Honor All

...behave to every one as if you were receiving a great guest.

Confucius

Just Say No

Better a friendly refusal than an unwilling compliance.

Saying (German)

Senseless Death

Vanity has made more martyrs than truth.

Anonymous

Expensive Money

Who marries for money earns it.

Saying (English)

Shoot For The Stars

Man must live on the summit to avoid the abyss.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Lemonaide

Help me, O Lord, to make a true use of all disappointments and calamities in this life, in such a way that they may unite my heart more closely with you. Cause them to separate my affections from worldly things and inspire my soul with vigor in the pursuit of true happiness.

Susanna Wesley

How To Win Friends And Influence People

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

1. Don't criticize, condemn, or complain.
2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
3. Arouse in the other person an eager want.

Six Ways to Make People Like You

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Smile.
3. Remember that a person's name is, to him or her, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5. Talk in the terms of the other person's interest.
6. Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

1. Avoid arguments.
2. Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never tell someone that he or she is wrong.
3. If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
4. Begin in a friendly way.
5. Start with questions to which the other person will answer yes.
6. Let the other person do the talking.
7. Let the other person feel the idea is his/hers.
8. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
9. Sympathize with the other person.
10. Appeal to noble motives.
11. Dramatize your ideas.
12. Throw down a challenge; don't talk negatively when a person is absent; talk only about the positive.

Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
2. Talk about your own mistakes first.
3. Call attention to other people's mistakes indirectly.
4. Ask questions instead of directly giving orders.
5. Let the other person save face.
6. Praise every improvement.
7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
8. Encourage them by making their faults seem easy to correct.
9. Make the other person happy about doing what you suggest.

Dale Carnegie

Valient Efforts

There are fights which should be made even if a loss is certain.

Frank Tollman

Free Money?

What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

Dr. Adrian Rogers

Higher Loyalties

Loyalty is a noble quality, so long as it is not blind and does not exclude the higher loyalty to truth and decency.

H.H. Liddell Hart

Thanksgiving

Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.

W.T. Purkiser

The Pure, Bright, Serene Atmosphere of God's Presence

Let us not seek out of you what we can only find in you,
O Lord.
Peace and rest, and joy and bliss,
which abide only in your abiding joy.
Lift up our souls above the weary round of harassing thoughts
to your eternal presence.
Lift up our minds to the pure, bright,
serene atmosphere of your presence,
that we may breathe freely,
there repose in your love,
there be at rest from ourselves
and from all things that weary us:
and thence return,
arrayed in your peace,
to do and to bear
whatsoever shall best please you,
O Blessed Lord.

Edward Bouverie Pusey

Say It. Do It.

A fool and his words are soon parted.

William Shenstone

Watchful Delegation

Tasks must be delegated without responsibilities being abdicated.

Anonymous

Watch And Learn

Learn from others what to pursue and what to avoid, and let your teachers be the lives of others.

Dionysius Cato

Leisure's Prediction

Your job today tells me nothing of your future - your use of your leisure today tells me just what your tomorrow will be.

Robert H. Jackson

A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

Henry A. Kissinger

"Chief Seats"

It is not smart to slip into your conversation little boasts about yourself—the college you went to, the degrees you earned, the plum positions you held. First of all, it sounds proud and diminishes you ever so slightly in the eyes of the other person. Secondly, it sets a trap for your own feet, because eventually (think about it), if you develop a relationship with the person you are speaking to, he or she will find out your true measure. If you have presented yourself too highly, your fall in his esteem will be the worse.

If, on the other hand, you have wisely refrained from boasting, your new friend will be continually delighted with pleasant discoveries about you, which will be all the more pleasing to him because you did not brag at all. This is just another application of Jesus’ parable about taking the lowest versus the highest seat at a formal dinner (Luke 14).

Andee Seu

Use Your Noggin

Some men covet knowledge out of a natural curiosity and inquisitive temper;
some to entertain the mind with variety and delight;
some for ornament and reputation;
some for victory and contention;
many for lucre and a livelihood;
and but few for employing the Divine gift of reason to the use and benefit of mankind.

