Category Archives: Quotes

Informed isn’t Formed

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I’ve been blessed recently by Eugene Peterson’s words.

In reflecting on how Scripture works to shape our lives, he puts this out there…

“It is possible to conceive of ourselves too narrowly, for there is far more to us than our genes and hormones, our emotions and aspirations, our jobs and ideals.  There is God.  Most, if not all, of what and who were are has to do with God.  If we try to understand and form ourselves by ourselves we leave most out most of ourselves.”

“And so the Christian community has always insisted that Holy Scripture that reveals God’s ways to us is necessary and basic to our formation as human beings.  In our reading of this book we come to realize that what we need is not primarily informational, telling us things about God and ourselves, but formational, shaping us into our true being.

It is the very nature of language to form rather than to inform.  When language is personal, with it is at its best, it reveals; and revelation is always formative—we don’t know more, we become more.

I hope this finds you experiencing revelation–the Divine speaking into your life through His Word–and being shaped into the you dreamed of long ago.  If you feel you could use more of that, let me suggest the obvious: You could use less of something else.  Free up time and space and attention, and devote it to positioning yourself before the Revealer.

You’ll be formed in the process.

Re-Thinking Prayer

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A hundred and some pages into Yancey’s book, here are a few quotes worth sharing…

Walter Wink:

“Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous.  It is more like haggling in an outdoor bazaar than the polite monologues of the church.”

Soren Kierkegaard:

“The true relation in prayer is not when God hears what we prayed for, but when the person praying continues to pray until he is the one who hears, who hears what God wills.”

Eugene Peterson:

“Be slow to pray.  Praying puts us at risk of getting involved with God’s conditions….  Praying most often doesn’t get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests.  And when we realize what is going on, it is often too late to go back.”

Karl Barth:

“To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“A day without morning and evening prayers and personal intercessions is actually a day without meaning or importance.”

Why Worship?

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Revelation 4-5 describe a vision of God’s throne around which are crowded a host of worshipers.  In speaking of this passage and its image of worship, Eugene Peterson puts these thoughts out there…

“In worship God gathers his people to himself as center.  Worship is a meeting at the center so that our live are centered in God and not lived eccentrically.  We worship so that we live in response to and from this center, the living God.  Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every siren.  Without worship we live manipulated and manipulating lives.  We move in either frightened panic or deluded lethargy as we are, in turn, alarmed by spectres and soothed by placebos.  If there is no center, there is no circumference.  People who do not worship are swept into a vast restlessness, epidemic in the world, with no steady direction and no sustaining purpose.” (taken from “Reverse Thunder”, p. 60)

Worship as more than ritual, music, or sermon… Eugene, surely you jest!  No, surely you’re dead on!  And I need some of that in my life pretty much every day I wake up.

On the other days, I can get by without it.

God and Man

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Been meaning to post several things all weekend but it never happened so this will have to suffice for now.

Blaise Pascal…

“If man is not made for God, why is he only happy in God?
If man is made for God, why is he so opposed to God?”

I have no idea, Blaise.

But I’ve felt both of those feelings recently. In fact, life as I know it is pretty much a circle of cycling through those two places.

And all I’ve got at the moment is this…

Tonight I lay me down to sleep,
With confidence the Lord can keep,
All that is placed within His hands,
One small life given to His plans,
O Master, hold me close.

Tradition

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In my cynical moments, I like posters like that one.  But not all my moments are cynical, gratefully.

Much of my inner “tradition discussion” has to do with faith and how it plays out in my life or in the life of my faith community.  I struggle from day to day, bouncing from stances that would seem anti-traditional to others that would seem ultra-traditional.  Call me bi-polar if you wish, but that’s where I am.

A reading today brought some valuable thoughts on the subject, from J.I. Packer…

“Nobody can claim to be detached from traditions.  In fact, one sure way to be swallowed up by traditionalism is to think that one is immune to it…. The questions, then, is not whether we have traditions, but whether our traditions conflict with the only absolute standard in these matters: Holy Scripture.”

He continues…

“All Christians are at once beneficiaries and victims of tradition–beneficiaries, who receive nurturing truth and wisdom from God’s faithfulness in past generations; victims, who now take for granted things that need to be questioned, thus treating as divine absolutes patterns of belief and behavior that should be seen as human, provisional, and relative.  We are all beneficiaries of good, wise, and sound tradition and victims of poor, unwise, and unsound traditions.”

And now to know the difference.

And now to act upon that knowledge wisely.