Results tagged “quotes”
No Day Without Its Line (11/14/09 - 11 Comments)
A little while ago I read Warren Wiersbe's book 50 People Every Christian Should Know. Just the other day I was tidying up my bookcases and noticed a toothpick sticking out of the book. I opened it to the page marked by the toothpick and found a quote I guess I must have been hoping to come back to. Turns out it's a good one. It comes from a chapter devoted to Alexander Whyte. Here...
A Nursery for Heaven (10/04/09 - 2 Comments)
This is one of my favorite prayers in The Valley of Vision. It is a prayer for family, asking God not only for grace in raising a family in a way that brings him glory but also asking God for grace in the lives of other family members. I think it is notable that a prayer for family first begins with soul-searching prayer about self. In fact it moves seamlessly from adoration of God to...
An Easy-Going God (10/03/09 - 12 Comments)
Here is some food for thought from John Stott. It comes courtesy of The Cross of Christ. ***** The kind of God that appeals to most people today would be easy-going in his tolerance of our offenses. He would be gentle, kind, accommodating. He would have no violent reactions. Unhappily, even in the church we seemed to have lost the vision of the majesty of God. There is much shallowness and levity among us. Prophets...
False Reverence (09/12/09 - 20 Comments)
Here is a great (and famous) quote from Mortimer Adler's classic How To Read a Book. ***** There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best...
Business for the Glory of God (09/07/09 - 7 Comments)
Today is Labor Day, a holiday here in Canada, and it seemed a good opportunity to post a short excerpt from Wayne Grudem's book Business for the Glory of God. In this book Grudem seeks to show the moral goodness of business and one of the ways he does that is by discussing the goodness of the employer/employee relationship. Here is what he says: **** Employer/employee relationships provide many opportunities for glorifying God. On both...
The Puritans and Sex (09/06/09 - 7 Comments)
I have unashamedly stolen this quote from my friend David. He shared it at his blog earlier this week and it struck me how so much of what we are sure we know about history is wrong. In fact, so much of what we know about life is wrong. We hear things and assume after a while that they are true but do not investigate for ourselves. Ask the average person what they know of...
Love Constrained to Obedience (08/15/09 - 16 Comments)
A couple of days ago I stumbled across this old hymn (or poem--you pick) by William Cowper. What a great poem it is. I thought I'd share it with you in case you've never read it or, as in my case, have read it in the past but have forgotten all about it. It is called "Love Constrained to Obedience." No strength of nature can suffice To serve the Lord aright: And what she has...
The Dearest Hold (08/08/09 - 2 Comments)
I came across an interesting quote in Joshua Kendall's book The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus. It is a biography of Peter Mark Roget, the man behind the creation of the famous thesaurus that bears his name. In 1824 Roget married Mary Hobson (who, like her husband, was of Huguenot stock) and, by all accounts, they had a very happy marriage. Sadly, the marriage lasted only nine...
Spiritual Friendship (07/12/09 - 8 Comments)
While our church focuses its teaching on verse-by-verse exposition, through the summer we often break for short topical series. This summer Julian (the associate pastor (is that his job title? Something like that) at our church) is preaching a series on spiritual friendship, looking at friendship in the light of the church's core values. At his blog he has been posting some great quotes from Hugh Black's book Friendship, published by Joshua Press. I have...
The Truth of the Cross (06/28/09 - 3 Comments)
In his book The Truth of the Cross, R.C. Sproul spends some time discussing the human condition and as he does so he uses three biblical concepts: debtors, enemies, and criminals. The Bible describes all of us in these terms. What Sproul does here, and this really helped it hit home for me, is show how it is always the Father who has been offended and the Son who intercedes. We have committed crimes against...
