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January 11 - April 5, 2018
In other words, while great art does not “hit you over the head” with a simple message, it always gives you a sense that life is not a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It fills you with hope and gives you the strength to carry on, though you cannot define what it is that moves you.
Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially “deify.”
Bitterness becomes neurotically intensified when someone or something stands between me and something that is my ultimate value.
If anything threatens your identity you will not just be anxious but paralyzed with fear.
Few of us get all of our wildest dreams fulfilled in life, and therefore it is easy to live in the illusion that if you were as successful, wealthy, popular, or beautiful as you wished, you’d finally be happy and at peace.
We bolster our sense of worth by devaluing those of other races, beliefs, and traits.
A Christian’s worth and value are not created by excluding anyone, but through the Lord who was excluded for me.
The gospel makes it possible for a person to escape oversensitivity, defensiveness, and the need to criticize others.
Religion and the gospel also lead to divergent ways of handling troubles and suffering. Moralistic religion leads its participants to the conviction that if they live an upstanding life, then God (and others) owe them respect and favor. They believe they deserve a decent, happy life. If, however, life begins to go wrong, moralists will experience debilitating anger. Either they will be furious with God (or “the universe”) because they feel that since they live better than others, they should have a better life. Or else they will be deeply angry at themselves, unable to shake the feeling that
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This act of radical grace is deeply troublesome to Javert. He realizes that to appropriately respond to this gesture will require a complete change in his worldview. Rather than make that change, he throws himself into the Seine.
It is only grace that frees us from the slavery of self that lurks even in the middle of morality and religion.
Cycles of reaction and retaliation can go on for years.
Evil has been done to you—yes. But when you try to get payment through revenge the evil does not disappear. Instead it spreads, and it spreads most tragically of all into you and your own character.
You may say, “I just want to hold them accountable,” but your real motivation may be simply to see them hurt.
Only when you have lost the need to see the other person hurt will you have any chance of actually bringing about change, reconciliation, and healing.
God, whose just passion to defeat evil and loving desire to forgive others are both infinitely greater than ours.
In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?”
In this new counterculture, Christians look at money as something to give away. They look at power as something to use strictly for service. Racial and class superiority, accrual of money and power at the expense of others, yearning for popularity and recognition, these normal marks of human life, are the opposite of the mindset of those who have understood and experienced the Cross. Christ creates a whole new order of life. Those who are shaped by the great reversal of the Cross no longer need self-justification through money, status, career, or pride of race and class.
We should never acquiesce in injustice.
The people of that time would have considered a bodily resurrection to be as impossible as the people of our own time, though for different reasons.
The Trinity means that God is, in essence, relational.
When something is useful you are attracted to it for what it can bring you or do for you. But if it is beautiful, then you enjoy it simply for what it is. Just being in its presence is its own reward.
The doctrine of the Trinity overloads our mental circuits. Despite its cognitive difficulty, however, this astonishing, dynamic conception of the triune God is bristling with profound, wonderful, life-shaping, world-changing implications.
He has infinite happiness not through self-centeredness, but through self-giving, other-centered love.
The ultimate reason that God creates, said Edwards, is not to remedy some lack in God, but to extend that perfect internal communication of the triune God’s goodness and love…. God’s joy and happiness and delight in divine perfections is expressed externally by communicating that happiness and delight to created beings…. The universe is an explosion of God’s glory. Perfect goodness, beauty, and love radiate from God and draw creatures to ever increasingly share in the Godhead’s joy and delight…. The ultimate end of creation, then, is union in love between God and loving creatures.
God did not create us to get the cosmic, infinite joy of mutual love and glorification, but to share it. We were made to join in the dance.
It was made in joy and therefore is good in and of itself. The universe is understood as a dance of beings united by energies binding yet distinct, like planets orbiting stars, like tides and seasons, “like atoms in a molecule, like the tones in a chord, like the living organisms on this earth, like the mother with the baby stirring in her body.”9 The love of the inner life of the Trinity is written all through it. Creation is a dance!
Self-centeredness creates psychological alienation. Nothing makes us more miserable than self-absorption, the endless, unsmiling concentration on our needs, wants, treatment, ego, and record. In addition, self-centeredness leads to social disintegration. It is at the root of the breakdown in relationships between nations, races and classes, and individuals.
Paul calls Jesus “the last Adam.” As the first Adam was tested in the Garden of Eden, the last Adam (Jesus) was tested in the Garden of Gethsemane.
To know oneself, is above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against the Truth, and not the other way around. —Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country”
Motivations are nearly always mixed. If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever. Nevertheless, it is important to ask what is primarily moving you toward an action, especially when it comes to faith commitment.
From the earliest days, the confession of Christians was Christos Kurios—“Jesus is Lord.” In the historical context, in which it was required to say Kaiser Kurios, “Caesar is Lord,” this confession meant that Jesus was the supreme power.
Almost anything—from a new language to a new skill—is best learned in a community of others who are at various stages in their own pilgrimage.
Their question to me as a pastor is “I don’t really know if I am a Christian or not. Am I returning to my faith or finding it for the first time?” The answer is simple—I can’t tell, and it doesn’t matter.
A Christian should love the poor and be faithful to his or her marriage vows. But those behavioral changes alone will not make you a Christian.
That means we should repent not only for things we have done wrong (like cheating or lying), but also for the motivations beneath our good works.
This means you don’t have to wait for all doubts and fears to go away to take hold of Christ. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to banish all misgivings in order to meet God.
The church of Jesus Christ is therefore like the ocean. It is enormous and diverse. Like the ocean there are warm and clear spots and deadly cold spots, places you can enter easily without danger and places where it will immediately whisk you away and kill you.
What a radical idea! The “freaks and lunatics” going to heaven before the morally upright tribe?
The writer Joseph Epstein once admitted that he envied people with the kind of intelligent, deep faith that can see them through the darkest crises.
