Food for Thought: The Fear of the Lord

"Obviously, to be in the fear of the Lord is not to be scared of the Lord, even though the Hebrew word has overtones of respect and awe. 'Fear' in the Bible means to be overwhelmed, to be controlled by something. To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love. It means that, because of his bright holiness and magnificent love, you find him 'fearfully beautiful.' That is why the more we experience God's grace and forgiveness, the more we experience a trembling awe and wonder before the greatness of all that he is and has done for us. Fearing him means bowing before him out of amazement at his glory and beauty."

 - Tim Keller, in The Meaning of Marriage

Food for Thought: Lent

"Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we are an imperishable... I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified." 

1 Cor. 9:25, 27 ESV

"LENT is a time of year to remember that God has seen fit to make us not airy spirits but embodied human beings living in a beautiful, material world. The soul fills the body the way fire fills a lump of coal, and what the body learns, the soul absorbs as well. Spiritual disciplines such as fasting are analogous to weight-lifting equipment. One who uses them in a disciplined way will be stronger, not just when he's lifting weights, but also for every situation he meets."

- Frederica Mathewes-Green

Food for Thought: Natural Beauty

"Cheerfulness and content are great beautifiers, and are famous preservers of good looks."
~ Charles Dickens

"Taking joy in living is a woman's best cosmetic."
~ Rosalind Russell

Food for Thought

"Real love always heals fear and neutralizes egotism, and so, as love grows up in us, we shall worry about ourselves less and less, and admire and delight in God his His other children more and more, and this is the secret of joy." - Evelyn Underhill

Food for Thought

"Too many people spend their entire marriages trying to conform their spouses into their image rather than allowing God to conform their spouses into His image."
- Michael Sytsma, in Saving Grace

Food for Thought

I'm currently reading Covenant Marriage by Fred Lowery. My soon-to-be-married friend Bethany recommended it to me and lent me her copy. I'm enjoying it and getting so much out of it that I decided I needed to order my own copy so that I can highlight and underline "the good stuff" for myself, pass it on to Travis when I'm done with it, and keep it around to spark conversations, serve as a reference, and inform the marriage for which we are steadily preparing. (Related aside: we have our first pre-marital counseling session tomorrow night.)

So far I'm about half-way through the book. Lowery's thesis is this: American society views marriage as a contract. God designed marriage as a covenant. Understanding the difference, and deciding how you will view and approach your marriage, makes all the difference. Basic, but pretty profound at the same time.

I look forward to finishing the book and perhaps posting a more thorough review here later, but for now I wanted to post a nugget from Chapter 5 that particularly stood out to me as I read during the train ride from Wheaton to Chicago Monday evening to meet Travis for our consultation with the DJ. It's a quote from David Jeremiah that Lowery inserts in his discussion of "where it all started" in Genesis.

The man is restless while he misses the rib that was taken out of his side. The woman is restless until she gets under man's arm from where she was taken. It is humbling to the woman to know that she was created for the man, but it is to her glory to know that she alone can complete him. Likewise it is humbling to the man to know that he is incomplete without the woman, but it is to his glory to know that the woman was created for him.

Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation

Delivered October 3, 1863. Still rings true today.

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father Who dwelleth in the heavens.

More Food for Thought

Philip Yancey writes,

"Thinking about what to say to the leaders gathered [for a state prayer luncheon], I recalled a line from the contemporary German philosopher Jurgen Haberman: Democracy requires of its citizens qualities that it cannot provide. Politicians can conjure an exalted vision of a prosperous, healthly, free society, but no government can supply the qualities of honesty, compassion, and personal responsibility that must underlie that vision.

"For all its strengths, the United States shows some alarming signs of ill health. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the world's prisoners--more than Russia and China combined. We consume half of all the prescription drugs in the world, and yet by most standards our overall health ranks lower than most other developed countries'. In every major city, homeless people sleep in parks and under bridges. And our leading causes of death are self-inflicted: obesity, alcohol, sexually transmitted diseases, stress-related illnesses, drugs, violence, environmental cancers. Obviously, politicians have not solved all our problems.

