Tag: God

Dangerous wine

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC:

Unfermented grape juice is a bland and pleasant drink, especially on a warm afternoon mixed half-and-half with ginger ale. It is a ghastly symbol of the life blood of Jesus Christ, especially when served in individual antiseptic, thimble-sized glasses.

Wine is booze, which means it is dangerous and drunk-making. It makes the timid brave and the reserved amorous. It loosens the tongue and breaks the ice, especially when served in a loving cup. It kills germs. As symbols go, it is a rather splendid one.
[Totally ripped off from Michael Hyatt.]

It’s Time To See Religion Die

Brian “Head” Welch, Save Me From Myself:

All of the man-made religion crap in this world has to die. Whether it’s Christian man-made religion crap or some other man-made religion crap, it all has to die. It must grieve God’s heart when he sees Christians fighting about whose doctrine is right; he doesn’t see denominations, he sees one big glorious bride. When Christians argue about doctrinal issues, all he sees is carnal people acting like children. All that prideful, controlling religious crap is what drives young people away from churches, and it has to go. Much of the world’s population is under the age of eighteen, and we have to bring the love of Christ to them without all this controlling crap going on. Because, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Burning them up

The Prodigal Jon:

Forgiveness is the thing I ask for the most. In my head maybe I know that God’s forgiveness is eternal and inexhaustible but in my heart I feel like he’s going to run out of them. That he’s got a limited supply. And I’m burning them up, one by one, sin by sin.
Boy, have I felt this way, too.
(Yes, I know the blog post is over a year old, but I just put the feed into my RSS reader and am reading the old entries still in the feed.)

Past the words

Tony Woodlief:

I spent a good portion of my time in a small chapel, learning prayers that preceded the Roman Catholic Church. I came with a great weight on my bones, a weight that overwhelmed me in that tiny chapel. I fell to my knees there, and prayed with quivering shoulders and trembling hands, done in by grief over the past, fear of the future, the knowing that this present ground is sand, that my feet must soon move forward or backward. Each way bears a cost; one of the great lies of men is that the path can be traveled without suffering. Another great lie is that we can stand still and read books and let our paltry knowledge carry us into the arms of God. We have to walk, with heavy, stumbling feet.

[…]

It’s easy to see why so many of us — Christians and pagans alike — spend lifetimes running from the living God, our hands stopping our ears, our mouths babbling prayers or blasphemies, all in an effort to avoid the great silence where God speaks to man. That silence is a fearful place, but there is love there, the great love of a parent. There is mercy too, and strength for the uncompleted race.

“Do not lean on your own understanding”

Andrée Seu, “Alice’s battle“:

You have never seen a struggle like Alice’s struggle against joy. The doubting Narnian dwarfs were preemptively miserable, and so is Alice. The girlfriends’ counsel of lowered expectations mounts a new offensive in her mind. (There is no force so powerful as error in a godly person’s mouth.) But just as Alice starts to sink again, the Spirit counters with this coup de grace:

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).

Alice perceives in a hot instant that this is not only where the present battle is joined, but where every battle is joined—against the counsel of one’s saintliest friend, against the received wisdom of one’s generation, against the carnal instinct to protect oneself. There are only ever these two—the Word of the Lord; your own understanding.

It dawns on Alice that at any given moment of the day she has a choice of which thoughts she may entertain—those of her friends and “her own understanding,” or the word of the Lord. All that is not the latter is the former, no matter how sweetly wrapped.

Don’t keep it in the closet

Glenn Beck, in the epilogue of The Christmas Sweater:

My mom gave me the sweater, but the greatest gift was given to all of us by a loving Father in Heaven. It is the only true gift ever given to all and yet opened or appreciated by so few. It is the gift of redemption and atonement, and it sits on the top shelf, largely untouched, in the closets of our soul.

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Christ child, but by doing so, sometimes we miss the real meaning of the season. It is what that infant, boy, and then perfect man did at the end of His ministry that makes the birth so special.

Without His death, the birth is meaningless.

Wow

I had read somewhere a brief bit of Brian Welch’s acceptance of Christ, but his testimony for I Am Second is powerful stuff.

[Wave of the phin to Evan Courtney.]

The future

Mark Hall:

“Praying about the future? Take heart! God is already there. He’s standing at the end of our lives looking back on all our days.”

A message from God

“Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.” –Rabindranath Tagore
[Via A Child Chosen.]

In praise of single-issue voting

Tony Woodlief:

Those other issues certainly affect a country’s safety, prosperity, and greatness. But I’ve come to believe that a nation that tolerates destruction of innocents deserves neither safety nor prosperity nor greatness. We’ve descended into barbarism, and it poisons how we treat the elderly, the incapacitated, even ourselves. We shouldn’t be surprised, having made life a utilitarian calculation, that more and more humans become inconvenient.

It’s certainly true that there are other issues that ought to concern Christians, like the sanctity of marriage, and how we treat the mentally ill, the elderly, and children who have been born. But abortion is, in my view, the touchstone. Get this one wrong and your moral compass can guide you in nothing else.