Francis Bacon

Highest Bliss

To love and be loved - this
On earth is the highest bliss.

Heinrich Heine

Endurance Or Indolence

Laziness is sometimes mistaken for patience.

Saying (French)

Be Ignorant

You can never know too little of what is not worth knowing at all.

Anonymous

Justice And Mercy

Let your love of justice be exceeded only by your love of mercy.

Anonymous

Moved By Empathy

Anonymous: How can justice be secured in Athens?
Solon:If those who are not injured feel as indignant as those who are.

Solon

A Letter To New Recruits

Dear Soldier
I’ve been thinking about the true statement you said about how the military is going to change you. It’s can’t not.

My prayer for you is that when you see death, it will make you treasure life.

When you see suffering it will make you that much more compassionate.

When you see soldiers using and degrading women, may you stand for honor.

When you see violence, my prayer is that it will make you love peace.

When you see poverty, may your response be gratitude for when and where you were born.

When you feel pain, use it to long for heaven.

When you see courage may it empower you, and

when you see sacrifice- remember Christ’s for your forgiveness.

When you see selflessness, and are yourself selfless, know that we appreciate all you are doing to keep our country safe and free.

Stand firm. Stand strong.

Cindy Dunagan

43

Have a set of principles that are inviolate. Defend those principles to matter what it might cost you...One of my proudest accomplishments was that I didn't sell my soul for the sake of popularity...if you are chasing popularity...it's just a fleeting moment, but principles last forever.

George W. Bush

Like Body, Like Spirit

Resistance training is any exercise that causes the muscles to contract against an external resistance, with the expectation of increases in strength, tone, mass, and/or endurance. . . . The overload is constantly increased to facilitate adaptation. . . . The body adapts to exercise and needs to be constantly challenged in order to continue to grow and change.

Mike Fishbaugh

Love Is Not Jealous

Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely love's contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object loved, it desires the dependence of the object upon itself, and its own triumph.
Henri Amiel

The Jealous are Troublesome to others, but a Torment to themselves.
William Penn

Go The Distance

Half measures can kill when on the brink of precipices...we cannot jump halfway across.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Greatness Is Goodness

They are only great who are truly good.

George Chapman

Preparing Or Producing

The old way in my Christian life was to be always preparing to live for God. Satan was well pleased. We do a lot more talking about the Christian life than living it, seems to me... we prepare on Sunday morning. We prepare at retreats, and fill our notebooks with great weekend insights that land on the shelf. How many times have I practically knocked over spiritually dying people trying to get to the women’s Bible study on time? That’s the parable of the Good Samaritan.

So I have started praying for random people—at the mall, at the cemetery where I walk. One benefit I find is that if you pray for the person you pass at the mall, you cannot simultaneously judge him, lust after him, or engage in any other fleshly preoccupation. I think this new posture is taking on a momentum of its own and producing a new lifestyle. It primes the pump, you see, and creates a groove between oneself and God that gets deeper and more natural day by day.

Andree Seu

Brooding And Light Bulbs

Ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion.

Max Weber

Run After The Inner Stir

We, undisciplined in discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it, run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs us; we are [like] one who sees his own reflection but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it.

Plotinus

Face The Facts

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

John Burroughs

Use Your Imagination

Use your imagination not to scare yourself to death but to inspire yourself to life.

Adele Brookman

National Security

The best foreign policy is to live our daily lives in honesty,decency and integrity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

What's The Plan?

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Anonymous

Licking The Boot

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.

Eric Hoffer

Why Injustice Is Condemned

An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Vote Or Go To The Hospital

We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.

Horace Mann

Move

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke

Ain't Hurtin' No One Else?

I believe in individualism...up to the point where the individual starts to operate at the expense of society.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Go Green

There is a lot of talk about going green and loving the environment. But the Bible says the Lord himself will “make the land a desolation” (Isaiah 13:9). He will do it not because our carbon footprint is too big but because our world is wicked and needs destroying (see Noah’s story). While it is true that God Himself is the one who told us to take good care of the trees and seas He made (Genesis 1:28-30), He is prepared to wreck his own garden because of our filthiness.

