Arthur Brooks on Seeing Gratitude like Exercise

by Jed CoppengerBook Summary, Gratitude, QuotesPosted on No Comments

In Arthur Brooks’ book, Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, he provides a way of thinking about gratitude that I thought was incredibly helpful. The short, simple, profound, thought is:

“Gratitude is very similar to exercise. We all know it’s good to be grateful and show it–just as we all know it’s good to go to the gym and work out. But just as fitness demands that we make a routine and overcome a natural desire to do nothing, so also we need to make a habit of being grateful, even if we don’t feel it. And not just on one Thursday–all year round.”

Matt Smethurst’s Top 50 Tim Keller Quotes

by Jed CoppengerBible, Quotes, Timothy KellerPosted on No Comments

Yesterday, Tim Keller went to be with the Lord. It’s hard to overstate the impact Keller has had on Christians over the past couple of decades. He’s certainly been used by God in my life.

Matt Smethurst posted 50 of his favorite Keller quotes. I was encouraged by them. Perhaps God will use them to encourage you as well.

“All death can now do to Christians is to make their lives infinitely better.”

“The central basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us.”

“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said. If he didn’t, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether you like his teaching, but whether he rose from the dead.”

“Describe the God you’ve rejected. Describe the God you don’t believe in. Maybe I don’t believe that God either.”

“Contemporary people tend to examine the Bible, looking for things they can’t accept; but Christians should reverse that, allowing the Bible to examine us, looking for things God can’t accept.”

“Satan doesn’t control us with fang marks on the flesh but with lies in the heart. . . . Our best defense in the fight against [his] lies is not the production of incantations but the rehearsal of truth.”

“The gospel is that I am so sinful that Jesus had to die for me, yet so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. I can’t feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone.”

“The doctrine of sin means believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. And the doctrine of common grace means unbelievers are never as flawed as their false worldview should make them.”

“Only if your god can outrage and challenge you will you know that you worship the real God and not a figment of your imagination. . . . If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.”

“The glory of God is available to you in the church in a way it’s not available to you anywhere else. . . . There is no more important means of discipleship than deep involvement in the life of the church.”

“You don’t fall into love. You commit to it. Love says, ‘I will be there no matter what.’”

“To say ‘I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself’ means you’ve failed an idol whose approval is more important than God’s.”

“If you make work your identity and you succeed, it’ll go to your head. If you fail, it’ll go to your heart.”

“To be loved but not known is superficial. To be known but not loved is our nightmare. Only Jesus knows us to the bottom and loves us to the sky.”

“The only person who dares wake up a king at 3:00 a.m. for a glass of water is a child. We have that kind of access.”

“Tolerance isn’t about not having beliefs. It’s about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.”

“Traditional religion says, ‘I give God a good moral record, so he has to bless me.’ The gospel says, ‘God gives me a good moral record through Christ, so I want to bless him.’ . . . Religion says, ‘If I obey, then God will love and accept me.’ The gospel says, ‘God loves and accepts me, therefore I want to obey.’”

“The gospel says you are simultaneously more sinful and flawed than you ever dared believe, yet more loved and accepted than you ever dared hope.”

“If you’re falling off a cliff, strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch. Salvation is not finally based on the strength of your faith, but on the object of your faith.”

“The temptation for those who suffer is to assume that because we can’t think of any good purposes God may have for our suffering, there can’t be any.”

“There are the good things of this world, the hard things of this world, and the best things of this world—God’s love, glory, holiness, beauty. The Bible’s teaching is that the road to the best things is not through the good things but usually through the hard things. . . . There is no message more contrary to the way the world understands life or more subversive to its values.”

“The Christian sex ethic was understood by the apostles to be a nonnegotiable part of orthodoxy, one of the core beliefs of Christianity. What Christians taught and practiced about sexuality was as much a necessary implication of the gospel and the resurrection as were care for the poor and the equality of the races. This makes it impossible to argue, as many try to do, that what the Bible says about caring for the poor is right but what it says about sex is outmoded and should be discarded.”

