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“O Lord and Master of my life!
Take from me the spirit of sloth, faint-heartedness, lust of power and idle talk.
But give me rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to my servant.
Yea, O Lord and King!
Grant me to see my own errors and not to judge my brother; for thou art blessed unto ages of ages.
Amen.”
—
A common fourth-century prayer of Lent from St. Ephrem the Syrian
“We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken.” — Timothy Keller
“Hope alone is to be called ‘realistic’, because it alone takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught.” — Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope
“In the Christian understanding, Jesus does not tell us how to live so we can merit salvation. Rather, he comes to forgive and save us through his life and death in our place. God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.” — Tim Keller, The Reason for God
“You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed” —
John Bunyan
#simplebutprofound
joy upon joy, grace upon grace
“Christ became flesh, a servant, without form or comeliness, the most despised of human beings; he descended to the nethermost parts of the earth and became obedient even to death on the cross. So also the word [the Bible], the revelation of God, entered the world of creatureliness, the life and history of humanity, in all the human forms of dream and vision, of investigation and reflection, right down into that which is humanly weak and despised and ignoble… . All this took place in order that the excellency of the power … of Scripture may be God’s and not ours.” — Herman Bavinck (1854–1921)