Wise Words for Today

Image from the Book of Kells, a 1200 year old book. Category:Illuminated manuscript images (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To seriously follow the spiritual journey, particularly amid our world’s busyness, one must learn to guard the preciousness of time by savoring the beauty of our periods for prayer or meditation, reflection, reading, work, study, and relaxation. Awareness of time’s value and a commitment to live one’s spiritual journey in this consciousness is a test of the maturity of a person’s spirituality. Only by guarding one’s time against the onslaught of distraction can we advance in our commitment to the mystical dimension of our existence. Only when we regard time’s precious relationship to our inner life, only if we understand its necessity for spiritual growth, can we begin to use time more wisely.

Wayne Teasdale

(from A Monk in the World)

Wise Words for Today

Zombies in Decatur (Photo credit: steambadger)

We have become lazy in our faith. This problem transcends denomination, age, gender, background, and race. As social pressure toward Christian conformity de-radicalizes us, making us safe, comfortable, and predictable, we lose the very essence of the purpose of our existence. We do not live to fit into some spiritual mold. We live to bring people to life. When we become more concerned about offending people than transforming people, we have lost what it means to be Christian. Too much focus on comfort and conformity makes us spiritually sterile.

Tyler Edwards

 (from Zombie Church)

Wise Words for Today

It’s so easy to get distracted by all the things going on around you. If you resolve to live the life of your dreams, if you refuse to settle for a life other than the one God created you to live….you have to decide to focus and lock in on the direction God has called you to live your life.

The first step in getting focused could be described as concentration. Concentration is directing all of our energies and resources to a specific task, idea, and direction. So to focus, you have to make this adjustment – to concentrate all your energy and resources on where you are going. Set your eyes on where God is calling you and don’t look back (and certainly don’t look around).

Your potential becomes talent only when it is harnessed and developed. Your talents become strengths when they are focused and directed. It is here where you begin to discover who you are and the potential God has placed within you.

Without a destiny, you will diffuse your energy.

When you are focused, you are your most powerful.

A destiny is not something waiting but something within you.

When Jesus calls us to come, he is calling us out into a future we cannot walk without him….The power of focus brings not only the strength of concentration but also the power of convergence – it harnesses all your talent, gifting, skills, passions, intellect, experience, the whole of you and brings it all together to unleash your highest potential.

 Irwin Raphael McManus

(from Wide Awake)

Wise Words for Today

A. W. Tozer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets ‘things’ with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns ‘my’ and ‘mine’ look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do… The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution……..Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and ‘things’ were allowed to enter. Within the human heart ‘things’ have taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their heart, for God is crowned there no longer, but there  in the  moral dusk stubborn and aggressive usurpers fight among themselves for first place on the throne.

A.W. Tozer

Wise Words for Today

The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt (1630) shows the Good Samaritan making arrangements with the innkeeper. A later (1633) print by Rembrandt has a reversed and somewhat expanded version of the scene. Roland E. Fleischer and Susan C. Scott, Rembrandt, Rubens, and the Art of their Time: Recent perspectives, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, ISBN 0915773104, pp. 68-69. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I am convinced that as Christians we are not about programs. We’re not about bigger or better blessings. We’re about responding to people who call for help because their world is falling apart. These individuals aren’t looking to be converted – they’re looking for help! Being their help – by being the presence of Christ in their lives – is the only thing we’re about. Everything else we do is secondary and can even detour us from carrying out the true purpose of the church…You are filled with the Spirit of God. You are living in this window in time called the last days. You are where you are because God has strategically placed you there. The question is, are you open for business?”

Jerry Cooke

(from The Monday Morning Church)

Wise Words for Today

First page of the Gospel of Mark, by Sargis Pitsak, a Medieval Armenian scribe and miniaturist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jesus is like air to the lungs and water to a desert dweller. He is not a religious artifact. He’s not dead. He is alive. He is engaged and engaging. He is here now, changing lives all over this world this very moment. When He walked on earth He changed everything for everyday, for all time. What started then continues today. It can’t be stopped though many have tried. Jesus is the rock of redemption and His church will prevail. He is here in this moment with you, doing what He always does, calling you to a higher place, calling you to break free from convention and stop going to church and start being the church everywhere you go. Let’s be “Jesus people” again. Let’s be men and women whose hearts are captured, redeemed, renewed, enlivened, ignited, set fee! Let’s return to the revolution to be the change we want to see in the world!

David Foster

(from Renegades Guide to God)

Wise Words for Today

Rapture (Photo credit: bill barber)

The closer one comes to the center of things, the better able he is to observe the connections. Everything created is connected, for everything is produced by the same mind, the same love, and is dependent on the same Creator. He who masterminded the universe, the Lord God Omnipotent, is the One who called the stars into being, commanded light, spoke the Word that brought about the existence of time and space and every form of matter: salt and stone, rose and redwood, feather and fur and fin and flesh. The titmouse and the turkey answer to Him. The sheep, the pig, and the finch are His, at His disposal, possessed and known by Him…We too are created, owned, possessed, known.

Elizabeth Elliot

Wise Words for Today

Wise Words for Today

Early Christian ichthys sign carved into marble in the ruins of Ephesus, Turkey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Christianity is now so fundamentally associated with the formula of fall and redemption, so focused on beliefs about Jesus instead of invitations to follow Jesus, that a new Reformation is needed. It will deal not with matters of doctrine and church order but with a recovery of the concept of transformation through the imitative wisdom of discipleship. It will reject once and for all the illusion that knowledge alone is redemptive and seek to restore the ancient truth that creation is blessed, not fallen…..The new Reformation will be about the very life and death of Christianity itself. We must first recover the original message and then be willing to interpret it for a new age. It will be a return to faith as praxis, grounded in trust, not intellectual assent, grounded in doctrine. Christianity was once, and must be again, about following Jesus, not worshiping Christ.

Robin Meyers

(from Saving Jesus from the Church)

Wise Words for Today

Bota de vino Taken by myself (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

God is bringing forth new wineskins for a fresh outpouring of wine, and it does not look like anything we’ve ever seen. So we must focus on Jesus and the wine he is pouring out, and not on the wineskin. Remember, the purpose of the wineskin is to furnish the appropriate environment for the juice of the choice grapes to ferment and season at just the right time. We should be open and flexible, like new wineskins, in order to have Jesus fill our hearts and communities. This new wineskin must be very simple and able to expand and grow with the new wine….Renewal is not enough. We all need to go through a conversion something like what the apostle Peter experienced in Acts 10 and 11. Peter’s conversion from an ethnocentric Jew to an advocate for Gentile missions was one of the most significant paradigm shifts in the history of the church. Likewise today, the church must repent of any cultural tradition that hinders the movement of the gospel across cultures. The current spiritual-cultural crisis calls for nothing less than complete repentance, what the Greeks call a metatonia, a transformation of the mind, a change of heart, and a new way of living. Just as Gentiles received salvation free of Jewish tradition, so all people have a right to follow Jesus without having to become Western or institutionalized.

Jonathan Campbell