The Gospel & Good Works

“If some teaching claims to be the Gospel but does nothing in response, does not elicit any compassionate action, then it is surely not the Gospel. The fantasy of a gospel that does nothing is not the good news of the New Testament.

The heart of the Gospel is God’s good work for us. What we do in response is a story every believer lives out. It is the story of faith becoming active in love.”

~ Thomas Oden, The Good Works Reader (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2007), 3.

Divorce & Love

“The proper question, perhaps, is not why we have so much divorce, but why we are so unforgiving. The answer, perhaps, is that, though we still recognize the feeling of love, we have forgotten how to practice love when we don’t feel it.”

~ Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1992), 140.

The Vulnerability of Genuine Community

“A community cannot be made or preserved apart from the loyalty and affection of its members and the respect and goodwill of the people outside it. And, for a long time, these conditions have not been met. As the technological, economic, and political means of exploitation have expanded, communities have been more and more victimized by opportunists outside themselves. And as salesmen, saleswomen, advertisers, and propagandists of the industrial economy have become more ubiquitous and more adept at seduction, communities have lost the loyalty and affection of their members. The community, wherever you look, is being destroyed by the desires and ambitions of both private and public life, which for want of the intervention of community interests are also destroying one another. Community life is by definition a life of cooperation and responsibility. Private life and public life, without the disciplines of community interest, necessarily gravitate toward competition and exploitation. As private life casts off all community restraints in the interest of economic exploitation or ambition or self-realization or whatever , the communal supports of public life also and by the same stroke are undercut, and public life becomes simply the arena of unrestrained private ambition and greed.”

~ Wendall Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1992), 121.

Honor & Shame Enough

“You come from the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, and that’s both honor enough to lift up the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.”

– C.S. Lewis, “Prince Caspian” in The Chronicles of Narnia (Grand Rapids, Mi: Eerdmans)

Work & the Will of God

“The difference between life in a wilderness and here is work. In the wilderness, you must do everything for yourself. But civilization is sharing in the work of others. Look at the chair you sit in. Imagine making it yourself — even if you had the skills, you’d need the tools. Do you have the skill to make the tools? And even if you had the skills for that, could you mine the ore to get the metal? And if you had the skills to do that, how would you get the ore down from the mountain? Would you make the truck? In other words, to simply make a chair from scratch is, in a sense, a lifetime of work for one person. But through the work of others, you can buy it with the fruit of a few hours of labor. Civilization is sharing in work of others. Your paycheck, whatever it is, can buy you the use of far more than you could possibly make for yourself in the time it took to earn the check. Work makes us interdependent. Work is cultivating the resources of the material and human universe. Work plants the seed; civilization reaps the harvest. Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others; civilization is the form in which others make themselves useful to us. Work unifies the human race and carries out the will of God.”

– Lester DeKoster, Work, the Meaning of Your Life (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Christian Library Press, 1982)

Narrative, Meaning & the Purpose of Learning

“Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.”

- Neil Postman, The End of Education (New York, NY: Vantage Books, 1995), 7.

The Meaning of All Misery

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience (Romans 8:18-25).

“The meaning of all misery in the world is that sin is horrific. All natural evil is a statement about the horror of moral evil. If you see a suffering in the world that is unspeakably horrible, let it make you shudder at how unspeakably horrible sin is against an infinitely holy God. The meaning of futility and the meaning of corruption and the meaning of our groaning is that sin — falling short of the glory of God — is ghastly, hideous, repulsive beyond imagination.

Unless you have some sense of the infinite holiness of God and the unspeakable outrage of sin against this God, you will inevitably see the futility and suffering of the universe as an overreaction. But in fact the point of our miseries, our futility, our corruption, our groaning is to teach us the horror of sin. And the preciousness of redemption and hope.”

- John Piper, “Subjected to Futility in Hope, Part 1” (sermon preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on April 22, 2002)

Hitler or Heffner?

“If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Heffner.”

~ Malcolm Muggeridge, A Third Testament (New York, NY: Ballentine Books, 1983).

The Most Consequential Question

“More consequences for life and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from any other basic question.”

~ Mortimer Adler, quoted by Ravi Zacharias in The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Baker Books, 1990, 2004), 21.

Totally Like Whatever, You Know?

Here’s a creative graphic presentation of the words of poet Taylor Mali’s “Totally Like Whatever, You Know?” along with an audio of Mali’s recitation of the poem. Mali challenges what he calls “the most aggressively inarticulate generation” to speak with clarity and conviction. This is brilliant.

(HT: Justin Taylor)