We should not imagine that He would do this gleefully. It makes the Lord grieve. We get a peek into His emotions in a little exchange between Him and Jeremiah’s scribe Baruch. Baruch thinks he has troubles, just because his personal ambitions are about to amount to nothing when Israel gets overrun by enemies to the north. The Lord tells him to try this on for size:

“Behold, what I have built, I am breaking down, and what I have planted I am plucking up — that is, the whole land. And do you seek great things for yourself?” (Jeremiah 45)... I have a glimpse of how God must have felt...God has a heart that grieves when He has to execute judgment:

“How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender . . .” (Hosea 11:8)....

But God has sometimes in history delayed His judgment when people have repented. Consider the Ninevites in Jonah’s time, or Israel’s brief reprieve after the revival under King Josiah...So my modest suggestion for global warming is repentance and revival.

Andree Seu

Light The Candle

Hope, like the gleaming taper's light, Adorns and cheers our way; And still, as darker grows the night, Emits a brighter ray.

Oliver Goldsmith

The Foundation of Virtue

Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues; hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.

St. Augustine

Accepting The Beauty of Mortality: A Prayer

When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);
when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;
when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly
awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old;
and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces that have formed me;
in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is You
(provided my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow
of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

Teilhard De Chardin

We Become What We Press Into

“All mortals tend to turn into the things they are pretending to be” (C.S. Lewis).

I would like to tweak that statement a bit and share my experience with you. I started rejoicing and praising the Lord some time ago, at first by force of will. But it has dawned on me lately that I am a joyful person nowadays. I do not think this is behaviorism or fakery. I suspect that what happens is that God meets you when you take steps to meet Him.

We know that we are commanded to rejoice in Him. By cajoling, by exhorting, by attracting, by precept, and by example, the Lord everywhere bids us to rejoice:

“This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24).

“Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble for me and it is safe for you” (Philippians 3:1).

When we set ourselves to do what He commands, the Lord blesses the effort by swapping our spirit of heaviness for a garment of praise (Isaiah 61:3).

Likewise, when we deliberately walk in holiness, we find ourselves becoming more holy. The unholy things lose their appeal, just naturally. Or rather, supernaturally. We become what we press into. That is why Scripture says:

“Walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh (Galatians 5:16).

“If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:26).

There is a mysterious dynamic here. In order to become what we are, we have to try it on and walk around in it, even if it feels unreal at first. No wonder God talks in terms of “putting on” righteousness and faith and love, etc. (Job 29:14; Isaiah 59:17; Ephesians 6:11). We do not wait for the Spirit to put it on us; He has already given it to us to put on! God can give you faith, but he can’t have faith for you!

Teenaged David put on Saul’s armor and it didn’t fit. But the spiritual things that you and I must try to put on will fit us in short order if we keep them on and walk around in them and get acclimated. This is degree-by-degree transformation of the Saints spoken of in 2 Corinthians 3:18:

“And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

When I was putting on joy at the beginning, I was “beholding the glory of the Lord,” for Jesus also put on joy. And as I was beholding the glory of the Lord, I was being transformed into His image unawares. In the course of time, I realized that I was no longer the same person that I had been at the start of the journey. But it took me by surprise. It is like sitting at my computer and feeling cold, and turning up the thermostat and going back to the keyboard, and then noticing about a half hour later that I am warm. The warming was going on for a while before I started to be aware of it.

Andree Seu

Remember Where You are. Give Thanks. Pray For the Persecuted

Every day that I am making my bed, a persecuted Christian in the North Korean gulag is getting up off his rat-infested floor. Every morning that I am eating my savory yogurt with fresh fruit, he is headed out to the logging site or mine or quarry or factory on an empty stomach. Every morning that I sing to the Lord in the beautiful sycamore-tree lined cemetery, she is working her 13- to 15-hour day and forced to sing patriotic songs while doing it or incur a beating. Every noon when I stop for a sandwich, he gets his only food allotment of the day, a few ounces of corn. When I feel a chill and reach for my sweater, she is put outside for the freeze treatment.

I don’t know if most Christians pray for the martyrs, but I’ll bet they pray for us. Why wouldn’t they? They see things more clearly, their vision undulled by entertainment and comfort.

