Possibly one of the most devastating things that can happen to us as Christians is that we cease to expect anything to happen. I am not sure but that this is not one of our greatest troubles today. We come to our services and they are orderly, they are nice ‒ we come, we go ‒ and sometimes they are timed almost to the minute, and there it is. But that is not Christianity, my friend. Where is the Lord of glory? Where is the one sitting by the well? Are we expecting him? Do we anticipate this? Are we open to it? Are we aware that we are ever facing this glorious possibility of having the greatest surprise of our life? Or let me put it like this. You may feel and say ‒ as many do ‒ ‘I was converted and became a Christian. I’ve grown ‒ yes, I’ve grown in knowledge, I’ve been reading books, I’ve been listening to sermons, but I’ve arrived now at a sort of peak and all I do is maintain that. For the rest of my life I will just go on like this.’ Now, my friend, you must get rid of that attitude; you must get rid of it once and for ever. That is ‘religion’, it is not Christianity. This is Christianity: the Lord appears! Suddenly, in the midst of the drudgery and the routine and the sameness and the dullness and the drabness, unexpectedly, surprisingly, he meets with you and he says something to you that changes the whole of your life and your outlook and lifts you to a level that you had never conceived could be possible for you. Oh, if we get nothing else from this story, I hope we will get this. Do not let the devil persuade you that you have got all you are going to get, still less that you received all you were ever going to receive when you were converted. That has been a popular teaching, even among evangelicals. You get everything at your conversion, it is said, including baptism with the Spirit, and nothing further, ever. Oh, do not believe it; it is not true. It is not true to the teaching of the Scriptures, it is not true in the experience of the saints running down the centuries. There is always this glorious possibility of meeting with him in a new and a dynamic way.

-Living Water: Studies in John 4 by Martin Lloyd-Jones

 

“But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must have as much as possible of the other — that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?”

 

It starts with light and it ends with light, and in between there is darkness.

-Heroes

 

We’re all at war with ourselves.  That’s what it means to be human.

-Sylar in Heroes

 

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.

 

…wherever it may be, you never understand a passage of Scripture to the end, and you do not comprehend all the truth it conceals. Although you may perhaps understand some or perhaps many things there, know that it is always there for you as a testimony of truth still to be revealed to you… Therefore it is always a matter of making progress in the understanding of Scripture.

 

She pulled it out and looked, wondering who ever saw this smooth hard thing that fell out of a chicken’s you-know-what and thought, I’m going to eat it? When you crack an egg open and see a sac of yellow oil surrounded by thick snot, what would give you the idea, now here’s a tasty little morsel?

It’s weird that despite the way an egg looks and the route it takes to open air, it is a nearly perfect food. You can serve it with almost anything that can be snipped, chopped, or grated. Fried, poached, scrambled, all good. Add it to any cookie or cake and it will be richer. Whip slimy whites to a tight froth, add them to butter, flour, sugar, and lemon and you get a soufflé that kills. And what crazy French person thought of beating olive oil into yolks until your arm breaks and suddenly you get mayonnaise? None of these things would exist if we had to rely on the way I look at things.

 

You are probably weary of people telling you that as a student you can change the world. Let me tell you what I have learned, though. When dictators think of 22,000 students, they think of what you might do. When power is threatened, it is students who are feared. When power is threatened, dictators don’t shut down the commercial districts, they close the schools. Than Shwe, the leader of the military junta in Burma fears you. He just arrested five student leaders from the 1988 democracy movement. And do you know why? Because he knows what you may only suspect: students change the world. The student movement in South Africa that ultimately precipitated the downfall of apartheid changed the world. Students threaten what is, because they have an anticipation of what might be and what should be, and from time to time they have been relentless about pursuing it, and the world changes. In part I think it is because the university makes everything seem possible. The world is opened to us—for many of us, for the first time…

 

Friends

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

 

The sins of our forefathers

They had a far smaller expectation of happiness, admittedly, and a far lesser tendency to regard happiness as a right. All our brightly minted social reforms, the sexual liberation since the war, the guilt-free divorce, the ending of the stigma of illegitimacy, have had their shadow side. Today we have a generation of children more disturbed, more unhappy, more criminal, indeed more suicidal than in any previous era. The sexual liberation of adults has been bought at a high price and it is not the adults who have paid it.