commonplace chapters

'into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.’

[commonplace-chapters]

The lover reveals himself enough to awaken the love of the beloved, yet veils himself enough to draw the beloved into an even deeper exploration of that love. In the love affair with God… there is an alternation of consolation and desolation and it is in this way that the finite being is constantly drawn beyond self into the depth of the divine. 

- John Macquarrie

[commonplace-chapters]

"Prayer is the voice of faith trusting that God knows and cares." 

- Our Daily Bread

[commonplace-chapters]

"The best gift we can give our nation is still prayer."

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"There is no possibility of retreat into an intersubjective rationality that does not bring power, difference, and conflict along with it."

- McGuirk 2001

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"The normative challenge for collective action in multicultural contexts is then to find ways of intercultural dialogue through which to reflect on meanings and understandings, to explore the cage of our consciousness, in forms that offer respect to individual and cultural differences. Public policy-making may thus be reconceptualised as processes of intersubjective communication in the public sphere, through which dynamic mutual learning may take place."

- Healey 1999

[commonplace-chapters]

"Too many of us are better at expressing our opinions on social media than focusing on what the Spirit is saying to us." - Reid, desiringgod.org

[commonplace-chapters]

When did you last hear anyone praying for revival, praying that God might open the windows of heaven and pour out his Spirit? When did you last pray for that yourself? I suggest seriously that we are neglecting this almost entirely. We are guilty of forgetting the authority of the Holy Spirit. ... When God sends revival he can do more in a single day than in fifty years of all our organization. That is the verdict of sheer history which emerges clearly from the long story of the Church. - Martin Lloyd-Jones

[commonplace-chapters]

Oh! men and brethren, what would this heart feel if I could but believe that there were some among you who would go home and pray for a revival: men whose faith is large enough, and their love fiery enough to lead them from this moment to exercise unceasing intercessions that God would appear among us and do wondrous things here, as in the times of former generations. - Charles Spurgeon

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"When a preacher fixates on himself, his preaching becomes a personal performance rather than proclamation of God's Word. And the preacher can never let himself become the spectacle. He cannot be the show. He gets out of the way by being wrapped up in and carried away in the God he proclaims. I think this is what God the Holy Spirit is doing when he uses the preacher's personality and expressiveness to serve the Word of God."

- Erik Raymond, TGC

[commonplace-chapters]

We can welcome sleep for what it is. We can choose to bow out of the action, to know that the world will be fine without us for a while. We can welcome that segment of the day when we make ourselves most vulnerable, when we exit consciousness and are forced to, in the right sense, “let go, and let God.” Whether we actually say it or not, going to bed prays, at least in practice: “Now I lay me down to sleep. Lord, I pray my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, Lord, I pray my soul to take.”

- Jonathan Parnell 

[commonplace-chapters]

'The Nativity... a glorious picture of scandalous humility and terrifying love beating in a little baby's heart' - Fitzpatrick and Thompson

[commonplace-chapters]

Jesus will one day return and reverse the fallenness of this world. The effects of sin will be wiped from our hearts along with the tears from our eyes. But that day has not yet come. We still live with the consequences of sin. There is no utopia yet, no unspoiled promised land—not even in the church. - John Greco

[commonplace-chapters]

'Self-interest does not exactly require encouragement for it to express itself.' - Fleishman 1981

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"Only when we love and trust God supremely that we have the resources to love our neighbors as ourselves (Luke 10:27). It is our profound love for and trust in the Lord Jesus that will refresh our brothers and sisters most. Only the water Jesus has quenches the thirst of the human soul (John 4:13–14), and we can only give it to others when we are drinking it ourselves." - Jon Bloom

[commonplace-chapters]

“Our lives on earth aren’t just placeholders until we go to heaven. We are to create, cultivate, and redeem while we’re here… We are created to infect and infiltrate culture, restoring and reclaiming what is God’s.” - Jefferson Bethke, ‘Jesus > Religion’

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"Wherever you are – be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God."

- Jim Elliot

[commonplace-chapters]

All thinking - all learning, all education, all schooling, formal or informal, simple or sophisticated - exists for the love of God and the love of man. We take the truth of 1 Corinthians 8:1-3 and apply it to the knowledge of God through his other “book,” the created world of nature and human life.

The upshot is that the task of all Christian scholarship - not just biblical studies - is to study reality as a manifestation of God’s glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it, and to make it serve the good of man. It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God. If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.

- John Piper, 'Think'