"...... all things are characterized by impermanence and subject to change. Most people have to work through a lot of disappointment, suffering, and heartache to get to that realization, but once it happens, it is a profound shift in how we perceive reality and experience life.:
(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)
"Likewise, you have a lifetime of experiences, circumstances, conditions, and choices, which makes you a Titanic-sized ship of habit energy that cannot be turned around on a dime. Your daily choices and responses are governed by deeply ingrained ways of thinking and being. You have a fixed and habitual mode of perceiving and understanding the world, and old habits die hard."
(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)
"Hell is a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement and where everyone has a grievance."
~ C.S. Lewis
"It is only by believing in God that we can criticize the Government. Once abolish God, and the Government becomes God. The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they worship the strongest thing in the world."
G. K. Chesterton,
Christendom in Dublin
"You did not bear the shame
You resisted
Sacrificing your life
For Freedom, Justice and Honor"
From the German Resistance Memorial, Berlin
We instinctively contrast the ministry with the laity, the priesthood with the people, the professional with the amateur. But the New Testament church knew nothing of this. This is perfectly astounding when you recall that every society in the world, including Israel, had had its specialized holy seasons, holy places, and holy people. In Christianity, all three were abolished. The keeping of holy days was a matter of indifference to the early Christians. They had no holy buildings, but met in private houses--the incarnation of God had made the secular sacred. As for holy people, why, all believers were called to be that holy people, that universal priesthood envisioned long ago in the Old Testament but never hitherto realized. The mediation of Jesus has abolished the need for an intermediary caste of priests: all can have access to God in virtue of the sacrifice of Christ; all have the priestly responsibility of interceding for man to God; all have the prophetic task of speaking God's message to men. There is no priestly body within Christianity. It is a one-class society, though you would never guess as much, so grossly has conformity to pagan and Old-Testament models distorted this unique facet of Christ's community.
... Michael Green (b. 1930), "Mission and Ministry"
"There are a lot of churches that are not even on the battlefield yet because they aren't good enough to be attacked by the devil. Many churches are not good enough to come into real spiritual warfare as the enemy doesn't have to attack them because they do a pretty good job of attacking themselves.
The devil can simply come up and press a few buttons of the flesh, and resentment, and bitterness, and ambition, and pride, and arrogance, and offense, and unteachable behavior, and as long as he continues to press those buttons then we'll never deal with the battle field that is out there, as long as he's dealing with the battlefield in here."
Jesus said these words in Luke 22."Who is more important, the one who sits at the table or the one who serves? The one who who sits at the table of course. But, not here, for i am among those who serves. I have come as one who serves........"
(Pastor Andrew Brice. Summerside Community Church. Sunday, Sept 24, 2017)
"Some men choose a job they know they can do well and easily, and don't even approach the fullest giving of their gift. Their lives are relatively secure and comfortable, but dead. They lack the aliveness, the depth, and the inspirational energy that is the sign of a man living at his edge."
David Deida
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
(Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey)
"We also live in an age of entitlement; personal fulfillment, we believe, is our due. In the West, sex is a right linked to our individuality, our self-actualization, and our freedom. Thus, most of us now arrive at the altar after years of sexual nomadism. By the time we tie the knot, we’ve hooked up, dated, cohabited, and broken up. We used to get married and have sex for the first time. Now we get married and stop having sex with others. The conscious choTice we make to rein in our sexual freedom is a testament to the seriousness of our commitment. By turning our back on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our “significant other”: “I have found The One. I can stop looking.” Our desire for others is supposed to miraculously evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction."
(Why Happy People Cheat: A good marriage is no guarantee against infidelity.
ESTHER PEREL
OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE The Atlantic)
"Jesus didn’t psychologize or spiritualize people’s pain. He didn’t even try to explain it in light of God. Jesus faced pain and tasted the depths of it. He leaned into it, endured it, and fully met others in their hurt and heartache. Jesus cared. He did give a damn. Jesus felt it all deeply.
Being human means we go through life embracing it all fully and feeling it all deeply. That we don’t hide and try to protect ourselves. That we live. That we show up. That we laugh. That we cry. That we hurt. That we heal. That we care. That we love. And then, that we wake up the next morning and sign up to be human all over again. That is being IN the world."