Andree Seu

Love The One's You're With

Endow the Living - with the Tears - You squander on the Dead.

Emily Dickinson

Walking Examples

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up as a person.

Ralph J. Bunche

Why Good Foundations Are Imperative

To enable it to do its work naturally, every new idea must be in some way embedded in what is old.

Albert Schweitzer

Training Wheels

They taught us a little trick when I was a child in the choir, and I have used it ever since. In order to hit the note you want to hit, you need to aim slightly above it. It really works. If you do not consciously do this, you tend to fall in the crack between high E and D sharp, just short of that sweet spot that divides the Maria Callases from the high school opera divas.

I am noticing a similar phenomenon in the spiritual life. Unless I keep straining upward all the time to greater faith, I do not keep even the level of faith I am at. Even as I think I am fine, the high water mark is imperceptibly inching down.

I was feeling blah today. I could think of many reasons to feel that way, but in truth I wasn’t really thinking, just moving on autopilot. I was going to just give myself over to it, like a hundred thousand times before. It is a well worn rut; everybody does it. It would not have been sin exactly. I was not complaining, nor saying anything either good or bad.

But I went for the higher note. I said to the Lord, out loud, that I believe He loves me and I will see His goodness in the land of the living. The “out loud” part is very important, for some reason. Call it training wheels, if you will, until I get the hang of pushing back all the voices of mediocrity and low expectations. But I notice that the psalmists don’t drop the habit of praising God with audible voice. There seems to be a supernatural kick to it; perhaps it releases extra grace from the throne. You might want to try it yourself when you’re blah.

“I will bless the LORD at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Psalm 34:1).

Andree Seu

He Has Honor

He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

Walter Lippmann

This I know

“Jesus loves me, this I know.” It is the doctrine that just keeps giving. It puts a spring in our step when we believe it—the same way it makes you feel good to know, when you and your husband have parted in the morning, that somewhere out there is a man who is thinking about you.

The doctrine of “God is love” means I don’t have to be forever watching my own back. It means I don’t have to worry about treachery or lies or gossip or scheming or unfairness. God has got that—just stand back and watch Him work. King David knew that too, and so he didn’t kill his pursuer Saul when he had the chance. Jesus knew that as well, so he kept silent when falsely charged. He “entrusted himself to the one who judges justly".

Andree Seu

Like The Beaches of Normandy

The rule for overcoming fear is to head right into it.

Anonymous

Saving Outcasts

The first vital step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel that some decent human being cares enough for them to take an interest in the question whether they are to rise or sink.

William Booth

In A Letter To A Son

While you were a child, I endeavored to form your heart habitually to virtue and honor, before your understanding was capable of showing you their beauty and utility.

Lord Chesterfield

Deck The Halls

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trying To Make Someone Else Look Bad?

He who violates another's honor loses his own.

Publius Syrus

The Hope of The World

The hope of the world lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.

James Baldwin

Thy Father Sees From Heaven And Will Reward You

Better to deserve honor and not have it than to have honor and not deserve it.

Portuguese Saying

Run With Horses. With God All Is Possible

“If you have raced with men on foot, and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses?” (Jeremiah 12:5)

...The immediate residue...was a great soberness that came over me, a sudden shame and distaste for all the worthless kinds of joking I do, the petty things that seem so hard to forgive. The Lord’s words in Jeremiah are a heads-up to get more serious about life, to prepare myself for the days ahead. We prepare by living up to what we already know—the simple, garden-variety obediences of forgiving and generosity and being patient and saying no to ungodly passions.

I commented to a mature Christian friend of mine that he was brave for Christ. He told me that he looks at it this way: If we truly believe and embrace the fact that we are called to even die for Christ, then the little acts that fall short of dying are not such a big deal.

And like Jesus said, if we cannot be trusted with small things, who will trust us with the real riches (Luke 16:11)—such as the privilege of persecution for His name? And if we do not stand firm in our faith in a day of relative ease, how will we stand at all when the fiery testing comes (Isaiah 7:9)?

