Deep in our timid hearts is a desire to be loved mildly, nothing more. That way, we retain control, we set the terms, we avoid risk. Our loving God, in His ferocious intensity, will have none of it.
~ Ray Ortlund, pastor and author

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
~ Daniel Boorstin (1914-2004), historian at the University of Chicago


Americans have…a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative. …Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our…fellow Americans use it.
~ Kurt Anderson in “How America Lost Its Mind”, Atlantic Monthly


I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.
~ Anthony Kapel Jones, American Commentator


Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Christ. … When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship


Kichijiro: ‘Where is the place for a weak person in the world we’re in? Why wasn’t I born when there wasn’t any persecution? I would have been a great Christian.’
~ The Martin Scorsese film “Silence”

This Sunday’s readings: Luke 12:49-53

Reflections

Jesus is a divider. He is oil to the world’s vinegar.
~ Julie Hildebrand, blogger

We can only know God well when we know our own sin. And those who have known God without knowing their wretchedness have not glorified Him but have only glorified themselves.
~ Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662, French mathematician

All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it. You expect the world to adjust… to the distortion you’ve become.
~ From the film “Deconstructing Harry” (Woody Allen)

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People today don’t think, believe or reckon. They ‘feel like.’ Listen for this phrase and you’ll hear it everywhere. For decades, Americans have been in the process of abandoning both the moral strictures of religion and the Enlightenment quest for universal truth in favor of obsessing over their own internal states and well-being…. This quest to understand and cope with our own feelings and desires — the current term of art is ‘selfcare’ — can lead to what the writer Christopher Lasch called ‘pseudo-self-awareness.’ It can leave us too preoccupied with personal satisfaction to see the world clearly. ‘The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety.’
~ Molly Worthen, UNC Professor, NYT article, “Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’”

How patient should God be? The day of reckoning must come, not because God is too eager to pull the trigger, but because every day of patience in a world of violence means more violence and every postponement of vindication means letting insult accompany injury. “How long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood?” cry out the souls under the altar to the Sovereign Lord (Rev. 6:10). We are uncomfortable with the response which calls on the souls “to rest a little longer until the number should be complete both of their fellow servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed!” (v.11) But the response underlines that God’s patience is costly, not simply for God, but for the innocent. Wanting for the evildoers to reform means letting suffering continue….
Miroslav Volf, Professor of Theology, Yale Divinity