“Sex apart from marriage becomes a product we consume if we find someone attractive enough in quality and low enough in price. If the quality goes down or the cost goes up, we can walk away, because there is no covenant. But if sex comes only with the radical self-giving and whole-life commitment of marriage, that takes sex off the market, as it were, and makes it priceless.”

“When Jesus Christ was in the garden of Gethsemane and the ultimate darkness was coming down on him and he knew it was coming, he didn’t abandon you; he died for you. If Jesus Christ didn’t abandon you in his darkness, the ultimate darkness, why would he abandon you now, in yours?”

“Only a grasp of what Jesus did on the cross—the doctrine of substitutionary atonement—can prevent spiritual distortions. . . . Only this doctrine keeps us from thinking God is mainly holy with some love or mainly loving with some holiness—but instead [he] is both holy and loving equally, interdependently. Only this view of God makes the spoiled or the neglected into the healthy and the loved.”

“The secular framework . . . has nothing to give the wounded conscience to heal it. It has nothing to say to the self who feels it is unworthy of love and forgiveness. Anyone who has seen the depths of their sin and what they are capable of will never be mollified by the bromide of ‘Be nice to yourself—you deserve it.’”

“True repentance begins where whitewashing (‘Nothing really happened’) and blame-shifting (‘It wasn’t really my fault’) and self-pity (‘I’m sorry because of what it has cost me’) and self-flagellation (‘I will feel so terrible no one will be able to criticize me’) end.”

“Forgiveness is granted (often a good while) before it is felt—not felt before it is granted. It is a promise to not exact the price of sin from the person who hurt you. . . . It is likely you have always thought, ‘Well, I have to feel it before I grant it. I have to start feeling less angry before I start to not hold them liable.’ If you wait to feel it before you grant it, you’ll never grant it; you’ll be in an anger prison.”

“It is hard to stay angry at someone if you are praying for them. It is also hard to stay angry unless you feel superior, and it is hard to feel superior if you are praying for them, since in prayer you approach God as a forgiven sinner.”

“Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the main way we experience deep change—the reordering of our loves. Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life.”

“God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything he knows.”

“We know God will answer us when we call because one terrible day he did not answer Jesus when he called. . . . Jesus’ prayers were given the rejection that we sinners merit so that our prayers could have the reception that he merits.”

“Mercy isn’t just the job of the Christian. Mercy is the mark of the Christian.”

“A good sermon is not like a club that beats upon the will but like a sword that cuts to the heart.”

“Expository preaching should provide the main diet of preaching for a Christian community. . . . [It] is the best method for displaying and conveying your conviction that the whole Bible is true. This approach testifies that you believe every part of the Bible to be God’s Word, not just particular themes and not just the parts you feel comfortable agreeing with.”

“Preaching is not only explaining the text but also using it to engage the heart. I often see preachers giving so much time to the first task that they put little thought and ingenuity into the second.”

“Every time you expound a Bible text, you are not finished unless you demonstrate how it shows us that we cannot save ourselves and that only Jesus can.”

“Christian communicators must show that we remember (or at least understand) very well what it is like not to believe.”

“The humanistic moral values of secularism are not the deliverances of scientific reasoning, but have come down to us from older times . . . they have a theological history. And modern people hold them by faith alone.”

“Through faith in the cross we get a new foundation for an identity that both humbles us out of our egoism yet is so infallibly secure in love that we are enabled to embrace rather than exclude those who are different.”

“[These are] Christianity’s unsurpassed offers—a meaning that suffering cannot remove, a satisfaction not based on circumstances, a freedom that does not hurt but rather enhances love, an identity that does not crush you or exclude others, a moral compass that does not turn you into an oppressor, and a hope that can face anything, even death.”

“If the suffering Jesus endured did not make him give up on us, nothing will.”

“Jesus is one of the very few persons in history who founded a great world religion or who, like Plato or Aristotle, has set the course of human thought and life for centuries. Jesus is in that tiny, select group. On the other hand, there have been a number of persons over the years who have implicitly or explicitly claimed to be divine beings from other worlds. Many of them were demagogues; many more were leaders of small, self-contained sects of true believers. What is unique about Jesus is that he is the only member of the first set of persons who is also a member of the second.”