The signs all around us are worrisome. I wonder what kind of world my grandson will grow up in. I hope he will be ready to run with horses.

Andree Seu

Calculating Happiness?

My greatest happiness consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness.

Chuang-Tzu

Tinsel Town

Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.

Erica Jong

Work With Him

The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling"-which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, "For it is God who worketh in you"- which looks as if God did everything and we nothing...God and man are working together.

C.S. Lewis

Get The Big Picture: From It Flows Health

The nature of reality is that there are different levels of it. This is patent and does not need to be argued for. Consider the yawning spectrum of reality that at one end is the boundless universe of stars (10 billion galaxies each with 10 billion stars) and at the other end is the atomic (10 to the 28th atoms in the human body). Consider the factory of activity in a domain that our naked eyes will never see—the single cell:

“Molecular highways haul cargo from one place to another along ‘highways’ made of other molecules, while still others act as cables, ropes, and pulleys to hold the cell in shape. Machines turn cellular switches on and off, sometimes killing the cell or causing it to grow. Solar-powered machines capture the energy of photons and store it in chemicals. Electrical machines allow current to flow through nerves . . .” (Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box).

Within this ponderous layering, you and I and our daily trips to the supermarket would seem to be found somewhere in the middle. Immensity stretches above us and below us. We go about our business for the most part unmindful of these parallel universes in the macro and the micro of life.

All of which is to set up the subject that is really on my mind this morning. It has seemed to me for some time that we tend to mistake where the real “action” is in the Christian life, as we erroneously direct all our focus to certain “layers” or “levels” of Christian reality that are not, at the end of the day, as consequential—or as emphasized by Christ—as other layers.

If I may illustrate by example: I have a friend who worked for many years for a well-known Christian ministry dedicated to laudable Scriptural, cultural goals. But what actually kept my friend awake nights was the hurtful office backbiting and power plays. So there you have it: two strata of reality, one the all-consuming focus, the other ignored.

The danger is always that the “macro” strata (sweeping cultural goals) tends to be more visible and to swallow up the “micro” strata (love of the brethren in the organization). The latter grinds on under the radar, under our noses, invisible. We forget about the elemental human relationships. We forget about love...


All of this dovetails with what the Lord has been teaching me in my own little life of children and neighbors and laundry and blog posting: In the dizzying array of stimuli that we call our lives—the macro and the micro things we do—I believe that the cellular level is where it’s at. This present moment’s choice to love God and to love the brethren is the most elemental and consequential of all. And from it flows the health of every other enterprise.

Andree Seu

Be A Giver

O, Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying to ourselves that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Francis of Assisi

Hooray For Hollywood?

[Hollywood's] a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.

Wilson Mizner

Don't Forget To Dust

He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others -- not because He has favorites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favorites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as a clean one.

CS Lewis

These Ever-Expanding Concentric Circles

...words released into the ether never simply evaporate away like dew, but people remember our conversations after they have gone home. And whether we said worthy or worthless things, those words will bear fruit—worthy words unto eternal life, and worthless words unto destruction.

That was a good exhortation for me because I don’t usually think of someone remembering my words after we have parted—in spite of the fact that I know full well I always remember others’ words and carry them around in my heart to my harm or my strengthening. The most casual of comments sow either to good or to harm...I never cease to be amazed by the rippling effect of spoken words that are in sync with God’s own Word...my own interactions with people will be different—and on and on in these ever-expanding concentric circles.

Andree Seu

The Pantheist's Pretend God

The Pantheist's God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you...An 'impersonal God'—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ('Man's search for God'!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that!

C.S. Lewis

When Suffering Is Mercy

Suffering is God's design in this sin-soaked world (Romans 8:20). It portrays sin's horror for the world to see. It punishes sin's guilt for those who do not believe in Christ. It breaks sin's power for those who take up their cross and follow Jesus...there is no greater joy than joy in the greatness of God. And if we must suffer to see this and savor it most deeply, then suffering is a mercy.

John Piper

Happiness Is: Freedom From Guilt

The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience

Edward Gibbon

They Measure Themselves ByThemselves

Comparison, more than Reality, makes Men happy or wretched.

