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W.H. Griffith Thomas scourged Christians this way, “There is no greater foe to Christianity than mere profession. There is no greater discredit to Christianity today than to stand up for it, and yet not live it in our lives. There is no greater danger in the Christian world today than to stand up for the Bible, and yet to deny that Bible by the very way we defend it. There is no greater hindrance to Christianity today than to contend for orthodoxy, whatever the orthodoxy may be, and to deny it by the censoriousness, the hardness, the unattractiveness with which we champion our cause. Oh this power of personal testimony ?with the heart filled with the love of Christ, the mind saturated with the teaching of Christ, the conscience sensitive to the law of Christ, the whole nature aglow with grace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ.?(Listening to tthe Giants, 149-50, Warren Wiersbe, Baker 1980)
[Christian Contradictions, Citation: Joseph Roy, Leadership, Vol. 5, no. 4.]
A true Christian is a sign of contradiction--a living symbol of the Cross.
He or she is a person who believes the unbelievable, bears the unbearable, forgives the unforgivable, loves the unlovable, is perfectly happy not to be perfect, is willing to give up his or her will, becomes weak to be strong ... and finds love be giving it away.
Aubrey Vaughan
D. Lloyd Jones sums up Paul's position in these words, "In vv. 6-29, he explains why anybody is saved: it is the sovereign election of God. Verses 30-33 show us why anybody is lost, and the explanation to that is our own responsibility."
Source: Commentary on Romans, Vol. 9, p. 28
Once at a meeting, some young people were discussing the text, “ye are the salt of the earth.” They were suggesting uses of salt, and the meaning. Salt gives flavor to food. It preserves food to keep it from decaying. Then one girl said, salt makes yo...
Covey states, “Although Habit 2 applies to many different circumstances and levels of life, the most fundamental application of ‘begin with the end in mind” is to begin today with the image, picture, or paradigm of the end of your life as your frame of reference or the criterion by which everything else is examined. Each part of your life-today’s behavior, tomorrow’s behavior, next week’s behavior, next month’s behavior-can be examined in the context of the whole, of what really matters most to you. By keeping that end clearly in mind, you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day does not violate the criteria you have defined as supremely important, and that each day of your life contributes in a meaningful way to the vision you have of your life as a whole” (98).
Instant obedience is the only kind of obedience there is; delayed obedience is disobedience. Whoever strives to withdraw from obedience, withdraws from Grace. -Thomas Kampis.
Dr. Ellin Greene, of the University of Chicago, has said, "We get so quickly sidetracked from the simple story nature of our faith. We begin to think that theology saves us, that truth is somehow embodied in our theology of the Atonement, or our mastery of eschatological charts. But when Jesus wanted to communicate the truth of God’s kingdom, he left out the polysyllables and told a story about a woman who lost a coin or a man who dug for treasure. The kingdom of heaven is like this … he said. Dare we ask for more scholarly explanation from the Son of God?”
“Joy is the byproduct of obedience” (Sou...
Grantland Rice, America’s first great sportswriter said it this way: “When Jesus comes to judge us, he will not be so concerned about whether we won or lost, but how we played the game!”
"A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions. Religion deals with both earth and heaven, both time and eternity. Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal.
It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself. This means, at bottom, that the Christian gospel is a two-way road. On the one hand, it seeks to change the souls of men and thereby unite them with God; on the other hand, it seeks to change the environmental conditions of men so that the soul will have a chance after it is changed. Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like to see - an opiate of the people."
- Martin Luther King, jr.
