have everything in Christ already. That thing called "patience" that we are so diligently seeking is not a thing at all, it is Christ. "Victory" is no longer a "thing", it is a Man. And so it is with everything else we need. It is certainly possible to seek spiritual blessings from God apart from Christ, or in addition to Christ. What a difference it makes to realize that He HAS (past tense) blessed us already - not with three or five or twenty blessings - but with every spiritual blessing. However many there may be, we have them all. Where and how has He done this? Thank God, it was done the moment we received Christ and entered into Him as our All in All. God would have us seek Him first, and not His things. To Him there is no "thing", for they are all summed up into Christ.

--Chip Brogden

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The Point is to Live

Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Take whatever comes with great trust.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet"

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Jesus is the Message

Jesus Christ is not just gentle, He is gentleness.
He is not just kind, He is kindness.
He is not just a peacemaker, He is peace.
He is not just truthful, He is Truth.

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If Jesus is the beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega, why look for another beginning, why fear the end?

source: here


One last thought from me that perhaps relates. The book of Hebrews begins this way:

"In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days has spoken to us by a Son ..."

One way to read this is that Jesus was the messenger. Another, more subtle way to read this is that Jesus was the message. See the difference?

It's Grace We Need Help Understanding

Sometimes, in an effort to remind people of the cost of the cross, we withhold grace until we are sure they understand their sin. But it's in giving of our grace that we remind people they need to go to Jesus to find their own.

People understand their sin without our help. It's grace they need help understanding.

The quote above was taken from this video:

Jesus as Deliverer

Understood properly, the Christian doctrine of sin is a vision of wholeness, and Dante represents this tradition at its best. He does not label people as evil because they've fallen short of some ill-conceived, perfectionist goal. Dante's understanding of sin is far more subtle than that, and more humane. These days, we are likely to say to people struggling with addiction or mental illness that their hope lies in a perpetual state of recovery. Imagine for a moment that this is much more severe than anything Dante, or the desert monks, for that matter, had in mind. Their ultimate concern was how, as we deepen our relationship with God, we become more free to love, and more free to choose the good. The idea that one would be defined forever by one's sin or sickness would have seemed to them excessively cruel, more likely to engender hopelessness than hope.

Kathleen Norris, "Acedia & Me", pg 204-205