This Sunday’s readings: Psalm 95

Reflections

As worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience. Holy obedience saves worship from becoming an opiate, an escape from the pressing needs of modern life.
~ Richard Foster, 1942, Theologian/Author

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
~ Voltaire, 1694-1778, French enlightenment philosopher

If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts. … When people say, “I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself,” they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God’s.
~ Timothy Keller, Author: Counterfeit Gods

You’re always making something look big. … inevitably [you] show that someone or something else rules your heart.
~ Ken Sande, Founder: Peace-maker Ministries

Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness….At the heart of the ethic of authenticity is a profound selfishness and callous disregard of others.
~ Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster in The NY Times, June 29, 2013

Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So, one hundred worshipers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were they to become ‘unity’ conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.
~ A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine

This Sunday’s readings: Psalm 63

Reflections

Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him… To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls.
~ R. C. Sproul, 1939-2017, Theologian & Educator

If God has at last died in our culture, he has not been buried. For the casually religious, he lingers on like a fond old relative who has been so expertly embalmed that we may prop him up in the far corner of the living room and pretend the old fellow is still with us.
~ Theodore Roszak, 1933-2011, Academic & Novelist

I am a mystery—more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For as, GK Chesterton, observed. “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
~ Leonard Read, 1898-1983, Author, ‘I, Pencil’

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed…. The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
~ C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

If two girls walk up to me and one says ‘you’re cute’, I’ll say thank you, but I appreciate it much more when the other one says ‘you make me laugh so much’.
~ Michael J. Fox, Actor

God is a covenant-making, covenant-remembering, covenant-keeping God!
~ Sinclair Ferguson (1948-present), Scottish author, pastor and professor