Darrel Schiel > Darrel's Quotes

“Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.”
― Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

“The Spirit’s work of illumination takes what someone knows and shows it to be beautiful so that the heart of the person is drawn out in love and devotion to the beauty perceived. If the person fails to see beauty as beautiful, no amount of convincing can help. They are, we might say, broken. To see true beauty as beautiful, Jesus as the image of the invisible God, fallen humans need to have their souls altered by the Spirit. Only then can we pray with the psalmist that we may “gaze upon the beauty of the LORD” (Ps 27:4). God’s response is to point to Christ.”
― Kyle Strobel, Formed for the Glory of God: Learning from the Spiritual Practices of Jonathan Edwards

“Hearing God’s Word is like one dip of the tea bag into the cup. Some of the tea’s flavor is absorbed by the water, but not as much as would occur with a more thorough soaking of the bag…. [Meditation] is like immersing the bag completely and letting it steep until all the rich tea flavor has been extracted.”38”
― David W. Saxton, God’s Battle Plan for the Mind: The Puritan Practice of Biblical Meditation

“When the Covenanter Walter Smith climbed the ladder to the scaffold and death, he turned to say goodbye to his relations and friends. Then he said: "Farewell all created enjoyments, pleasures and delights; farewell, sinning and suffering; farewell praying and believing, and welcome heaven and singing.
Welcome, Joy in the Holy Ghost; welcome, Father, Son and Holy Ghost; into thy hands I commend my spirit!”
― Derek W.H. Thomas, How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home

“To be Reformed is to stress the comprehensive, sovereign, fatherly lordship of God over everything: every area of creation, every creature’s endeavor, and every aspect of the believer’s life. Calvin and Calvinism’s ruling motif is “In the beginning God” (Gen. 1:1).”
― Joel R. Beeke, Calvin on Sovereignty, Providence, and Predestination

“The Calvinist is the man who sees God: God in nature, God in history, God in grace. Everywhere he sees God in His mighty stepping, everywhere he feels the working of His mighty arm, the throbbing of His mighty heart. The Calvinist is the man who sees God behind all phenomena and in all that occurs recognizes the hand of God, working out His will. [The Calvinist] makes the attitude of the soul to God in prayer its permanent attitude in all its life activities; [he] casts himself on the grace of God alone, excluding every trace of dependence on self from the whole work of his salvation.11”
― Joel R. Beeke, Calvin on Sovereignty, Providence, and Predestination

“The heart of man is his worst part before regeneration and his best afterwards.”
― John Flavel, Keeping the Heart: In Modern English

“Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard, violent and superficial. Baseball is the generations, looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls, cricket and rounders, and the games the Iroquois played in Connecticut before the English came. Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age, and death. This diamond encloses what we are.”
― Donald Hall, Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport