This Sunday’s readings: Matthew 7:1-6

Reflections

Just because they annoy you doesn’t mean they’re wrong!
~ Oscar Auliq-Ice, writer, philanthropist

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

It’s not at all hard to understand a person; it’s only hard to listen without bias.
~ Christopher James Gilbert, 1987- , Musician, Author, Philosopher

You meet Noah after the flood, you think, That brave, faith-filled, visionary man. You meet him before and you’re like, What a nut job.
~ Courtney C. Stevens, Author, The June Boys

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God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.
~ Vance Havner, 1901-1986, pastor and evangelist

Jesus instructed us to take the beam out of our own eye before we take the speck out of our brother’s (Matthew 7:5). In this way, He told us that the battle is not only against others, it is also within ourselves. Facing the deeply embedded evil of our own hearts is where the most bitter fighting occurs. It’s like a civil war. Your enemy, your old self, is a dearly beloved friend you really don’t want to kill.
~ Dan Allender, Tremper Longman, Bold Love

The marvel of grace is that we are all inflicted with the same cancer as those we are called to love. We are called to be ophthalmologists-eye doctors who see a disease in the eye of another and are so committed to removing that speck of cancer that we knowingly undergo the same surgery to remove the mass in our own eye in order to remove the disease in the other.
~ Dan Allender, Tremper Longman, Bold Love

This Sunday’s readings: Luke 11:1-4

Reflections

A coat that is not used, the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted—the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.
~ Henry Ward Beecher, 1813-1887, Congregationalist Clergyman

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
~ George Eliot, 1819-1880, Novelist/Poet

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The main temptation is not to reject God outright, but to embrace God as something secondary and use God as an instrument for our own ends.
~ Miroslav Volf

For Hannah Arendt, it was not that Adolf Eichmann did not know what he was doing… It was that he did not think about what he was doing. The thoughtlessness that allows evil to flourish cannot be dispelled with new facts or better information, and the society that has forgotten how to think needs to do more than inform its citizens. Instead, like stretching unused muscles, it must relearn the daily habits of thinking.
~ Hannah LaGrand in Thoughtlessness, Sloth, and the Call to Think

In our members there is a slumbering inclination toward desire, which is both sudden and fierce. With irresistible power, desire seizes mastery over the flesh. All at once a secret, smoldering fire is kindled. The flesh burns and is in flames. It makes no difference whether it is sexual desire, or ambition, or vanity…or greed for money… Joy in God is in course of being extinguished in us as we seek all our joy in the creature.

At this moment God is quite unreal to us, he loses all reality, and only desire for the creature is real . . . Satan does not here fill us with contempt of God, but with forgetfulness of God… The powers of clear discrimination and of decision are taken from us. The questions present themselves: “Is what the flesh desires really sin in this case?” “Is it really not permitted to me, yes—expected of me, now, here, in my particular situation, to appease desire?” […] It is here that everything within me.revolts against the Word of God. Powers of the body, the mind and the will, which were held in obedience under the discipline of the Word, of which I believed that I was the master, make it clear to me that I am by no means master of them…