Great Quotes — Five

I’m reading so many good books this summer.  I’d like to share some of the best quotes with you today.

It was there [in Lima, Peru], that I discovered for the first time that those who are marginalized by our society carry within them a great treasure for the church.      – Henri Nouwen, ¡Gracias! , pg. ix 

To believe on the Son of God is to receive the Lord Christ as the Son, the Son given to us to fulfill in us the purposes of the Father’s love.    – John Owen, Communion With God, pg. 5

Be fully assured in your hearts that the Father loves you.  Have fellowship with the Father in his love.  Have no fears or doubts about his love for you.  The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unknidness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you.  – John Owen, Communion With God, pg. 13

Jesus calls to Peter , and to you and me, to look beyond all that…to a new reality where walking on the water is also real, and so is feeding thousands of people with a few crumbs, and rising from the dead.  The world has a million confusing faces:  our fragile health, hunger, our fallen situation, aching loneliness.  The world Jesus calls us into has one focus:  him!  – Michael Card, Joy in the Journey, 6/29

The peace of God, the comfortable sense of being reconciled to God, and having a part in his favor, and the hope of the heavenly blessedness, are a greater good than can be fully expressed.  This peace will keep our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus; it will keep us from sinning under troubles, and from sinking under them; keep us calm and with inward satisfaction.  – Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary, Philippians 4:6-7

Every Christian story is a freedom story.  Each tells how a person has been set free from the confines of small ideas, from the chains of what other people think, from the emotional cages of guilt and regret, from the prisons of the self, sin-separated from God.  We are free to change.  – Eugene H. Peterson, Traveling Light, pg. 45

Freedom comes from trusting, not from manipulating, from leaving matters to God rather than trying to be in control…No one understood this better than Paul.  He knew that we are not whole persons until we are free, and that we are not free until we trust.  He faced the reality that religion repeatedly falls prey to the insatiable will of human beings to do and control, and thus makes a mockery of that freedom.  And he proclaimed, with rare power and effectiveness, that God in Christ has set us free from that compulsion so that we can be free in that original created sense:  free to live in a praising, trusting relationship with God, free to live in a loving, serving relationship with other persons.  He also understood that there are people all around us who will appeal to our need and appetite for freedom to get something from us that they want for themselves — control.  – Eugene H. Peterson, Traveling Light, excerpt, pg. 130-133

~ by Juli Jarvis on July 8, 2009.