echoing Reverend MLKJr in prayer

 

“God, we thank you for the inspiration of Jesus. Grant that we will love you with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, even our enemy neighbors. And we ask you, God, in these days of emotional tension, when the problems of the world are gigantic in extent and chaotic in detail, to be with us in our going out and our coming in, in our rising up and in our lying down, in our moments of joy and in our moments of sorrow, until the day when there shall be no sunset and no dawn. Amen.” (Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.)

 

awe-ful

 

“Numinousness on its own isn’t necessarily a comfort. Some of my children (as well as most small dogs) find thunderstorms dreadful. Rightly so. They are the rumbling expression of the power of a mysterious God. I was similarly rattled as a child, but I have come to embrace the storms because I have come to understand that my Father sends forth the lightning, and he has told every bolt where to go (Job 38:35). 

He has demonstrated his love for me, but that cozy fact doesn’t diminish the exhilaration of his God-ness. It enables me to cease my fearful attempts at control. I am simply chained to the mast with a front-row seat to the storm. I am still afraid, but afraid in a profoundly new way. Lewis illustrates the Christian numinous experience by citing The Wind in the Willows, as Rat and Mole approached the god Pan: 

“Rat,” he found breath to whisper, shaking, “Are you afraid?” 

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid? of Him? O, never, never! And yet — and yet — O Mole, I am afraid.””     Reagan 

this one may be a repeat on my part, and that’s ok

 

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (Mere Christianity, 55–56)”    C.S. Lewis

quotable quotes

                        

   please, know this: 

                                     my posting a quote is not

equal to 

my affirmation of 

every thing the person ever thought, wrote, said…

the problem is mine

“Even now, I struggle with certain things that are plainly taught in the Word of God. To combat this tendency in my life, when I was in seminary I kept a card on my desk that said, "You are responsible to believe and to teach what the Bible teaches, not what you would like for it to teach." I realize that when there's something in the Word of God that I don't like, the problem is not with the Word of God, it's with me.” Sproul