Their focus has moved from self to others; from problems to solutions; from failure to redemption; from brokenness to restoration. They recognize the broken, weak, fallen, and corrupt but can’t leave them in that condition–they are moved to change things. The next Christians are offering a new way forward–a way to act, live, and bring others along with them into the new reality of how things ought to be.
- Gabe Lyons
The Next Christians’ Focus Has Changed
August 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Solitude: To Disappear Into God
August 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
“Meanwhile, for myself, I have only one desire and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.”
- Thomas Merton
Oh To Do Things For Love, and Love Alone
August 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Not to demand that what I do should immediately show some result that I can appreciate; not to want to esteem anything that I do, or do anything because it will make me think I am something; but to only do things for love, and love alone. This is real obscurity, because the values loved by God’s infinite love (the love that is so perfect that it is its own object) are absolutely incomprehensible to me.
- Thomas Merton
“If We Would Only Keep Our Hands Off The Cup”
August 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment
We are drunkards and maniacs, we snatch the cup in our wild and feeble and helpless and shaking hands, and the cup falls down and the drink spills and we die of thirst. If we would only keep our hands off the cup, God would give us to drink from it, Himself holding the cup, which we are too sick and weak to take without spilling.
- Thomas Merton
Only Love Can Drive Out Hate
August 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.
- Martin Luther King Jr
Yahweh’s Open Hand
August 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The wise design of Yahweh’s rule is characterized by a sovereignty that is not a rule with an “iron fist” but one with an “open hand.” God is so sovereign that He does not have to be a “control freak.”
- Dr. Richard Smith
Simply To The Cross We Cling
August 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The paradoxes of the ways of God are part of the mystery of our being, and though we may see kinship between Job, Jeremiah and the Suffering Servant in Second Isaiah, it is only in the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ that the afflictions of Job reach their proper evaluation. We have reached the heart of the message of Job when we can say: “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy Cross I cling.”
- William Neil