“Everything in the Hebrew worldview militated against the idea that a human being could be God. Jews would not even pronounce the name ‘Yahweh’ nor spell it. And yet Jesus Christ—by his life, by his claims, and by his resurrection—convinced his closest Jewish followers that he was not just a prophet telling them how to find God, but God himself come to find us.”

“When you come to Christ, you must drop your conditions. You have to give up the right to say, ‘I will obey you if . . . I will do this if . . .’ As soon as you say, ‘I will obey you if,’ that is not obedience at all. You are saying: ‘You are my adviser, not my Lord. I will be happy to take your recommendations. And I might even do some of them.’ No. If you want Jesus with you, you have to give up the right to self-determination. Self-denial is an act of rebellion against our late-modern culture of self-assertion. But that is what we are called to. Nothing less.”

“When you say, ‘Doctrine doesn’t matter; what matters is that you live a good life,’ that is a doctrine. It is called the doctrine of salvation by your works rather than by grace.”

“It’s in death that God says, ‘If I’m not your security, then you’ve got no security, because I’m the only thing that can’t be taken away from you. I will hold you in my everlasting arms. Every other set of arms will fail you, but I will never fail you.’ Smelling salts are very disagreeable, but they are also very effective. But as you’re waking from your illusions, be at peace, because here’s what Jesus Christ offers to us if by faith we have him as our Savior.”

“If you want to understand your own behavior, you must understand that all sin against God is grounded in a refusal to believe that God is more dedicated to our good, and more aware of what that is, than we are. We distrust God because we assume he is not truly for us, that if we give him complete control we will be miserable. Adam and Eve did not say, ‘Let’s be evil. Let’s ruin our own lives and everyone else’s too!’ Rather they thought, ‘We just want to be happy. But his commands don’t look like they’ll give us the things we need to thrive. We’ll have to take things into our own hands—we can’t trust him.’”

“The only storm that can really destroy—the storm of divine justice and judgment on sin and evil—will never come upon you. Jesus bowed his head into that ultimate storm, willingly, for you. He died, receiving the punishment for sin we deserve, so we can be pardoned when we trust in him. When you see him doing that for you, it certainly does not answer all the questions you have about your suffering. But it proves that, despite it all, he still loves you. Because he was thrown into that storm for you, you can be sure that there’s love at the heart of this storm for you.”

“If you were a hundred times worse than you are, your sins would be no match for his mercy.”

5 Steps To Take When You Experience Loss: Insights from Jerry Sittser’s “A Grace Disguised”

by Jed CoppengerBook Summary, Christian living, Church, Practical Ministry, QuotesPosted on No Comments

Jerry Sittser and his family were headed back home from an event when a drunk driver drove head-on into their minivan. Although he and three of his kids survived, tragically, his wife, mother, and one of his daughters all died at the scene of the accident.

While most people don’t, thankfully, have to go through what he went through, every single one of us experience loss. Sittser writes, “Sooner or later all people suffer loss, in little doses or big ones, suddenly or over time, privately or in public settings. Loss is as much a part of normal life as birth, for as surely as we are born into this world we suffer loss before we leave it” (17). He continues, “”All people suffer loss. Being alive means suffering loss. Sometimes the loss is natural, predictable, and even reversible. . . . But there is a different kind of loss that inevitably occurs in all of our lives, though less frequently and certainly less predictably. This kind of loss has more devastating results, and it is irreversible. Such loss includes terminal illness, disability, divorce, rape, emotional abuse, physical and sexual abuse, chronic unemployment, crushing disappointment, mental illness, and ultimately death. If normal, natural, reversible loss is like a broken limb, then catastrophic loss is like an amputation. The results are permanent, the impact incalculable, the consequences cumulative. Each new day forces one to face some new and devastating dimension of the loss. It creates a whole new context for one’s life” (31-32).

