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July 24 - July 24, 2018
A gentle but firm noncooperation with things that everyone knows to be wrong, together with a sensitive, nonofficious, nonintrusive, nonobsequious service to others, should be our usual overt manner.
In our culture one is considered educated if one “knows the right answers.”
Jesus’ disciples are those who have chosen to be with him to learn to be like him. All they have necessarily realized at the outset of their apprenticeship to him is, Jesus is right.
If anyone is to love God and have his or her life filled with that love, God in his glorious reality must be brought before the mind and kept there in such a way that the mind takes root and stays fixed there.
We will never have the easy, unhesitating love of God that makes obedience to Jesus our natural response unless we are absolutely sure that it is good for us to be, and to be who we are.
we cannot be thankful for who we are without being thankful for our parents, through whom our life came. They are a part of our identity, and to reject and be angry with them is to reject and be angry with ourselves.
There is almost nothing we do as adult human beings that does not depend on our body’s “knowledge” taking over.
The struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane was a matter of Jesus’ mind and feelings being hammered in every possible way to make him mistrust the Father.
nothing has power to tempt me or move me to wrong action that I have not given power by what I permit to be in me.
The function of the Holy Spirit is, first, to move within our souls, and especially our minds, to present the person of Jesus and the reality of his kingdom.
Our confidence in Jesus as the One is always a response elicited and supported by the spiritual movements of God.
The deeds of the kingdom arise naturally out of a certain quality of life. We cultivate that life in its wholeness by directing our bodies into activities that empower the inner and outer person for God and through God.
Life as usual must go. It will be replaced by something far better.
Liberation from your own desires is one of the greatest gifts of solitude and silence.
In worship we are ascribing greatness, goodness, and glory to God. It is typical of worship that we put every possible aspect of our being into it, all of our sensuous, conceptual, active, and creative capacities.
we should respect others before God and allow them to make their judgments on the basis of our simple statements that things are this way or are not this way. We are not to attempt to drive, to control them, to manipulate them.
A place in God’s creative order has been reserved for each one of us from before the beginnings of cosmic existence. His plan is for us to develop, as apprentices to Jesus, to the point where we can take our place in the ongoing creativity of the universe.
Science, then, may explain many interesting and important things, but it does not explain existence. Nor does it explain why the laws of science are the laws of nature.5 And it does not explain science itself.6
“Mystery” means, in the language of the New Testament, something that had long remained hidden but then came to be known for the first time.
Meaning is not a luxury for us. It is a kind of spiritual oxygen, we might say, that enables our souls to live.9
anything that “has no future” is meaningless in the human order. That is why we try to avoid it as much as possible. It stifles us.
If we trust what Jesus said out of his own direct consciousness of God, we shall share his belief in the future life. This belief is supported by the reasoning that a God of infinite love would not create finite persons and then drop them out of existence when the potentialities of their nature, including their awareness of himself, have only just begun to be realized.11
