Falling Off Cliffs

Whoever does not want to know the will of God is mentally walking a path next to a cliff, and easily falls with any wind. If he is praised, he is proud. If he is rebuked he is angry. If he eats pleasant food, he is drawn into bodily passions. When he suffers he weeps. When he knows something, he wants to show that he knows. When he doesn’t understand, he pretends to understand. When he is rich he puts on airs. When he is poor, he is a hypocrite. When he is full, he is bold. When he fasts he is vainglorious. When he is denounced he loves to argue, while he looks on those who forgive him as fools.

– Saint Mark the Ascetic

Listening to God

Our spiritual hearing will improve only as we obey the truth we hear. Disobedience to the truth deafens. More than deafening us, disobedience renders us dumb. The word absurd comes from the Latin surd, which means deaf. Obedient comes from the Latin audire, which means listening. In Scripture, to hear is indeed to obey…

The absurdly disobedient lives rampant in our society result from spiritual deafness. Henri Nouwen comments, “A spiritual discipline is necessary in order to move slowly from an absurd to an obedient life, from a life filled with noisy worries to a life in which there is some free inner space where we can listen to our God and follow his guidance.”

–Tim Dearborn
Taste & See

Making Up Our Minds

The moment we make up our minds that
we are going on with this determination to exalt
God overall, we step out of the world’s parade…
We shall acquire a new viewpoint; a new and different
psychology will be formed within us; a new power
will begin to surprise us by its upsurgings
and its outgoings.

– A. W. Tozer
The Pursuit of God

Choose Life

 Indeed we can rest content in
the full assurance that nothing harms
or destroys us but the wrong use of that
liberty of choice which God has entrusted to us.
Choose any life but the life of God
and you choose death.

– William Law,
(1686-1761)

Stronger Cords

Grace binds you with
far stronger cords than
the cords of duty or obligation
can bind you.

–E. Stanley Jones

Becoming What We Are

When Paul . . . says that “if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation” he is teaching that God has done for us everything that needs to be done; when Peter says that ‘his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness’, there is the same note of completeness . . . Both Paul and Peter speak of the work of God in the past tense: it is our foundation inheritance as believers. The remainder of our earthly life is an outworking of what God has already ‘in-worked’. We are called to become what we are.

This is the mighty imperative of Christian ethics. Every other ethical system calls us to the costly effort of becoming what we are not. But in the full salvation already bequeathed to us in Christ, the new nature is already ours, waiting for expression, poised for growth, until its potential is triggered by our obedience to the Word of God.

–Alec Motyer,
The Message of Philippians

Our True Home and Happiness

When you have learned
that your only home
is God’s presence,
and your only happiness
is in doing God’s will,
there is nothing more
that I can teach you.

–Edward Dennet
(1831-1914)

The freedom of obedience

Obedience. The most thrilling word in the world; a very thunderclap of a word. Why do these fools fancy that the soul is only free when it disagrees with the common command? Even the mobs who rise to burn and destroy owe all their grandeur and terror, and a sort of authority, not to their anger, but to their agreement. Why should mere disagreement make us feel free?

—G. K. Chesterton
“The Surprise”

To have faith in Christ

[To have faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

―C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity

Love is the foundation

Love is the foundation of all obedience. Without it, morality degenerates into mere casuistry. Love is the foundation of all knowledge. Without it religion degenerates into a chattering about Moses and doctrines and theories; a thing that will neither kill nor make alive, that never gave life to a single soul or blessing to a single heart, and never put strength into any hand in the conflict and strife of daily life.

–Alexander MacLaren
(1826 – 1910)

Making a choice

We all have to choose
between two ways of being crazy:
the foolishness of the gospel
or the non-sense of values
of the world.

–Jean Vanier

Tenacity

No half-heartedness
and no worldly fear
must turn us aside
from following
the light
unflinchingly.

–J. R. R. Tolkien

Getting a real personality

The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because he made us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

–C. S. Lewis 
Mere Christianity

Heaven already inside

If you have really handed yourself over to Him it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

–C. S. Lewis
Christian Behavior