(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)
"The Religion-Free Bible paraphrase of the shortest verse of the Bible, “Jesus wept,” captures this: “Anguish climbed from the bottom of his gut up through his chest and throat, and into his eyes with a power that even he could not contain. A lone tear quietly dropped from his eyelash and as it inched down his face, he was now inseparably a part. In the length of his face, the heartache of humankind washed through him like rain. Jesus knew full well the human experience and how it sometimes felt like your heart was being ripped right out of your chest. Life is beautiful. But life was also agonizing. That was the deal, and there was nothing Jesus could ever do to change that. Gravity had its way with this solitary tear and as it fell from his chin to the ground, Jesus was undone with sadness and compassion that seemed to stretch across every wound and scar that had ever been suffered. No divinity could save him now from his own human heart. Jesus wept.”
(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)
"The leading social commentator now teaches that despair and rage are an essential element in the struggle for justice. He and others who teache thus are sowing the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind, the tornado. Indeed, we are reaping it now in a nation increasingly sick with rage and resentment of citizen toward citizen. And often the rage and resentment resentment is upheld as justified......"
Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"Many think I’m so concerned about organized religion because I’ve been hurt by the worst of it. That isn’t quite true. I think its greatest danger comes not when it is obviously flawed, but when it works well— giving people an aesthetic experience or a place to park their guilt, and missing out on a real engagement with the King of Glory. When it convinces us that sitting in the same room or greeting each other briefly in the parking lot is real fellowship, we’ll miss the greater joy of supportive relationships that will help us all respond better to what God is doing in us....
What I love about the work of the Spirit in our day is that it is not being driven by an organization, a book or a charismatic speaker. God’s Spirit is creating a hunger in his people that defies the confines of religion or a particular way of doing things, and seeks to drink deeply of his presence and share an effective life with other fellow travelers."
Wayne Jacobsen
Everywhere I go now, people ask me about the ‘house church movement,’ hoping it will provide the answer to their hunger for real body life. While I greatly prefer relational environments to institutional ones, every time I hear the word ‘movement’ my heart sinks. I’m convinced that the day we call what God is doing a movement is the day it has already begun to die. I’ve seen many movements come and go —Charismatic, discipleship, deliverance, healing, intercession, spiritual warfare, prophetic, worship, and apostolic just to name a few. All of them came up hollow in the end, not because God wasn’t in some of it, but because people hijacked his work to serve their own needs and ambitions.
Calling something a movement inflates our own sense of importance and separates us from the multi- faceted working of God that transcends any particular way of doing things.
Wayne Jacobsen
Like it or not, the church is finally becoming much more universal in its teaching. Marginalized and oppressed groups have a wealth of insights to offer us in reading the Gospel. The New Testament is being rediscovered by altogether different sets of eyes, raising very different questions and perspectives that we just never thought about before. We are just beginning to honor the voices of women, minorities, and many groups that have not had access to the power, privilege, and comforts of past theologians."
Richard Rohr
“There are many who agonize over the church. The good news is that the church Jesus is building is alive and well. It is the religious system that is unraveling before our eyes.”
~ Don Nori Sr.
"These 'little' people, without any of the character or qualifications humans insist are necessary, are the only ones who can actually make the world work. It is how things are among them that determines the character of every age and place."
(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy)
"Blessed are the physically repulsive,
Blessed are those who smell bad,
The Twisted, misshappen, deformed,
The too big, too little, too loud,
The bald, the fat, and the old--
For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus.
(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy. Pg 123)
I have a problem with the Bible. Here’s my problem…
I’m an ancient Egyptian. I’m a comfortable Babylonian. I’m a Roman in his villa.
That’s my problem. See, I’m trying to read the Bible for all it’s worth, but I’m not a Hebrew slave suffering in Egypt. I’m not a conquered Judean deported to Babylon. I’m not a first century Jew living under Roman occupation.
I’m a citizen of a superpower. I was born among the conquerors. I live in the empire. But I want to read the Bible and think it’s talking to me. This is a problem."
Brian Zahnd
"The church is meant to be a force of evangelism but has become a field of evangelism instead"
British Methodist Samuel Chadwick (1860-1932)
"The reason why so few find the Truth is because we impose our conditions and preferences upon it. We insist the Truth must look a certain way, including the path we take to get to it. You have a “Yeah, but” problem. You say you want to know the truth but you have conditions. Yeah, I want to know the Truth… BUT it must nicely fit into, complement or be consistent with certain beliefs and understandings I never plan on giving up, BUT it must not put me at odds with my family, friends, or faith tradition, BUT it must be something I can figure out in, with, and through my mind, BUT it must produce the outcomes I want on my terms. The Truth will not bend to satisfy your conditions. The path is simple except for your preferences."
(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)
