Meditations of the day

[Inquire of God]

"The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none."

Thomas Carlyle

 

[FineLinen]

“If sin is anything that separates us from God and from each other; and if God is to be “all in all,” then he must sooner or later destroy all sin and thus remove every stain from his creation. According to the New Testament as a whole, God has a two-fold strategy for accomplishing this end. On the one hand, he sent his Son in the flesh to defeat, in some unexplained mystical way, the powers of darkness and to pioneer the way of salvation (see Heb 2:10)—a way of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice. On the other hand, for those who refuse to step into his ordained system of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice, he has an alternative strategy: in their estrangement from God, they will experience his love as a consuming fire; that is, as wrath, as punishment, and, in the end, as a means of correction. So in that sense, they will literally pay for their sin; and God will never—not in this age and not in the age to come—forgive (or set aside) the final payment they owe, which is voluntarily to step inside the ordained system of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice. As Jesus said, using the analogy of someone being thrown into prison, “Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny” (Matt 5:25). 97.” - Thomas Talbott (The Inescapable Love of God)

 

[FineLinen]

"I had always thought of God as loving, but now I found out that He was far more than loving: He was love, love embodied and ingrained. I saw that He was, as it were, made out of love, so that in the very nature of things He could not do anything contrary to love." -Hannah W. Smith

 

[FineLinen]

“If we suppose that God, being supremely powerful, supremely wise, and supremely loving, can achieve, and will settle for nothing less than, perfect justice, then we must also suppose that he will settle for nothing less than a full atonement for sin—something that will actually make up for, or cancel out, sin; punishment (in and of itself) has no power to do that.” - Thomas Talbott (The Inescapable Love of God)

 

[FineLinen]

"Grace cannot prevail until all our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed." -Robt. F. Capon

 

[FineLinen]

 

[FineLinen]

"After all, even though we all die, and we're all like water being spilled on the ground that cannot be recovered, nevertheless God doesn't take away life, but carries out his plans so as not to cast away permanently from him those who are presently estranged."

"Most laws condemn the soul and pronounce sentence. The result of the law of my God is perfect. It condemns but forgives. It restores - more than abundantly - what it takes away." - Jim Elliot

 

[FineLinen]

 

[FineLinen]

“Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.” -- Robert Farrar Capon

 

[FineLinen]

 

[FineLinen]

"God's justice is a saving, healing, restorative justice, because the God to whom justice belongs is the Creator God who has yet to complete his original plan for creation and whose justice is designed not simply to restore balance to a world out of kilter but to bring to glorious completion and fruition the creation, teeming with life and possibility, that he made in the first place." ― N.T. Wright

"If our desire for justice is not rooted primarily in the pursuit of restoration, then reconciliation will be nearly impossible to achieve. It is precisely because grace is undeserved that makes it grace.” -Jamie Arpin-Ricci

 

[FineLinen]

“As George MacDonald was so fond of pointing out, not one word in the New Testament implies that vindictiveness and wrath are ultimate facts about God, or that Christ’s sacrifice was required in order to appease a vindictive God. A more accurate understanding would be that Christ’s death and resurrection was God’s sacrifice to us, the means whereby God changes our attitudes and reconciles us to himself; it is not a means whereby God’s attitude towards us is changed. God’s attitude remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. For God is love; that is the rock-bottom fact about God. But the history of organized religion, at least in the Western tradition, is a record of our human resistance to the proclamation that God is love, that his love extends to everyone, and that it is in no way conditioned upon human obedience or human faithfulness.” ― Thomas Talbott (The Inescapable Love of God)

 

[FineLinen]

“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.” - Jürgen Moltmann

“God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him.” - Jurgen Moltmann

 

[FineLinen]

“Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might some day prove to be empty!" ~ Karl Barth

 

[FineLinen]

"Man can certainly flee from God... but he cannot escape Him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God, but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in his hate." ~Karl Barth

 

[FineLinen]

“Faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.” - Jürgen Moltmann

 

[FineLinen]

“A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” -C.S. Lewis

“Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.”

 

[FineLinen]

 

[FineLinen]

"You are not called to believe in your love to God, but in God's love to you! Do not argue, 'I cannot love God! I have striven to my uttermost to do so, but have failed in all my endeavors, until in despair I have abandoned the thought and relinquished the attempt.' Be it so- no effort of your own can strike a spark of love to God from your heart. Nor does God demand the task at your hands. All that He requires of you is faith in His love, as embodied and expressed in Jesus Christ to poor sinners." -Octavius Winslow

"Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy; - but the Father, for love!"

 

[FineLinen]

“We may get knocked down on the outside, but the key to living in victory is to learn how to get up on the inside.” - Joel Osteen