Kindle Notes & Highlights
I used to think that the passage, “Be sure your sin will find you out,” meant, “Be sure your sin will be found out.” It doesn’t say so; rather it says, “Your sin will find you out”—will register in you, cause deterioration, decay; you will get consequences,
we are free to choose, but we are not free to choose the results of our choosing.
The first step, then, is to be humble, to be teachable, to cease struggling and fighting and listen. Something is speaking, and speaking authoritatively. What is it?
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: God is; God is like Christ. I am; I must be like Christ.
We choose, but the moral universe decides the results of our choosing, and those results are inexorable.
We do not break the laws of God written into the nature of things. We break ourselves on them.
These laws are God’s preventive grace. They are barriers put up at the edge of precipices to keep us from going over. They are not put there to bind our freedom; they are put there to save us from using our freedom to destroy ourselves.
This modern age has put hell out of the door, but it has come back by the window. Dismissed from the universe, it has moved inside us in the form of inner neuroses and conflicts. Painfully, we are finding out how not to live.
When God goes, does the meaning drop out of life? And does life actually become “a bottle of very nasty wine”? Do we then live in a generally devaluated world? Does life turn sour? There is only one answer: Yes! And the whole of life is one long comment on it!
hands. Inevitably, lust equals disgust.
Rather we are seeing that science is working up through the facts to the Fact, through truths to the Truth.
moral universe is not humanity’s creation but humanity’s discovery.
“This is bad for the business of the bank.” It would lower confidence in the moral integrity of a leading official, and that was bad for business.
I find the Way written in the common ways of life.
“Sin is, has been, and ever shall be the parent of misery.”*
There seems to be in people a kinship with God that makes us yearn for God with unwordable yearnings.
Nature works with me when I work with God, against me when I am against God.
I have written of a friend who became so used to riding a bicycle with the handlebars crooked that when someone straightened them he fell off.
naturalized in the unnatural.
It is. A strange nostalgia is upon humanity, and homesickness for God is responsible for most of our other sicknesses: mental, spiritual, physical, corporate.
“Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.”*
God’s laws are native to us.
I am fulfilled when I make God my center. I am frustrated when I make myself the center. I am destined to be a Christian.
My poison is to do my own will when my own will clashes with God’s.
If you won’t listen to the judgments of Christ, you will have to listen to the judgments of life.
Revolt against God, and you revolt against yourself.
Today my life will be a mess or a message. I choose.
“His commands are not irksome.”
When God commands, life commends.
But it is an upset that sets up!
Well, one satisfies a life and the other satisfies an impulse, an impulse that throws confusion and disgust into the rest of life.
For our happiness is not dependent on happenings; it is founded on life.
The Christian way is life set to music; the unchristian way is life set to misery.
John presented religion as anti-natural asceticism; Jesus presented it as a supernatural naturalism. John’s religion was against life, and Jesus’ was for life. The faith that John presented was world-denying and life-denying. Jesus was world-affirming and life-affirming. One was a no! The other was a yes! John preached a baptism of repentance, a turning from. Jesus offered a baptism of the Spirit, a turning toward—positive, receptive. John’s movement died. Jesus’ movement lives on. For you cannot live against life. The answer to life is not a reduction of life but an inner fullness of life
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They were most themselves when most God’s.
In you I am myself; outside of you I am beside myself.
The real Christian is the most universalized person on earth, the most natural.
“Life is given to the peaceful and death is given to the guilty,”
“Jesus is the best photograph that God ever had took.”
Instead of being an imposed idealism it was an exposed realism; it was Reality itself speaking.
in every conceivable circumstance.
the Christian way is not a mere naturalism; it is supernaturally natural.
apart from Christ we know little about God.
If we try to start from God, we do not start from God, but from our ideas about God.
through the heightening of their insights—in
The Person is greater than the product.
The Ten Commandments are an injunction. Jesus is an injunction plus an inspiration.
Love Christ supremely; hold all else in relationship to that supreme love; then all else is yours.
Christian never is; a Christian is always becoming.
In front of Christ, a rite or ceremony may be an idol and a stumbling block. Behind Christ, as an expression of our love to him, it may be a beautiful sacrament.