Discount Personal Feelings (06/27/09 - 3 Comments)
I thought you would enjoy this quote from Jim Andrew's Polishing God's Monuments (one of my favorite books from a couple of years ago). This book, which offers "pillars of hope for punishing times" tells Andrews' story of faith and perseverance through almost unbelievable suffering. This man writes from hard experience and here he offers sound, biblical wisdom. ***** When the Lord's ways do not neatly conform to our pat little paradigms of what seems...
Believing Lies, Rejecting Truth (06/14/09 - 6 Comments)
The following quote is from the pen of Horatius Bonar (1808 - 1889), the great Scottish preacher, poet, author and hymn writer. It talks about the nature, the true nature, of unbelief. It's worth reading and pondering. ***** In all unbelief there are these two things--a good opinion of one's self and a bad opinion of God. Man's good opinion of himself makes him think it quite possible to win God's favor by his own...
The Gospel Without Adulteration (06/13/09 - 4 Comments)
Here is a brief quote taken from John Newton's A Review of Ecclesiastical History which was published in 1769. It strikes me that the words he wrote them are perfectly applicable today: Whenever and wherever the doctrines of free grace and justification by faith have prevailed in the Christian Church, and according to the degree of clearness with which they have been enforced, the practical duties of Christianity have flourished in the same proportion. Wherever...
Longings After God (05/31/09 - 3 Comments)
Through the past couple of weeks I have been fighting for joy, fighting to find joy in the journey. It has been one of those times that I've been longing for God but have seemingly found so little of him. And so this morning, when I opened up The Valley of Vision, as I so often do on a Sunday morning, I was encouraged by this prayer titled "Longings After God." My dear Lord, I...
Quotable (05/30/09 - 15 Comments)
A little while ago I was sorting through my files and found a document where I had jotted down quotes from four different books I had read at just about the same time. They are vastly different books so it was kind of interesting to me to see the juxtaposition between each of the quotes. The first quote is from God's Bestseller, a biography of William Tyndale written by Brian Moynahan. The author, comments about...
Happiness (05/03/09 - 1 Comments)
Here is another prayer from Arthur Bennett's The Valley of Vision. This is a prayer titled simply "Happiness." As I read the prayer I was particularly drawn to these words: "How precious is time, and how painful to see it fly with little done to good purpose! I need thy help." How much time I waste and how painful it is to me to see if fly on by, wasted, unused, with little done to...
Afraid? Of What? (05/02/09 - 9 Comments)
Last week I read a short biography of John and Betty Stam, missionary martyrs to China. Stay tuned for a review. In that book, written by Vance Christie, was a poem and the story that inspired it. I thought I'd share that today. ***** The poem, entitled "Afraid?" was written by Presbyterian missionary E.H. Hamilton following the recent martyrdom of one of his colleagues, J.W. Vinson, at the hands of rebel soldiers in northern China....
Eternity Without a Mediator (04/26/09 - 24 Comments)
In his little book Fear Not!, an examination of death and the afterlife from a Christian perspective, Ligon Duncan writes about the horrors of hell. Having done so, he offers a final reflection on the ultimate difference between heaven and hell. And, though I've read extensively, I do not recall ever hearing someone express it quite like this. These are words that are worthy of some reflection. Though he has already discussed hell, there is...
Humility in Service (04/19/09 - 3 Comments)
It has been too long, I think, since I've posted a prayer from The Valley of Vision. This one, titled "Humility in Service," seems appropriate for a Sunday morning as the day will undoubtedly bring us many opportunities to serve our brothers and sisters in Christ and many opportunities to share the Good News with those who do not yet know the Lord. Mighty God, I humble myself for faculties misused, opportunities neglected, words ill-advised,...
Putting Unity First (04/18/09 - 15 Comments)
The following quote comes from Iain Murray's book Evangelicalism Divided (on page 291 if you must know). I think it offers good food for thought (even on a Saturday morning). The ecumenical call [in the mid-20th century] was not for truth and salt; it was supremely for oneness: the greater the unity of 'the Church', it was confidently asserted, the stronger would be the impression made upon the world; and to attain that end churches...