Darrel Schiel

“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

“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

“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

“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