This Sunday’s readings: John 21:1-14

Reflections

To live above with the saints we love Oh, that will be glory; but to live below with the saints we know Well, that’s another story.
~ Source Unknown

…not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.
Anne Lamott, novelist

Repentance is an intimate affair. And…intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect … I think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Christ if people stopped lying about what we need, what we fear, where we fail, and how we sin.
~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, Author/Speaker

According to Jesus, acknowledging our neediness opens the door to genuine and lasting happiness. Religions usually talk about what a person has to ‘do’, but Jesus talks about what we ‘can’t do’. He says that our weakness, not our power or what we bring to God, enables us to know God.
Paul Miller, Love Walked Among Us: Learning to Love Like Jesus

I hardly, if ever, lie to myself, because it’s a lot harder work to be self-righteous if you follow Jesus, than it is to be self-aware.
Steve Brown, 1940- , Author/Speaker

He who wants more than what Christ has established, does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience…. He who loves his dream of a community more than Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest & sacrificial.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), from ‘Life Together’, pastor-theologian

This Sunday’s readings: John 20:24-31

Reflections

‘My master,’ he says, ‘and my God!’ He is the first person in this book to look at Jesus of Nazareth and address the word ‘God’ directly to him. Yet this is what John has been working round to from the beginning. ‘In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was God.’ ‘Nobody has ever seen God. The only-begotten God, who is intimately close to the father—he has brought him to light.’ What does that mean? What does it look like when it’s actually happening? Well, says John, it looks like this…
~ N.T. Wright, 1948- , N.T. Scholar, Pauline Theology

Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.
~ Madeleine L’Engle, 1918-2007, American Author

It is the way of God: he humbles that he may exalt, he kills that he might make alive, he confounds that he might glorify.
~Martin Luther, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

If Jesus is the model of perfect faith, and his twin is Thomas, who models doubt, then what we understand is that faith and doubt are not antitheses—they’re twins.
~ Mark Schaefer, American University Chaplain, Author

The only way to doubt Christianity rightly and fairly is to discern the alternate belief under each of your doubts and then ask yourself what reasons you have for believing it. How do you know your belief is true? It is inconsistent to require more justification for Christian belief than you do for your own, but that is frequently what happens. In fairness, you must doubt your doubts. My thesis is that if you come to recognize the beliefs on which your doubts about Christianity are based, and if you seek as much proof for those beliefs as you seek from Christians for theirs—you will discover that your doubts are not as solid as they first appeared.
~ Tim Keller, Pastor/Author