'I think we have grievously sterilized the gospel, depersonalizing it to such an extent that we have a hard time seeing sin as more personal than legal (though it is), salvation as more reconciliation than payment (though it is), and God’s work in and through Christ as more relational than judicial.'

From Muse and Mystery.

prayer

This booklet on praying God's word, found via the Desiring God blog.

timely advice

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
- Chuck Close

found here.

to suffering

From Elisabeth Elliot's daily devotional:

If resurrection is a fact--and there would be no Easter if it were not--then there is no situation so hopeless, no horizon so black, that God cannot there "find His glory." The truth is that without those ruined hopes, without that death, without the suffering that He called inevitable, the glory itself would be impossible. Why the universe is so arranged we must leave to the One who arranged it, but that it is so we are bound to believe.

And when we find ourselves most hopeless, the road most taxing, we may also find that it is then that the Risen Christ catches up to us on the way, better than our dreams, beyond all our hopes. For it is He--not His gifts, not His power, not what He can do for us, but He Himself--who comes and makes Himself known to us. And this is the one pure joy for those who sorrow.

esp. the os guinness bit

I think there has been a lot of anxiety and burnout—indeed, a new kind of low-grade legalism—as believers are given the burden of transforming culture. Most of us are called to making small differences every day in the lives of a few neighbors—like our spouse, children, extended friends and relatives, co-workers. Of course, we pursue our callings as more than jobs, but so do a lot of non-Christians. We are motivated by a concern to love and serve our neighbors, but a lot of non-Christians have a stronger sense of social obligation than we do. What if I’m a janitor or tree surgeon in Iowa rather than a Wall Street mover-and-shaker? Actually, most Christians are the former rather than the latter. I like Os Guinness’s line: “In terms of influence, the problem is not that most Christians aren’t where they should be, but that they aren’t what they should be where they are.” I would only add that it’s only by being regularly steeped in God’s Word, over the long haul, that this kind of maturity becomes something that others recognize even if we don’t.

--Michael Horton, from Justin Taylor's blog.

quotes

from World magazine, 26th march 2011.
in the Q&A reviews with Andy Crouch:
'Pursuing being elite is a terrible idea... Most people who pursue being elite end up being shaped solely by that: They become nothing but elite. I'd much rather have everyone, whatever their prospects for being elite or not, pursue excellence. Excellence is often accompanied by humility, whereas being elite often is not. People who have obtained mastery of certain fields, I've found, are surprisingly humble, because they've become aware of how difficult their work is....
'The key to becoming a serious culture maker is you learn to tell when you played the scale well and when you didn't... It takes 10,000 hours to develop mastery of something...[That] is a great index, because you will not make it to mastery unless you love something. So, the first question: What do you love enough to make it to those 10,000 hours? ...
'For Christians it can't just be a self-discovery process of "What are my deepest desires and how do I fulfill those?" Not instead of that, but in addition to that, we should ask, "Does this vocation take me to a place where the world is in pain?" Christian vocation takes us to a place where our work intersects with the brokenness of the world.'
Andree Seu:
'Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his 1978 Harvard University commencement address, "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations.... Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?"

An Open Letter to Seekers

An Open Letter to Seekers