kingdom.

"the ascetics of qumran and the pharisees thought that the kingdom would come because they were not as other men. Jesus taught that it would not come until they recognised that they WERE as other men." 

-a.n. wilson.

judge not.

"Both pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged."

-abraham lincoln.

today. (every day).

He must become greater. 
i must become less.

mysteries, yes.

"let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

let me keep company always with those who say
'look!' and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads."

-mary oliver.

we ourselves.

"as a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. and we ourselves are, too."

-fyodor dostoyevsky.

yet they remained.

"the history of abraham's people is, of course, one of unfaithfulness as well as faithfulness, yet they remained faithful enough so that they might be truthful about their unfaithfulness."

-hauerwas.

----

sometimes i feel the only good and valuable thing i have to offer is my honesty, my vulnerability, my truth.

and perhaps that is enough.

perhaps.

tension.

sometimes the worst thing for faith is our ideals.

the beauty of following Jesus does not grow from His removal of life's messiness;

the weight and the power and the glory of following Jesus manifests in the fact that amongst all of life's chaos and failure and struggle and tension,

the power of the resurrection, the living Word, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the gentle One, Victor and Shepherd and Defender, King of all kings,

MESSIAH,

resides with us in the midst of it,

and breathes, speaks, creates,
resurrects

new life.

(amen).

the one and only vital thing.

"our community with one another consists solely in what Jesus Messiah has done to both of us. this is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. i have community with others and i shall continue to have it only through Jesus Messiah. the more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Messiah and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. we have one another only through Jesus, but through Jesus we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity."

-dietrich bonhoeffer.

new dimensions.

"a purely ethical monotheism in which God, the guardian of moral order, keeps the world subject to the law, would restrict the scope of God's knowledge and concern to what is of ethical signifigance. God's relation to man would, in general, run along the lines of a universal principle. the divine pathos alone is able to break through this rigidity and create new dimensions for the unique, the specific, and the particular.

it is not law and order itself, but the living God who created the universe and established its law and order, that stands supreme in Biblical thought.

before the Torah, the covenant was.

prophecy is a reminder that what obtains between God and man is not a contract but a covenant. anterior to the covenant is love, the love of the fathers, and what obtains between God and israel must be understood, not as legal, but as a personal relationship, as participation, involvement, tension. God's life interacts with the life of the people. to live in the covenant is to partake of the fellowship of God and His people. Biblical religion is not what man does with his solitariness, but rather what man does with God's concern for all men.

the gulf that separates man from God is transcended by His pathos."

-abraham joshua heschel, excerpts.

burden.

as prophets,

we are overwhelmed by our sympathy for God,
we are burdened by our sympathy for man.

as prophets,

we stand before the people and plead for God,
we stand before God and plead for the people.

as prophets,

we are wearied by the heaviness of sin,
we are carried by the force of this mighty Love.

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

-c.s. lewis.

discoveries.

"Beloved, you can bear me witness that, when you have had sad discoveries of your own heinous guilt, you have been deeply humbled. Sometimes, your good works have been a great evil to you, because you have prided yourself upon them, and so brought yourself to the edge of the precipice of presumption. But manifestations of your guilt, brought home to your conscience by God’s Spirit, have been of essential service to you, by teaching you not to be high-minded, but rather to fear, and to remember that your standing in grace is not of yourself, and: therefore you must not boast. That is another good reason, if there were no other, why we may bless God for showing us our own iniquity."

-c.h. spurgeon.

the divine name.

"people treat it as if that incomprehensible and most high Being, who is even beyond the reach of thought, were only their equal. Otherwise they would not say, 'the Lord God, the dear God, the good God.' This expression becomes to them, who have it daily in their mouths, a mere phrase, a barren name, to which no thought whatever is attached. If they were impressed by His greatness they would be dumb, and through veneration unwilling to name Him."

-goethe.

God-sufficient.

To God alone nothing is necessary. He did not bring His worlds into being to meet some unfulfilled need in Himself. The word necessary is wholly foreign to God.

Since He is the Being supreme over all, it follows that God cannot be elevated. Nothing is above Him, nothing beyond Him. Any motion in His direction is elevation for the creature; away from Him, descent. As no one can promote Him, so no one can degrade Him. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections; to doubt Him takes nothing away.