We all experience loss, but, unfortunately, we don’t all understand how to GROW through loss. Instead of growing through our losses, many, sadly, lose their way, their heart, and their hope. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Sittser writes, “It is not, therefore, the experience of loss that becomes the defining moment of our lives, for that is as inevitable as death, which is the last loss awaiting us all. It is how we respond to loss that matters. That response will largely determine the quality, the direction, and the impact of our lives” (17). He continues, “There is little we can do to protect ourselves from these losses. . . . There is much we can do, however, to determine how to respond to them. We do not always have the freedom to choose the roles we must play in life, but we can choose how we are going to play the roles we have been given. Choice is therefore key. We can run from the darkness, or we can enter into the darkness and face the pain of loss. We can indulge ourselves in self-pity, or we can empathize with others and embrace their pain as our own. We can run away from sorrow and drown it in addictions, or we can learn to live with sorrow. . . .” (46).

Sittser’s book is a healing balm to anyone hurting. I first picked it up when I lost one of my best friends who gave his life saving some people from a burning car and oncoming traffic. Since then, I’ve returned to a few parts of this book more than once, as I’ve experienced more loss over the years.

But I know many people might not have or make the time to read this book. So I thought I’d offer a few lessons I’ve taken away from the book that I apply when I experience loss.

  1. Watch Out for Attempts to Deal With the Pain of Loss in a Way That Causes More Pain

As many besides Sittser have noted, when we experience loss, we are prone to do one of the following things:

Denial – On denial, Sittser writes, “Denial puts off what should be faced. People in denial refuse to see loss for what it is, something terrible that cannot be reversed. They dodge pain rather than confront it. But their unwillingness to face pain comes at a price. Ultimately, it diminishes the capacity of their souls to grow bigger in response to pain” (56). Denial happens when we give the “it’s not that big of a deal” statement, when it actually is. We can deny dealing with the pain by working harder than before. Denial says “it’s fine” when it really isn’t.

Bargaining – When we experience pain, sometimes we try to fight it by bargaining. On his experience, he wrote, “I thought about replacement relationships that could help me make the transition quickly and conveniently, but then I faced disappointment when two relationships fizzled during the first year as quickly as they had begun. I considered finding a new life for myself by moving and starting a different job so that I could escape the hellish life I was forced to live after the accident” (57). Some might try to bargain with God by doing the classic, “Lord if you give me this relationship, then…” or “If you do _____, then I’ll…” Sittser was prone to bargain, maybe you will too in a tough time.

Indulging – Sittser writes, “I tried to drown the pain by indulging my appetites. . . . There was one period, about two months long, in which I . . . watched television almost every night from 10:00 pm to 2:00 am. . . . I was tempted to indulge other appetites as well” (57). He continues, “Many people form addictions after they experience loss. Loss disrupts and destroys the orderliness and familiarity of their world. They feel such desperation and disorientation in the face of this obliteration of order that they go berserk on binges. They saturate their senses with anything that will satisfy them in the moment because they cannot bear to think about the long-term consequences of loss. So they watch television every moment they can, work sixty hours a week, drink too much alcohol, go on a sexual rampage, eat constantly, or spend their money carelessly. In so doing, they hold suffering at a distance” (58). I tend to go to sweets like ice cream in tough times. Nothing wrong with ice cream or many of these things, but none of them can help bring the healing you’re looking for.

Venting – Sittser also points out that when we experience loss, we might deal with it by getting angry and venting. On his experience, he writes, “I resisted the pain, finally, by venting anger. I thought that revenge would somehow help me mitigate my suffering. I wanted someone to pay the price for the loss” (58). When someone does something wrong to you or someone you love, you will probably feel this acutely at times. Beware of it. He writes, “Anger, like denial, or bargaining or binges, is simply another way of deflecting the pain, holding it off, fighting back at it. We refuse to let the pain in and experience it for the hell it is” (59).

