The Things of Earth Quotes

“While we often recognize the need to learn how to face hunger and need, we aren't always aware that we need similar help to face wealth and abundance. It's not easy to face affluence every day without committing idolatry or succumbing to ingratitude. In fact, church history is filled with stories of sincere believers facing lowness, hunger, need, suffering, persecution, hardship, and death with Christ-honoring joy and faithfulness. But the stories of Christian fidelity in the midst of overwhelming abundance, provision, plenty, and wealth are fewer and farther between. This is why Jesus says that it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 19:23). One of the chief challenges for Christians in the West is to learn to face our unprecedented abundance with the strength supplied by Christ and not by the wealth.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Be the smile of God to your children.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Idolatry begins with a false separation of gift and giver. Rather than a momentary comparison for the sake of testing our affections, idolatry is a permanent separation for the sake of false worship. God divides things in order to gloriously reunite them. Heaven and earth, male and female, Trinitarian glory and its created beams—all of these are separated in order to bring about a more perfect and glorious union. On the other hand, sin just separates. It divides in order to destroy. It tears asunder and leaves the fragments scattered on the ground. The separation of gift from giver ruins our enjoyment of both.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Scripture is the grammar textbook for the language of God, instructing us clearly in the patterns of meaning and the rules by which we are enabled to read everything else.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts by Joe Rigney

“In Christ, God is restoring what has been lost and reintegrating our love for him and our enjoyment of his gifts so that they do not compete with each other but instead mutually serve and enhance each other for his glory and our joy.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Good music excellently played beautifies the world, calling people out of the prison of themselves to something greater and grander. Literature, both writing and reading it, is strategic. How many people have been primed to receive the gospel because they read The Chronicles of Narnia as children? And how much medieval philosophy and classical poetry and fantastic fiction did C. S. Lewis have to read before he was equipped to write those precious books?”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Jesus did not die on the cross to deliver me from the sin of being born in America.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“False guilt kills true joy and ruins us for fruitful ministry. Impossible obligations lead to constant failure and incurable guilt, which only serve to breed greater sin. Read that again. Impossible obligation. Constant failure. Incurable guilt. Greater”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“What many call 'plundering the Egyptians' is nothing more than dumpster diving in Egypt.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“My one-year-old walks up to me with arms outstretched. I can see it in his eyes. He is searching for something: approval, affirmation, acceptance. The kind that only a father can give. He is hungry for a father's love, for the Father's love.
Either the laughter in my eyes, the smile on my face, and the strength and tenderness of my arms will tell the truth about God, or their absence will blaspheme the Father of lights.
My son is reaching for me, and looking for God.
My son, the theologian.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“A full look at Jesus makes his gifts come alive.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“The triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—out of love for and delight in his own fullness, freely chose to create the world as a fitting, narratival communication of his glory. It’s fitting, because infinite wisdom conceived and directed it. It’s narratival, because the shape of the world is a story, a sequence of events with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s communication, because God speaks it into existence and speaks himself through it at every point. And all of it is glory, because the creator and author is the Lord of glory.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Our efforts at beauty—whether in art, music, homemaking, or anything else— can serve similar purposes in nourishing our souls,in encouraging and blessing others, and in honoring the beautiful and beauty-making Creator”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“God glorifies himself by inviting us to participate in his Trinitarian fullness. Put another way, God glorifies himself by extending his glory so that his divine life comes to exist in creaturely form.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Christianity is a paradoxical religion in that it is both world-affirming and world-denying.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“faithful gospel proclamation must include a robust theology of the goodness of God’s gifts in creation.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“The heavenly mind-set is profoundly earthy, but it is fundamentally oriented by the glory of Christ.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Supreme love for God orients our affections and orders our desires and integrates our loves.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“God’s love for God led him to create the world from nothing. Therefore, our love for God, if it is to be an accurate reflection of God’s love, must also lead us to a deep and profound and fitting love for creation.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“One of the besetting sins of our day is food-fussing, the attempt to resurrect some kind of food laws, whether they be all-natural, organic, paleo, gluten-free, or what have you. While there is no problem in having food preferences (I myself am not a fan of raw onions, bubblegum, or coffee), there is a serious problem in ascribing moral value to your food preferences. Making food choices based on food allergies or other responses to food is perfectly legitimate, but imposing those choices on others (or judging others for making different choices) is not. While a full treatment of food fussing is beyond the scope of this book, all Christians would do well to memorize, digest, and embody Mark 7:19, 1Cor. 8:8, and 1Cor. 10:31–33. In the first, Jesus declares all foods clean. All of them. All of them, which means the attempt to treat some foods as functionally unclean is contrary to Christ, however distasteful or dissatisfying they may be to you. The second reads, “Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.” Your kale and arugula salad won’t commend you to God. And your neighbor’s greasy burger and large Diet Coke won’t condemn him. God does not care about what you eat, provided you do so with gratitude in your heart (see 1 Tim. 4:4–5). Finally, we all know that 1 Cor. 10:31 commands us to eat and drink to the glory of God. What we don’t often recognize is that Paul primarily has in mind our attitude toward others, not our attitude toward the food itself. The following verse reads, “Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved” (v. 32). We glorify God in eating when we Refuse to make dietary choices a barrier to fellowship. So thank God for the food, love your neighbor in your eating, and quit your fussing.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Proverbs 17:24: “The discerning sets his face toward wisdom, but the eyes of the fool are on the ends of the earth.” Obsessing about the horizon is often a way of avoiding clear and present obligations. As P. J. O’Rourke memorably put it, “Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“The real labor is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy [and all of our culture making and faithful naming] he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.34”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“Robert Farrar Capon: Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers, why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry, or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half of earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become. For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself—and it is our glory to see it so and thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We are given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“In a word, Creation + Man’s Creative Efforts = Culture.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“The food is good. The spouse is good. The friends are good. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. We shouldn’t reject them. We ought to receive them gladly, giving thanks to God for them and setting them apart with biblical prayers. People who orient their lives through direct godwardness over the Scriptures and in prayer are free to gratefully receive God’s goodness in what he has made and given.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“But, in Christ, God is restoring what has been lost and reintegrating our love for him and our enjoyment of his gifts so that they do not compete with each other but instead mutually serve and enhance each other for his glory and our joy.”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the play and the opera, And grace before the concert and the pantomime, And grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, boxing, walking, playing, dancing; And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
—G. K. Chesterton”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts

“First, the incarnation of Jesus Christ is the greatest endorsement of the abiding goodness of creation and its capacity for amplification, transformation, and glorification. “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9).”
― Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts