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What I'm Reading

It is not how you mark your Bible, but how your Bible marks you that counts
written in Dutch on the flyleaf of a well-marked Bible

I tried atheism for a while, but my faith just wasn't strong enough.

Let your natural life be spiritual, and your spiritual life be natural.

Justice - When you get what you deserve
Mercy - When you don't get what you deserve
Grace - When you get what you don't deserve

A riddle
What is:
greater than God?
more evil than the devil?
Poor people have it
Rich people need it
but if you eat it, you'll die?

The answer is the same as the answer to the question in Romans 8:35-39
If this doesn't help, send me an email for the answer!

gontroppoATyahooDOTcom

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make
them all yourself.

Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards

Money will buy a bed but not sleep; books but not brains;
food but not appetite; finery but not beauty;
a house but not a home; medicine but not health;
luxuries but not culture; amusements but not happiness;
religion but not salvation; a passport to everywhere but heaven

And Jesus said to them, "Who do you say that I am?"
And they replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our inter-personal relationships."
And Jesus said, "What?"

Religion becomes the enemy of Christ when its picture of God ceases to grow and expand:
we must beware of worshipping a god who is simply the guardian of all we cherish,
the justification of all our ways of life and the protector of our group.

Dear Lord, please protect me from your followers.- Bumper Sticker

So far today, God, I've done all right. I haven't gossiped, I haven't lost my temper.
Haven't been grumpy, nasty or selfish. I'm really glad of that.
But in a few minutes, God, I'm going to get out of bed;
and from then on, I'm probably going to need a lot of help. /p>

To err is human, but to blame it on someone else is even more human.

You didn't find God; God found you.
God wasn't lost; you were.

Eric Alexander
God made the Son of His love to become the object of His wrath,
that we who were the objects of His wrath might become the sons of His love.

Charles L. Allen
When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you are slamming the door in the face of God.

Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609)
After the reading of Scripture, which I strenuously inculcate, and more than any other ... I recommend
that the Commentaries of Calvin be read ... For I affirm that in the interpretation of the Scriptures
Calvin is incomparable, and that his Commentaries are more to be valued than anything that is
handed down to us in the writings of the Fathers -- so much that I concede to him a certain spirit of
prophecy in which he stands distinguished above others, above most, indeed, above all

Augustine
Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.

God will not suffer man to have a knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless; and if understanding of his adversity, he would be despairing and senseless.

J.S. Bach
The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
If heed is not paid to this, it is not true music but a diabolical bawling and twanging.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.

Salvation is free, ... but discipleship will cost you your life.

Sir William Bragg (1862-1942)
Religion and science are opposed...but only in the same sense as that in which my thumb and forefinger are opposed - and between the two, one can grasp anything.
Bragg and his son Lawrence were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, for their exploration of crystals using X rays.

John Calvin
The best limit of sobriety for us will be not only to follow God’s lead always in learning but, when he sets an end to teaching, to stop trying to be wise.

Robert Capon
Jesus is a lifeguard who responds to our calls for help by drowning, letting us drown, and telling us He will raise us from the dead.

George Carey, former archbishop of Canterbury
Belief in the resurrection is not an appendage to the Christian faith. It is the Christian faith.

G. K. Chesterton
When people stop believing in God they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.

Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit; but, obviously, we must argue. Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent's faith is to say I must not discuss it
. . . It is absurd to have a discussion on Comparative Religions if you don't compare them.

It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into anything.

C. C. Colton
Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but live for it.

Neil R. Combe
So much of the "creation vs evolution" battle seems to me to be a battle between some very bad science and some very bad theology.

Mary C. Crowley
Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He's going to be up all night anyway.

Don Cupitt
Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity.

Peter Denham
Using reason without God's revelations of himself to create theology is like trying to hammer pieces of sand together to build a house. Beginning with God's word at least means you start with the right raw materials even if you dont have the best tools to put it all together.

Dostoevsky?
If you have no God, what is the meaning of crime?
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov, book 6, ch. 3, sect. f

Jonathan Edwards
As long as a person has a notion that he is guided by immediate direction from heaven, it makes him incorrigible and impregnable in all his misconduct.

Albert Einstein
Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.

Canon John Fenton
The way to read the Bible is, first and foremost, to read it in big chunks - whole books or even several books. Scripture should not be sipped like wine but drunk freely like beer.

Paul Traugott Fuhrmann
It is a matter of common knowledge that the least Calvinistic commentary on Romans is that of Calvin himself.
Interpretation, April 1952, page 199-200

Chris Hall
James Packer has warned me ... to beware of draining the mystery out of the Scripture in a misplaced desire for rational consistency.

A. A. Hodge
A church has no right to make anything a condition of membership which Christ has not made a condition of salvation.

Charles Hodge
Original sin is the only rational solution of the undeniable fact of the deep, universal and early manifested sinfulness of men in all ages, of every class, and in every part of the world.

Michael Horton
from a sermon at a funeral of a pastor who committed suicide
Christianity is not true because it works. In many cases, it does not work. That is to say, it does not solve all of the problems that we think it should solve. Those who become Christians because they were told it would fix their marriages, only to find themselves in divorce court, might well give up on Christianity. Those who expected to be free of sinful habits and desires after a conversion in which "sudden victory" was promised may find themselves disillusioned with God altogether soon thereafter, when they realise that they are still sinners saved by grace… God didn't promise any of us health, wealth and happiness. In fact, he tells us that we who expect to share in Christ's glory will also participate in his suffering.

Christianity is true, not because it works for people in that pragmatic, utilitarian way, but because nearly 2,000 years ago, outside of the city centre of Jerusalem, the Son of God was crucified for our sins and was raised for our justification. This historical event may not fix our marriages, our relationships or our messed-up lives the way we would like, and in the timing we would like, but it saves us from the wrath of God to come. And surely in view of this, all else pales not into insignificance, but into secondary importance to that great issue. "For it is appointed for a man once to die, and then the judgment."

Martin Luther King, Jr.
If a man is called a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

Ronald Knox
It is so stupid of the twentieth century to have abandoned belief in the devil when he is the only explanation for it.

Anne Lamott
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

C. S. Lewis
Among the Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He were God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among pantheists, like the Hindus of India, anyone might say that he is part of god or one with god. There would be nothing very odd about that. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God in their language meant the Being outside of the world who had made it and was infinitely different than anything else. And when you have grasped that concept you will see that what this man said was quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. Weight of Glory and Other Addresses pp.1-2.

I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks".

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up save in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.... When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.

...we keep on assuming that we know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows.

When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes.

Martin Luther
I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.

Vernon McGee
A woman wrote to J. Vernon McGee: "Our preacher said that on Easter Jesus just swooned on the cross and that the disciples nursed him back to health. What do you think?" McGee replied, "Dear sister, beat your preacher with a leather whip for thirty-nine heavy strokes. Nail him to a cross. Hang him in the sun for six hours. Run a spear through his heart. Embalm him. Put him in an airless tomb for three days. Then see what happens."

Thomas Manton
First we practise sin, then defend it, then boast of it.

Justin Martyr, c.160 AD, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew
We ourselves were well conversant with war, murder, and everything evil, but all of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for ploughshares, our spears for farm tools. Now we cultivate the fear of God, justice, kindness to men, faith, and the expectation of the future given to us by the Father himself through the Crucified One.

Jack Miller
Cheer up! You're worse than you ever thought and God's grace is greater than you ever imagined.

Jonathon Miller
In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners.

Charles C. Morrison
The Church is a society of sinners - the only society in the world in which membership is based upon the single qualification that the candidate shall be unworthy of membership.

Malcolm Muggeridge
Our twentieth century, far from being notable for scientific scepticism, is one of the most credulous eras in all history. It is not that people believe in nothing - which would be bad enough - but that they believe in anything - which is really terrible. Recoiling, as they do, from accepting the validity of miracles, and priding themselves on seeing the Incarnation as a transcendental con-trick, they will accept at its face value any proposition, however nonsensical, that is presented in scientific or sociological jargon - for instance, the existence of a population explosion, which has been so expertly and decisively demolished by Professor Colin Clark of Monash University. Could any mediaeval schoolman, I ask myself, sit through a universally applauded television series like Bronowski's Ascent of Man without a smile of derision at such infantile acceptance of unproven and unprovable assertions?
- from Vintage Muggeridge, ed. Geoffrey Barlow, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985, pp. 74-75, "The Bible Today," from a lecture delivered on 7 October 1976

Gregory Nazianzen
What he was, he laid aside; what he was not, he assumed. He takes upon himself the poverty of my flesh so that I may receive the riches of his divinity.

Stephen Neill
This Christian claim [of universal validity] is naturally offensive to the adherents of every other religious system. It is almost as offensive to modern man, brought up in the atmosphere of relativism, in which tolerance is regarded almost as the highest of the virtues. But we must not suppose that this claim to universal validity is something that can quietly be removed from the Gospel without changing it into something entirely different from what it is... Jesus' life, his method, and his message do not make sense, unless they are interpreted in the light of his own conviction that he was in fact the final and decisive word of God to men... For the human sickness there is one specific remedy, and this is it. There is no other.

Richard John Neuhaus
In the gay community, it would seem, the maxim is: love the sin and love the sinner, but hate anyone who calls it a sin or him a sinner.

Michael Novak
In America, however, most of our atheists are actually thinly disguised Christians, or sometimes thinly disguised Jews, who want to retain the humanism taught by the Creator, without believing in the Creator. They believe in the image of God, without believing in God. They want the Kingdom of God - the Kingdom of compassion, justice, peace, love, integrity, honesty, and commitment - without God, the King.

James I. Packer
A half-truth masquerading as a whole truth becomes a complete untruth.

Blaise Pascal
Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride.
Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair.
Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and
our own wretchedness. Pensees, XIV.192

Not only do we not know God, except through Jesus Christ, we do not even know ourselves except through Jesus Christ.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who believe themselves sinners; the sinners who believe themselves righteous.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Patrick Henry Reardon (from Christ in the Psalms)
To relinquish any of the Psalms on the excuse that its sentiments are too violent for a Christian is a clear sign that a person has also given up the very battle that a Christian is summoned to fight. The Psalms are prayers for those who are engaged in an ongoing, spiritual conflict. No one else need bother even opening the book.

John Robinson [1620]
I am verily persuaded that the Lord has more Truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word. For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the Condition of the Reformed Churches, who are come to a Period in Religion and will go at present no farther than the instruments of their Reformation. The Lutheran can't be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things... I beseech you, remember, 'tis an Article of your Church Covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever Truth shall be made known to you from the written Word of God....

Dorothy Sayers
In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

George Bernard Shaw
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Fulton J. Sheen
If Christmas were just the birthday of a great teacher, like Socrates or Buddha, it would never have split time into two, so that all history before the advent of Christ is called B.C. and all history after, A.D.

Joy is not the same as pleasure or happiness. A wicked and evil man may have pleasure, while any ordinary mortal is capable of being happy. Pleasure generally comes from things, and always through the senses; happiness comes from humans through fellowship. Joy comes from loving God and neighbor. Pleasure is quick and violent, like a flash of lightning. Joy is steady and abiding, like a fixed star. Pleasure depends on external circumstances, such as money, food, travel, etc. Joy is independent of them, for it comes from a good conscience and love of God.

Gypsy Smith
Kneel down with a piece of chalk and draw a complete circle around you. Then pray to God to send a revival on everyone inside that circle. Stay there until he answers, and you will have revival.

Joseph Sobran
It can be exalting to belong to a church that is 550 years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.

C H Spurgeon
If God requires of the sinner, dead in sin, that he should take the first step, then he requires just that which renders salvation as impossible under the gospel as it was under the law, since man is as unable to believe as he is to obey.

I believe in the doctrine of election, because I am quite certain that, if God had not chosen me, I should never have chosen him; and I am sure he chose me before I was born, or else he never would have chosen me afterwards; and he must have elected me for reasons unknown to me, for I never could find any reason in myself why he should have looked upon me with special love

Chris Stamper
He who is not a charismatic when he is young has no heart. He who is still a charismatic when he is old has no brain.

Tom Stoppard
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

John Stott
Some people construct a Christianity which consists entirely of a personal relationship to Jesus Christ and has virtually nothing to do with the church. Others make a grudging concession to the need for church membership, but add that they have given up the ecclesiastical institution as hopeless. Now it is understandable, even inevitable, that we are critical of many of the church's inherited structures and traditions. Every church in every place at every time is in need of reform and renewal. But we need to beware lest we despise the church of God, and are blind to his work in history. We may safely say that God has not abandoned his church, however displeased with it he may be. He is still building and refining it. And if God has not abandoned it, how can we?

Henry Van Dyke
The plague of Christendom has been the passion of theology to define what God has not defined and to discover what he has kept secret.

Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language
(On being asked how a scientific or technical mind can believe in God)
I expect a good deal of the problem is that you are busy disbelieving a different God than the one I am busy believing in. In theological discussions more than any other kind, it's easy to talk at right angles and never even realize it.

B.B.Warfield
A firm faith in the universal providence of God is the solution of all earthly troubles.