These four responses to loss are important to be aware of and avoid. He writes, “These responses can deceive us, appearing to provide a way of escape from the problem rather than the points of entry into the problem. We must therefore pay attention to them but not fool ourselves into thinking that they are merely stages on our way out of the predicament” (59).

If we don’t respond in these ways, how should we respond? Very simply, I’ve found, after reading his book and Scripture, that we should:

2. Acknowledge the Pain – Whether it is just an acknowledgment to yourself, to God, or to others, acknowledge the pain. When one of my kids didn’t get in the game and I said I was “sorry because I know it stinks,” on the way home, he said, “It’s no big deal.” I corrected him, gently saying, “let’s not pretend like it doesn’t stink. I know you wanted to get in, that you wondered why you weren’t getting any time, etc.” Anybody that has played, knows what it is like not to get in, and really think you should. I tried to help him acknowledge the pain he felt. Anybody that wants to grow through their grieving and loss has to do the same.

3. Trust God’s Ability to Integrate Your Difficulty into Your Story for Your Good – Usually when you experience loss, you won’t know most of the reasons why God allowed it to happen. Often times, it won’t make sense from your perspective. The only way to grow through the pain and loss is to trust God enough to believe he can integrate the pain into your story for your good, making you “more” not “less.” If you don’t trust God’s good, but mysterious purposes, then you won’t be able to move forward more like Jesus than you were before the disaster.

4. Focus On What God Wants You To Do and Ask Him To Help You Do It – If you truly trust God with your pain, it frees you up to focus on what he wants you to do. Usually you won’t “feel like it.” That’s why you ask him to help you do what he’s called you to do. The Apostle Paul was “sorrowful, yet rejoicing.” He ministered with a broken heart. Your loss, by God’s good design and with his help, will actually make you better at doing what he’s called you to do, when you respond by faith. Trust him and follow him in the midst of your loss. For my son, that meant he needed to be a great teammate from the bench. Cheer his teammates on. Encourage them. Even as he prayed that God would give him a chance to play.

5. Remember This Process and Expect to Have to Work Through it Unexpectedly and Consistently – Sittser argues that we never “move on” from loss, in the sense that we can return to how things were before. But we can be “enlarged by loss, even as we continue to experience it” (18). In order for this to happen, we need to understand that we will need to return to these steps consistently. We’ll hear a song that reminds us of a lost loved one, smell something that takes us to a painful place, or something else that reminds us of some old pain that is still able to have a fresh impact. That’s why it is important to remember these steps. They can help you, with God’s help, walk out of the darkness that so easily overcomes us in this broken world.

Douglas McKelvey on What to Pray When a Dream Dies

by Jed CoppengerBible, Book Summary, Christian living, Church, Ministry, Practical Ministry, Prayer, QuotesPosted on No Comments

Douglas McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy vol. 1 provides liturgies, or prayers, for all kinds of different situations. I thought I’d share the one he wrote for “The Death of a Dream.” In it, he skillfully and beautifully puts into words what so many feel when this happens and how they should process it in the presence of a good God. This prayer could be something you pray for almost any disappointment. I hope it encourages you like it encouraged me.

O Christ, in whom the final fulfillment of all hope is held and secure,

I bring to you now the weathered

fragments of my former dreams,

the rent patches of hopes worn thin,

the shards of some shattered image of

life as I once thought it would be.

What I so wanted

has not come to pass,

I invested my hopes in desires

that returned only sorrow

and frustration. Those dreams,

like glimmering faerie feasts,

could not sustain me,

and in my head I know that you

are sovereign even over this–

over my tears, my confusion,

and my disappointment.

But I still feel,

in this moment,

as if I have been abandoned,

as if you do not care that these hopes

have collapsed to rubble.

And yet I know this is not so.

You are the sovereign of my sorrow.

You apprehended a wider sweep with wiser eyes

than mine. My history hears the fingerprints of grace.

You were always faithful, though I could not always trace quick evidence of your presence in my pain, yet did you remain at work,

lurking in the wings, sifting all my

splinterings for bright embers that might

be breathed into more eternal dreams.