Thomas Fuller

The Ends Do Not Justify The Means

The glory of great men must always be measured against the means they have used to acquire it.

La Rochefoucauld

Ugly In Them? Ugly In Me.

Neither urge another to that thou wouldst be unwilling to do thyself, nor do thyself what looks to thee unseemly and intemperate in another.

William Penn

Even Vegetables Reveal The Grand Plot

They [miracles] are not exceptions (however rarely they occur) nor irrelevancies. They are precisely those chapters in this great story on which the plot turns. Death and Resurrection are what the story is about; and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and ever been muttered in conversations between such minor characters...as the vegetables. If you have hitherto disbelieved in miracles, it is worth pausing a moment to consider whether this is not chiefly because you thought you had discovered what the story was really about? --- that atoms, and time and space and economics and politics were the main plot? ...It is easy to make mistakes in such matters.

C.S. Lewis

He Is Intrinsically Love

If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must, in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit it. Christ did not die for men because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely. And what, after all, does size of a world or a creature tell us about its "importance" or value?...we are all equally certain that only a lunatic would think a man six-feet high necessarily more important than a man five-feet high, or a horse necessarily more important than a man, or a man's legs than his brain...

C.S. Lewis

Work And Pray

Work as if you were to live 100 yeas, Pray as if you were to die To-morrow.

Benjamin Franklin

What's The Bible About, Anyway?

The Law gives the foundation for Christ
The Historical books show the preparation for Christ
The books of poetry express the aspiration for Christ
The books of prophecy proclaim the expectation of Christ
The gospels record the historical manifestation of Christ
The book of Acts relates the preaching of Christ
The Epistles give the interpretation of Christ
The book of Revelation reveals the consummation of Christ

J. Hampton Keathley III

Laying Down Your Arms

...fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor-that is the only way out of a "hole." This process of surrender-this movement full speed astern-is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death...If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen...

C.S.Lewis

Earning The Challenge

Abraham made up his mind to put the Word of God and his promise of a progeny above everything else—above the condition of his body, the age of his wife, the fleshly logic that said this waiting makes no sense. He faced the facts (Romans 4:19). And then, having faced the facts, he didn’t go with the facts. Or rather, he considered the promise of God a greater “fact” than any other fact. Perhaps he envisioned an old-fashioned scale with balancing plates, on one side containing all the data of his eyes and senses and on the other side containing only the ethereal Word of God. And he went with the latter.

Then Abraham had a son. And a day came when the Lord told him to put his son on an altar and kill him. I am thinking that Abraham had to have earned a challenge that difficult. I do not think that God would spring a test like that on just any man, but only one who had worked up to it and proved worthy of it by a thousand prior obediences.

Abraham saddled his mule and took Isaac. God did nothing. Abraham tied up his son. God did nothing. Abraham found the firewood. God did nothing. Abraham listened to his son crying. God did nothing. Abraham unsheathed the knife. God did nothing. Abraham raised it high. God did nothing.

How long are you and I prepared to keep saying to the Lord, “I trust your Word completely” before we bail out?

Andree Seu

He's Bad. He's Bad. He's Really, Really Bad

Goodness is, so to speak, itself; badness is only spoiled goodness...All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things - resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself... And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled...To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow or steal from his opponent...

C.S.Lewis

Good Grief

Grief is itself a med'cine"

William Cowper

Spoken of Abraham Lincoln

While an eminent man wins our admiration through his great qualities, he can hold our love only from his human weaknesses, that make him one of ourselves.

Donn Piatt

Through The Stormy Setbacks

A great pilot can sail even if his canvas is rent.

Seneca The Younger

Happiness The By-product

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Aldous Huxley

Choose Your Asphalt

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, the road to Heaven is is paved with good deeds.

Anonymous

The Law of Spiritual Progress

By helping yourself, you are helping mankind. By helping mankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.

Christopher Isherwood

Hang Tight

Heroism is endurance for one moment more.
Unknown

Bold As A Lion

In crisis boldness is the safest course. Hesitation encourages the adversary to persevere, maybe even to raise the ante.

