More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 15 - November 13, 2023
My former life still lurks in the edges of my heart, shiny and still like a knife.
where everybody thinks the same nobody thinks very much.
life in Christ has hard edges and dark valleys, but it is purposeful even when painful.
Christians still scare me when they reduce Christianity to a lifestyle and claim that God is on the side of those who attend to the rules of the lifestyle they have invented or claim to find in the Bible.
There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted.
Like it or not, in the court of public opinion, feminists and not Bible-believing Christians have won the war of intellectual integrity.
they talked with me in a way that didn’t make me feel erased.
If Ken and Floy had invited me to church at that first meal I would have careened like a skateboard off a cliff, and would have never come back.
Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame.
Ken stressed that he accepted me as a lesbian but that he didn’t approve of me as a lesbian.
A Methodist pastor and the Dean of the Chapel at Syracuse University believed that I did not have to give up everything to honor God. Indeed, he told me, since God made me a lesbian, I gave God honor by living an honorable lesbian life. He told me that I could have Jesus and my lesbian lover. This was a very appealing prospect. But I had been reading and rereading Scripture, and there are no such marks of postmodern “both/and” in the Bible.
repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.
Wanting to understand is a theoretical statement; willing to do his will takes action.
we must obey in faith before we feel better or different.
Faith that endures is heroic, not sentimental.
He and the session knew that the church is competent to counsel
Biblical orthodoxy can offer real compassion, because in our struggle against sin we cannot undermine God’s power to change lives.
How did the Lord heal me? The way that he always heals: the word of God got to be bigger inside me than I.
Modesty and discretion are not old-fashioned values. They are God’s standards that help us to encourage one another in good works, not covetousness.
sin roots not in outward behaviors, but in patterns of thinking.
When you die to yourself, you have nothing from your past to use as clay out of which to shape your future.
“Sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it” (Gen. 4:6).
Before we can come to Christ, we must come to ourselves.
The integrity of our relationships matters more than the boldness of our words.
Faith is not a feeling. Faith rides the waves of the treachery of life on the Christian worldview that you own. Faith and worldview are intimately intertwined.
There is no finer resolution to a faith test than genuine Christian ministry.
God gives and God takes away and he does it for our good.
never doubt in the darkness what God has promised in the light.”
“Unbelief puts circumstances between itself and Christ, so as not to see Him.…Faith puts Christ between itself and circumstances, so that it cannot see them” (p. 17).