I have seen so oft in retrospect, how

you had not neglected me, but had, with a

master’s care, flared my desire like silver in

a crucible to burn away some lesser longing,

and bring about your better vision.

So let me remain tender now, to how

you would teach me. My disappointments

reveal so much about my own agenda

for my life, and the ways I quietly demand

that it should play out: free of conflict,

free of pain, free of want.

My dreams are all so small.

Your bigger purpose has always been

for my greatest good, that I would

day-to-day be fashioned into a more fit vessel

for the indwelling of your Spirit,

and molded into a more compassionate

emissary of your coming Kingdom.

And you, in love, will use all means to shape

my heart into those perfect forms.

So let this disappointment do its work.

My truest hopes have never failed,

they have merely been buried

beneath the shoveled muck of disillusion,

or encased in a carapace of self-serving

desire. It is only false hopes that are brittle,

shattering like shells of thin glass, to reveal the

diamond hardness of the unshakeable eternal

hopes within. So shake and shatter

all that hinder my growth, O God.

Unmask all false hopes,

that my one true hope might shine out

unclouded and undimmed.

So let me be tutored by this new

disappointment.

Let me listen to its holy whisper,

that I may release at last these lesser dreams.

That I might embrace the better dreams you

dream for me, and for your people,

and for your kingdom, and for your creation.

Let me join myself to these, investing all hope

in the one hope that will never come undone

or betray those who place their trust in it.

Teach me to hope, O Lord,

always and only in you.

You are the King of my collapse.

You answer not what I demand,

but what I do not even know what to ask.

Now take this dream, this husk,

this chaff of my desire, and give it back

reformed and remade according to

your better vision,

or do not give it back at all.

Here in the ruins of my wrecked

expectation, let me make this confession:

Not my dreams, O Lord,

not my dreams,

but yours, be done.

Amen.

C.S. Lewis on the Importance of Accessible Communication

by Jed CoppengerBible, Christian living, Church, Culture, Evangelism, Ministry, Missions, Practical Ministry, QuotesPosted on No Comments

Our business is to present that which is timeless (that which is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age. . . .

We must learn the language of our audience. And let me say at the outset that it is no use at all laying down a priori what the “plain man” does or does not understand. You have to find out by experience. . .

You must translate every bit of your Theology into the vernacular. This is very troublesome and it means you can say very little in half an hour, but it is essential.

It is also the greatest service to your own thought. I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning. A passage from some theological work for translation into the vernacular ought to be a compulsory paper in every Ordination examination.

—C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics” [1945], in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 96.

Paul Miller On “Finding Community”

by Jed CoppengerChristian living, Church, Ministry, Paul Miller, Practical Ministry, QuotesPosted on No Comments

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“You don’t find community; you create it through love. Look how this transforms the way you enter a room of strangers. Our instinctive thought is, ‘Who do I know? Who am I comfortable with?’ There’s nothing wrong with those questions, but the Jesus questions that create communities are, ‘Who can I love? Who is left out?’ Instinctively, we hunt for a church or community that makes us feel good. It is good to be in a place where you are welcome, but making that quest central is idolatry. And like all idolatry, it ultimately disappoints. But if we pursue hesed love, then, wherever we go, we create community.”

From page 100 of Paul Miller’s A Loving Life: In A World Of Broken Relationships.

Listen to Your Fears

by Jed CoppengerEd Welch, QuotesPosted on No Comments

“There is no dawdling in the face of fear. When we perceive it creeping up on us we want to keep moving. To slow down and listen to what it might be saying is counter-intuitive.

 

But fear is speaking, and we should listen.

 

One useful life skill is to know when to listen to our feelings and when to ignore them. As a general rule, the first step is to listen. There is a logic-a language-to fear and anxiety, just as there is to most emotions. Anger says, ‘You are wrong.’ Embarrassment or shames says, ‘I am wrong.’ Fear says, ‘I am in danger,’ but it also says much more.

