This Sunday’s readings: Psalm 107:1-31,43

Reflections

The Bible is shallow enough for a child not to drown, yet deep enough for an elephant to swim.
~ Augustine of Hippo

Those who work well in the depths will more easily understand the heights, for indeed in their true nature they are one in the same.
~ George MacDonald, 1824-1905, The Princess and Curdie

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968

Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.
~ Toni Morrison, 1931-2019, Am. Novelist

Some Christians have taken all the justice, judgment and hatred of sin out of the nature of God and have nothing left but a soft god. Others have taken love and grace out and have nothing left but a god of judgment. Or they have taken away the personality of God and have nothing left but a mathematical god—the god of the scientists. All these are false, inadequate conceptions of God.
~ A.W. Tozer, 1897-1963, The Dangers of a Shallow Faith

The question is not, do you have conflicts? The real question is, are you aware of your conflicts? … Anybody who says they don’t have any conflict, is either lying or deluding themselves.
~ Abhijit Naskar, Author, Mad About Humans: World Maker’s Almanac

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
~ William Faulkner, 1897-1962, American Author, ‘As I Lay Dying’

So for example. We’re here at a cancer hospital, and sometimes you want to say: God, what in the world, are you up to? What’s wrong with you? And the last line in the hymn is this—“Tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee.” There’s a tendency for us to think there’s a darkness in God and we’re smart, instead of saying, well, wait a minute, no, He’s more light than we can handle. And the darkness is in us. ‘Tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.
~ Tim Keller, On the Hymn ‘Immortal, Invisible’

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