Henry A. Kissinger

"The Grace Of God That Helps"

It is the grace of God that helps those who do everything that lies within their power to achieve that which is beyond their power.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

"The Plague Of Bad Habits"

To make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy...we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.

William James

"Things Above. Not Slippery Happiness"

That is but a slippery Happiness with Fortune can give and take away.

Thomas Fuller

"Assured Pledges Of Thy Love"

Lord, why should I doubt any more when Thou hast given me such assured pledges of Thy love?
First, Thou art my Creator, I Thy creature,
Thou my master, I Thy servant.
But hence arises not my comfort,
Thou art my Father, I Thy child; "Ye shall be My sons and daughters," saith the Lord Almighty.
Christ is my brother, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father, unto my God and your God;
but lest this should not be enough, thy maker is thy husband.
Nay more, I am a member of His body, He my head.
Such privileges had not the Word of Truth made them known,
who or where is the man that durst in his heart have presumed to have thought it?
So wonderful are these thoughts that my spirit fails in me at the consideration thereof...
this is my comfort, when I come to Heaven,
I shall understand perfectly what He hath done for me,
and then shall I be able to praise Him as I ought.
Lord, having this hope, let me purify myself as Thou art pure,
and let me be no more afraid of death,
but even desire to be dissolved and be with Thee,
which is best of all.

Anne Bradstreet

"Come"

Come, my Light, and illumine my darkness.
Come, my Life and revive me from death.
Come, my Physician, and heal my wounds.
Come, Flame of divine love,
and burn up the thorns of my sins, kindling my heart with the flame of your love.
Come, my King, sit upon the throne of my heart and reign there.
For Thou alone art my King and my Lord.

Dimitri of Rostov

"How To Keep From Slipping Back"

Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up, a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right.

Williams James

"We Are Sifted"

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22: 31-32).

There are several things to notice in this interesting aside between Jesus and Peter. One is that Ephesians 6 is not whistling Dixie when it says there is spiritual warfare in high places going on over your soul. This is no poetic drivel. As Francis Schaeffer said in True Spirituality, the supernatural world, though not normally seen, is as real in our lives as the person sitting on the other side of the door from you right now.

Another observation is that Satan asks permission to sift us. For His own reasons, God allows His favorites to undergo this abuse; indeed, He once sent His anointed Son into the wilderness for the express purpose of enduring everything Satan threw at him, that He might be battle-hardened for the ministry He was about to embark on.

The word “sifting,” when applied to men, sounds gruesome. It reminds me of the little hand sifter my mother had when I was a kid. This contraption consisted of a metal cylinder with a metal mesh stretched across its circumference toward the bottom of the inside. Just above the mesh, a thin whip turned by an outside crank would noisily scrape the sides of the cylinder and the metal mesh. Mom poured in the flour, and it came out the other end all fluffy in the bowl under the sifter, and a residue of unwanted matter left on the mesh. In other words, sifting involves fragmentation.

The demoniac at the tombs was a man fragmented by Satan. Jesus asked him his name and he said “Legion.” The man’s body had become little more than a trashed playground overrun by demons who amused themselves by having him cut himself and run around naked a screaming.

A wonderful observation from our verse is that Jesus prays for us while Satan sifts us. Speaking for myself, I can put up with the sifting of Satan only if I know that the praying of Jesus is going on simultaneously. As a matter of fact, I have been “sifted” lately, and it was during that time that this verse of which I write today came to mind.

It is very interesting to me that in the short run Satan seems to win. Simon is going down—for the moment. Jesus prays that Simon’s “faith may not fail”—and it fails! It at least stumbles. What about me, am I dispirited when my prayers at first seem to go unanswered, to be of no avail? Should I not take the long view like Jesus did? (Just think how long Jesus impassioned prayer for the unity of all believers is taking [John 17:21-22]).

Who is better qualified to help his brothers than the one who has been through sifting and “returned” by the praying of Christ? I know several such people—former homosexuals, former drug addicts. I find it very comforting indeed that Christ’s expectation is that the sifted Christian of yesterday is the strengthener of brothers tomorrow.

Andree Seu

"The All Seeing Eye"

Called or not called, God will be present.

