Your Custom Text Here
“The Word has become flesh! It has become flesh never to be separated from that flesh again! Not even presently on the Throne. ... The Word having become flesh creates therewith the real possibility that this Child takes your place and that this Child of flesh and blood saves, reconciles, and glorifies you, made of flesh.”
— Abraham Kuyper
“I will underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire, which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then, Joy is never in our power, and pleasure often is.”
— C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
“… [I]t begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.”
— C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
“When your son asks you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the LORD our God has commanded you?’ then you shall say to your son, ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.’”
—Deuteronomy 6:20-21
“For the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”
—The Prophet Isaiah
“Perfect power does not absorb, exclude or overwhelm and dispossess other dependent powers and agents, but precisely the opposite: omnipotent power creates and perfects creaturely capacity and movement. … what God in his perfect wisdom, power and goodness causes is creatures who are themselves causes. The idea whose spell must be broken is that God is a supremely forceful agent in the same order of being as creatures, acting upon them and so depriving them of movement.”
—John Webster, “Love is Also a Lover of Life”
“For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”
—Romans 8:15-17
“Draw me from created good,
From self, the world, and sin;
To the fountain of Thy blood,
And make me pure within.
If Thou hast drawn a thousand times (Oh draw me Lord again)
Around me cast the Spirit’s bands (Oh draw me Lord again).”
—“If Thou Hast Drawn a Thousand Times,” John Rippon and Benjamin Beddome
“… the wonder that draws Moses aside, and opens his ear, is not the seeming impossibility of a fire that is not fiery, nor a bush that is not God being yet at once divine. The wonder is that the Lord God draws near and the creature does not die away.”
— Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Doctrine of God, 84
“Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance. It is laying hold of God’s willingness.”
—Julian of Norwich