 

Don’t forget, listening for fear is like listening to background noise. At first you think there is nothing to hear, but then you notice the wind in the trees, birds calling for a mate, cars passing by, a plane overhead, creaks in the floors, the water heater kicking in. At first we might deny any palpable fears and their logic, but then we listen more carefully and notice that they are everywhere, speaking loudly.”

 

Edward Welch in Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest.

Five Minutes After We Die

by Jed CoppengerQuotes, Randy AlcornPosted on No Comments

“At the end of the movie Schindler’s List, there’s a heart wrenching scene in which Oskar Schindler-who bought from the Nazis the lives of many Jews-looks at his car and his gold pin and regrets that he didn’t give more of his money and possessions to save more lives. Schindler had used his opportunity far better than most. But in the end, he longed for a chance to go back and make better choices.

 

Unbelievers have no second chance to relive their lives, this time choosing Christ. But Christians also get no second chance to live life over, this time doing more to help the needy and invest in God’s kingdom. We have one brief opportunity-a lifetime on earth-to use our resources to make a difference.

 

John Wesley said, ‘I judge all things only by the price they shall gain in eternity.’ Missionary C. T. Studd said, ‘Only one life, ’twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.’

 

Five minutes after we die, we’ll know exactly how we should have lived. But God has given us His Word so we don’t have to wait to die to find out. And He’s given us His Spirit to empower us to live that way now.

 

Ask yourself, Five minutes after I die, what will I wish I would have given away while I still had the chance? When you come up with an answer, why not give it away now? Why not spend the rest of our lives closing the gap between what we’ll wish we would have given and what we really are giving?”

 

Written by Randy Alcorn in The Treasure Principle.

Two Ways to Find Happiness

by Jed CoppengerQuotes, Timothy KellerPosted on No Comments

“Jesus uses the younger and elder brothers [in Luke 15] to portray the two basic ways people try to find happiness and fulfillment: the way of moral conformity and the way of self-discovery. Each acts as a lens coloring how you see all of life, or as a paradigm shaping your understanding of everything. Each is a way of finding personal significance and worth, of addressing the ills of the world, and of determining right from wrong.

 

The elder brother in the parable illustrates the way of moral conformity. The Pharisees of Jesus’s day believed that, while they were a people chosen by God, they could only maintain their place in his blessing and receive salvation through strict obedience to the Bible. There are innumerable varieties of this paradigm, but they all believe in putting the will of God and the standards of the community ahead of individual fulfillment. In this view, we only attain happiness and a world made right by achieving moral rectitude. We may fall at times, of course, but then we will be judged by how abject and intense our regret is. In this view, even in our failures we must always measure up.

 

The younger brother in the parable illustrates the way of self-discovery. In ancient patriarchal cultures some took this route, but there are far more who do so today. This paradigm holds that individuals must be free to pursue their own goals and self-actualization regardless of custom and convention. In this view, the world would be a far better place if tradition, prejudice, hierarchical authority, and other barriers to personal freedom were weakened or removed. . . .

 

. . . Our Western society is so deeply divided between these two approaches that hardly anyone can conceive of any other way to live. If you criticize or distance yourself from one, everyone assumes you have chosen the follow the other, because each of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say: ‘The immoral people-the people who ‘do their own thing’-are the problem with the world, and moral people are the solution.’ The advocates of self-discovery say: ‘The bigoted people-the people who say, ‘We have the Truth’-are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution.’ Each side says: ‘Our way is the way the world will be put to rights, and if you are not with us, you are against us. . . .’

 

. . . The hearts of the two brothers were the same. Both sons resented their father’s authority and sought ways of getting out from under it. They each wanted to get into a position in which they could tell the father what to do. Each one, in other words, rebelled-but one did so by being very bad and the other by being extremely good. Both were alienated from the father’s heart; both were lost sons.

 

Do you realize, then, what Jesus is teaching? Neither son loved the father for himself. They both were using the father for their own self-centered ends rather than loving, enjoying, and serving him for his own sake. This means that you can rebel against God and be alienated from him either by breaking his rules or by keeping all of them diligently.

 

It’s a shocking message: Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God.”

 

In Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God.