He that will not believe in Christ must see to it how he can get along without him. As for you and me, we cannot. We need someone who will lift and hold us up when we are alive and who will lay his hand beneath our heads when we must die, and this he can do abundantly according to what is written about him, and we know of nobody whom we’d rather have do it.
– Matthias Claudius
Do you see how the devil is defeated by the very weapons of his prior victory? The devil had vanquished Adam by means of a tree. Christ vanquished the devil by means of the tree of the Cross. The tree sent Adam to hell. The tree of the Cross brought him back from there. The tree revealed Adam in his weakness, laying prostrate, naked and low. The tree of the Cross manifested to all the world the victorious Christ, naked, and nailed on high. Adam’s death sentence passed on to all who came after him. Christ’s death gave life to all his children.
–John Chrysostom,
4th century bishop
God is not concerned about you doing his will because he wants to be obeyed. He is concerned about you—about making you blessed with his blessedness. He is not thinking about himself, but about you.
–George MacDonald
(paraphrased)
Image: Nelleke Pieters
[T]here is nothing inherently wrong with the physical world and bodily life. Nothing in the world God created caused our alienation and provoked the groan of all creation. None of the groan we feel is from our essential existence in the world, but rather from our broken existence in the world.
The world is good. The world has been broken,
but full freedom is coming.
This should free us to rejoice in the present. The Spirit’s nearness does not causes us to despise the world but join in God’s profound love of it (cf. John 3.16).
… Jurgen Moltmann has said, “God’s blessing enhances vitality and does not quench the joy of living. The nearness of God makes this mortal life worth loving, not something to be despised.”
In the Spirit of the Resurrection we participate now in the renewal of life and rejoice in the vitality and passion for life He gives.
–Richard Liantonio
The triune God
is the love behind all love,
the life behind all life,
the music behind all music,
the beauty behind all beauty.
–Mike Reeves
When we really look at what the Bible says and grasp the implications of the Gospel according to Jesus then we soon discover that this Good News is better than we could have ever dared to hope. It is a story of recovering something that was once thought to be totally lost, redeeming something that was once thought to be absolutely hopeless.
It is a story of God bringing
something wonderfully good
out of something terribly evil.
It is a story of God bringing Life and Light out of so much death and darkness. It is a story of love, and the incredible lengths to which that Love will go to secure the object of its affection.
–Henri Nouwen
(1932 – 1996)
Perichoresis 