Anonymous

"Jacob's Ladder"

Man is the link between God and nature...As God has descended into man, so man must ascend to God.

Jili

"Where's The Glory?"

The glory's naught, the deed is all.

Goethe

"When You Care Enough To Send The Very Best"

The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge. ...Nothing becomes truly "one's own" except on the basis of some genuine effort or sacrifice...The gift of material goods makes people dependent, but a gift of knowledge makes them free.

E.F. Schumacher

"Why Quote Those Less Than Noble"

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Stephen Hunt

Sometimes It Takes One To Know One

The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.

Eric Hoffer

"This Blessing Be Upon Your House"

O God, make the door of this house wide enough to receive all who need human love and fellowship,
narrow enough to shut out all envy, pride and strife.
Make its threshold smooth enough to be no stumbling block to children,
nor to strained feet, but rugged and strong enough to turn back the tempter’s power.
God make the door of this house the gateway to your eternal kingdom.

On St. Stephen's Wallbrook, London

"Feeling Powerless?"

Prayer is the golden key that opens heaven.

Thomas Watson

One’s prayer life is a useful index of one’s level of faith. If your prayer life does not contain a certain amount of outlandishly improbable scenarios for the advance of Kingdom of God, for your children’s salvation, for your own sanctification—if, in fact, your imagination has never even been stretched to entertain such requests—maybe you can join me in this daily exercise too: “Lord, I believe that nothing is impossible with You! I believe that You can (fill in the blank with your personal impossibilities).” ...There are two ways of looking at everything that life throws up at us. We can always be “reasonable” (but watch out for low expectations of God masquerading as reasonableness) or we can say, “With God all things are possible.”

Andree Seu

I have a purpose. Through the vicissitudes of job changes, the death of a spouse, and a nearly empty nest, I am tethered by the unchanging purpose of bringing glory to God. And in particular, God has left me here so that I may declare the praises of the One who called me out of darkness into his light (1 Peter 2:9). I don’t need Jack Daniels to anesthetize purposelessness on the weekends...I have a sense of meaning...Paradise is the last exit, and that it makes the present bumps on the road bearable.

Andree Seu

"Scan The Room"

...when you walk into church on Sunday...Instead of worrying about whether your seat is taken, or if you look good, you scan the room for people who appear to be lonely or miserable...chances are there is someone in your congregation who could use a little random act of love.

Andree Seu

"Two Kinds Of Fools"

There are two kinds of fools: one says, 'This is old, therefore it is good'; the other says, 'This is new, therefore it is better'.

Dean William Ralph Inge

"Taking Pains"

Genius prepares with difficulty and executes with ease.

Anonymous

To Him Shall More Be Given"

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

C.S. Lewis

"Worth It?"

What Price Glory?

Maxwell Anderson

"Nature Declareth"

There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls into the ground, and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and mercy of God to the whole world.

Thomas Merton

"What Benjamin Franklin Asked Himself Upon Awakening And Sleeping"

What good shall I do today?...What good have I done today?"

"Lover Or User?"

A good person loves people and uses things, while a bad person loves things and uses people.

Sydney J. Harris

"Robbing Peter To Pay Paul"

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

George Bernard Shaw

"The Secret Of Genius"

The secret of genius is...first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To The Intimidater"

Those who love to be feared, fear to be loved.

St. Francis de Sales

"All Truth A Treasure"

Look upon the man who tells thee thy faults as if he told thee of a hidden treasure.

The Dhammapada

"Friendship"

Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another.

Eustace Budgell

"Be Gentle, Yet Frank, Frank."

I am for frank explanations with friends in cases of affronts. They sometimes save a perishing friendship, and even place it on a firmer basis than at first; but secret discontent must always end badly.

Sydney Smith

"Shape Your Future"

The future must be shaped or it will impose itself as catastrophe.

Henry A. Kissinger

"Genius"

Genius sharpens itself on the whetstone of struggle.

Anonymous

"Make No Mistake About It"

The fool mistakes power for virtue, acclaim for merit, nonconformity for dangerousness, conviction for truth, revenge for justice, license for liberty, and kindness for weakness.

Anonymous