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And shalvah, “prosperity.”
One is service.
God did not become a servant so that we could order him around but so that we could join him in a redemptive life.
Biblical writers are neither geographers nor astronomers—they are theologians.
Power breeds oppression.
The Christian is a person who recognizes that our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master. The Christian realizes that every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive. Recognizing and realizing that, we urgently want to live under the mastery of God.
Its position is that if the attitude of servanthood is learned, by attending to God as Lord, then serving others will develop as a very natural way of life.
Those who parade the rhetoric of liberation but scorn the wisdom of service do not lead people into the glorious liberty of the children of God but into a cramped and covetous squalor.
Psalm 124. Psalm 124
this is one that better than any other describes the hazardous work of all discipleship and declares the help that is always experienced at the hand of God.
Good poetry survives not when it is pretty or beautiful or nice but when it is true: accurate and honest. The psalms are great poetry and have lasted not because they appeal to our fantasies and our wishes but because they are confirmed in the intensities of honest and hazardous living.
How God wants us to sing like this! Christians are not fussy moralists who cluck their tongues over a world going to hell; Christians are people who praise the God who is on our side. Christians are not pious pretenders in the midst of a decadent culture; Christians are robust witnesses to the God who is our help. Christians are not fatigued outcasts who carry righteousness as a burden in a world where the wicked flourish; Christians are people who sing “Oh, blessed be GOD! . . . He didn’t abandon us defenseless.”
Faith develops out of the most difficult aspects of our existence, not the easiest.
But the content of our lives is God, not humanity.
We are not scavenging in the dark alleys of the world, poking in its garbage cans for a bare subsistence. We are traveling in the light, toward God who is rich in mercy and strong to save. It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.
Evil is always temporary.
Discipleship is not a contract in which if we break our part of the agreement he is free to break his; it is a covenant in which he establishes the conditions and guarantees the results.
Joy is a product of abundance; it is the overflow of vitality.
Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal. But that kind of joy never penetrates our lives, never changes our basic constitution.
Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing.
Joy is nurtured by living in such a history, building on such a foundation.
If the joy-producing acts of God are characteristic of our past as God’s people, they will also be characteristic of our future as his people.
Effort, even if the effort is religious (perhaps especially when the effort is religious), does not in itself justify anything.
For it is the nature of sin to take good things and twist them, ever so slightly, so that they miss the target to which they were aimed, the target of God. One requirement of discipleship is to learn the ways sin skews our nature and submit what we learn to the continuing will of God, so that we are reshaped through the days of our obedience.
Christian discipleship, by orienting us in God’s work and setting us in the mainstream of what God is already doing, frees us from the compulsiveness of work. Hilary of Poitiers taught that every Christian must be constantly vigilant against what he called “irreligiosa solicitudo pro Deo”—a blasphemous anxiety to do God’s work for him.
we learn to pay attention to and practice what God is doing in love and justice, in helping and healing, in liberating and cheering.
The history we walk in has been repeatedly entered by God, most notably in Jesus Christ, first to show us and then to help us live full of faith and exuberant with purpose.
Blessing is the vital power, without which no living being can exist.
Christians in the Middle Ages summarized under the headings of the world, the flesh and the devil:
The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not.
It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have to him: Will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will we always be trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle?
The way is plain—walk in it. Keeping the rules and obeying the commands is only common sense.
God’s ways and God’s presence are where we experience the happiness that lasts. Do it the easy way: “All you who fear GOD, how blessed
or do you see it as a tough perennial that can stick it out through storm and drought, survive the trampling of careless feet and the attacks of vandals?
The person of faith outlasts all the oppressors. Faith lasts.
Stick-to-itiveness. Perseverance. Patience. The way of faith is not a fad that is taken up in one century only to be discarded in the next. It lasts. It is a way that works. It has been tested thoroughly.
The life of the world that is opposed or indifferent to God is barren and futile.
The way of the world is marked by proud, God-defying purposes, unharnessed from eternity and therefore worthless and futile.
For it is apathetic, sluggish neutrality that is death to perseverance, acts like a virus in the bloodstream and enervates the muscles of discipleship. The person who makes excuses for hypocrites and rationalizes the excesses of the wicked, who loses a sense of opposition to sin, who obscures the difference between faith and denial, grace and selfishness—that is the person to be wary of.
For if there is not all that much difference between the way of faith and the ways of the world, there is not much use in making any effort to stick to it.
Perseverance does not mean “perfection.” It means that we keep going.
Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength.
The phrase does not mean that he corresponds to some abstract ideal of what is right; it speaks of a personal right relationship between Creator and creation.
The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness. We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God is righteous, because God sticks with us. Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map
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The Christian faith is the discovery of that center in the God who sticks with us, the righteous God. Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in his ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions and gifts, our human needs and our eternal aspirations.
His relationships with us are personal, true; intimate, yes; but private, no. We are a family in Christ. When we become Christians, we are among brothers and sisters in faith. No Christian is an only child.
“How am I going to live in this community of faith?”
community is essential.
As we come to declare our love for God, we must face the unlovely and lovely fellow sinners whom God loves and commands us to love.
It is not only necessary; it is desirable that our faith have a social dimension, a human relationship: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!”