The picture of a nervous, ingratiating God fawning over men to win their favor is not a pleasant one; yet if we look at the popular conception of God that is precisely what we see. Twentieth-century Christianity has put God on charity. So lofty is our opinion of ourselves that we find it quite easy, not to say enjoyable, to believe that we are necessary to God.

We commonly represent Him as a busy, eager, somewhat frustrated Father hurrying about seeking help to carry out His benevolent plan to bring peace and salvation to the world, but, as said the Lady Julian, 'I saw truly that God does all things, be they ever so little.'

I fear that thousands of younger persons enter Christian service from no higher motive than to help deliver God from the embarrassing situation His love has gotten Him into and His limited abilities seem unable to get Him out of.

Again, God needs no defenders. He is the eternal undefended.

To be right, we must think worthily of God.

That God exists for Himself and man for the glory of God is the emphatic teaching of the Bible. The high honor of God is first in heaven as it must yet be in earth.

Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its trust not in the living God but in dying men. The unbeliever denies the self-sufficiency of God and usurps attributes that are not his. This dual sin dishonors God and ultimately destroys the soul of the man.

In His love and pity God came to us as Christ. In recent times, this has come to mean something different from, and less than, what it meant to the early church. The Man Jesus as He appeared in the flesh has been equated with the Godhead and all His human weaknesses and limitations attributed to the Deity. The truth is that the Man who walked among us was a demonstration, not of unveiled deity but of perfect humanity. The awful majesty of God was mercifully sheathed in the soft envelope of human nature to protect mankind.

Christians today appear to know Christ only after the flesh. They try to achieve communion with Him by divesting Him of His burning holiness and unapproachable majesty, the very attributes He veiled while on earth but assumed in fullness of glory upon His ascension to the Father's right hand.

This truth, while a needed rebuke to human self-confidence, will when viewed in its Biblical perspective lift from our minds the exhausting load of mortality and encourage us to take the easy yoke of Christ and spend ourselves in Spirit-inspired toil for the honor of God and the good of mankind.

For the blessed news is that the God who needs no one has in sovereign condescension stooped to work by and in and through His obedient children."

-aw tozer excerpts, the knowledge of the holy.

preoccupied...

"He brings everything to pass precisely at its time. He also preoccupies man with the attempt to discover the times of future events, but without ever guessing, from first to last, all the things that God brings to pass." -tanakh.

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." -NIV

-ecclesiastes 3:11.

-----

(big. giant. exasperated. sigh).

LORD. teach me how to wait well.

You've got this. You've got this. You've got this.

the unworded.

"Vain would be any attempt to reconstruct the hidden circumstances under which a word of God alarmed a prophet's soul. Who could uncover the divine data or piece together the strange perceptions of a Moses? The prophet did not leave information behind. All we have is the prophet's certainty, endless awe and appreciation. All we have is a Book, and all we can do is to try to sense the unworded across its words.

Revelation is a mystery for which reason has no concepts..."

-abraham joshua heschel.

so that we might be able.

"Here is the thing about God. He is so big and so perfect that we really can't understand Him. We can't possess Him, or apprehend Him. Moses learned this when he climbed up Mount Sinai and saw that the radiance of God's face would burn him up should he gaze upon it directly. But God so wants to be in relationship with us that He makes himself small, smaller than He really is, smaller and more humble than his infinite, perfect self, so that we might be able to get to Him, a little bit."

-lauren winner.

and more so.

"For a humble person, even the most obstinate sinner deserves respect, for we do not know the essential truth about someone else. Therefore I am unable to put myself in his or her place. Truth, in its totality, is known to God alone. And He desires to be humble in going down to the level of His creatures - and joining his people in exile. From this we learn that though it is not included in the list of the biblical commandments, humility is implicit in them, for it is written "ve'halakhta bi'drakhave" or "imitatio dei": man must follow in God's ways. Just as He is humble, we must be. And more so."

-elie wiesel.

okay.

I wish we were taught more often in this life that it's okay not to be okay sometimes.

contrite spirit.

Indeed You desire truth about that which is hidden; teach me wisdom about secret things. True sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit; God, You will not despise a contrite and crushed heart.

-psalm 51.

-----

Jesus, please give me enough reverence and discernment in this spirit of mine to understand how to have a truly repentant heart.

I bless you for your patience and your graciousness thus far.

thank you for taking me back, always, in love.