"...Fortunately, U.S. politicians of both parties still recognize that faith plays a vital role in a healthly society. People of the Christian faith are charged to uphold a different kind of vision. That this is God's planet, not ours, and as we scar it beyond repair, God weeps. That a person's worth is determined not by appearance or income or ethnic background or even citizenship status, but rather is bestowed as a sacred, inviolable gift of God. That compassion and justice--our care for "the least of these my brothers," in Jesus' words, are not arbitrary values agreed upon by politicians and sociologists, but holy commands from the One who created us.

"We Christians don't always live out that vision. We find it difficult to maintain a commitment to both this world and the next, to this life and the next."

- From the article "On the Grand Canyon Bus," in the Sept 2008 issue of Christianity Today

Food for Thought

"[Redemption] speaks of a dynamic rescue mission. It is the promise that the story is not yet over, there is more to be written, and the final word has not yet been spoken. Redemption picks up the broken threads and weaves them into the storyline with the grace and mercy that only our Redeemer could offer. At that moment, the whisperings said that my deepest longing was not for perfection but for redemption. I long to see, experience and know the dangerous beauty of authentic life. Dangerous because it goes beyond the realm of my control and rarely follows my script. Beautiful because it reflects the heart of our Creator. Authentic because it is broken, imperfect, and unhidden. Whereas the lure of perfection hid and stifled life–-beginning with my own–-God's promise of redemption beckons and invites me into life. I can begin to breathe." - Amanda Bricker, in "Perfectly Redeemed," from the Sept/Oct 2008 issue of Women of the Harvest Magazine

Food for Thought

"To be transformed by Christ, to be in community—family, friends, strangers; the local church and the universal church, the body of Christ—is humbling, often mundane, sometimes bewildering, yet also glorious." - John Wilson

Food for Thought

"Unless we can touch and feel God in the commonplaces, He is going to be a very infrequent and unfamiliar guest. For life is made up of very ordinary experiences. Now and again a novelty leaps into the way, but the customary tenor is seldom broken. The ordinary stars shine upon us night after night; only occasionally does a comet come our way. Look at some of the daily commonplaces: health, sleep, bread and butter, work, friendship, a few flowers by the wayside, the laughter of children, the ministry of song, the bright day, the cool night. If I do not perceive God in these things, I have a very unhallowed and insignificant world." - John Henry Jowett

Food for Thought

"Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and
nothing is so gentle as true strength."

- Ralph Sockman

Food for Thought

"When I look back it reminds me to thank Him.
When I look ahead it reminds me to trust Him.
When I look around it reminds me to serve Him."

- Charles Jones

Food for Thought

"Choosing joy over bitterness doesn't mean slapping a silly grin on your face. And it's not about being bubbly, perky or giggly. Let's face it, sometimes happy people can be a bit annoying. Joy goes much deeper than any facial expression. And it's more intense and real than fleeting happiness. In his play Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare understands this solemn quality of joy, writing, 'Silence is the perfectest herald of joy.' How perfectestly said.

"Author and teacher Gary Thomas raises the question that perhaps God is more concerned with our holiness than He is with our happiness. That the real purpose of the Christian life is to make us holy — not happy. The first time I heard this concept I was actually a little relieved. Personally, I'd rather not measure my life by its moments of happiness, but by knowing that the Lord will never give up on trying to make me holy. For I know that He who has begun a good work in me will complete it."

- Kara Schwab, in "Choose Joy"

Food for Thought

"Sabbath reveals that redemption comes through Jesus Christ, not through our hard labor. The Holy Spirit is our source of power. We are God's beloved children, utterly dependent on God, receiving everything good from the hand of God. Because we are so easily addicted to taking ourselves too seriously, because we so easily fall into patterns of idolatry that we elevate our own significance, we need the sabbath, stopping productivity, so we can remember that God is God and we are not."

Lynne Baab, in "A Day Off from God Stuff?" in Leadership Journal, Spring 2007