Thoughts to Ponder: April 2008
“The way of Jesus Christ, and therefore the way of all Christian thinking, leads not from the world to God but from God to the world. This means that the essence of the Gospel does not lie in the solution of human problems, and that the solution of human problems cannot be the essential task of the Church.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (quoted at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/aprilweb-only/114-32.0.html?start=2)
“When the Communists took over Russia in 1917, Lenin did not ban the Church, but forbade it to do any good works. Central elements of Christian ministry such as feeding the hungry, teaching and caring for the sick and orphaned were taboo for the Church. Seventy years later, the Church was completely irrelevant. Today, without Lenin, many churches still do exactly that, concentrating only on preaching, with identical results. Take service out of the church, and it becomes irrelevant and weak.”
Eric Swanson
“There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself.”
C. S. Lewis
“Christians are to be the good news before they share the Good News.”
Joe Alrich
“Why do folks allow their daughters to dress like an advertisement for something they are not selling? Why are they bringing them up to think that their worth as a human being rests in being someone else’s object instead of someone’s beloved person?”
Mary Walsh (Touchstone, Jul/Aug 2006)
“In these postChristian times, a major pastoral task is to explain Christianity to people who really have no idea what it means.”
Philip Graham Ryken (quoted in Preaching, Sep/Oct 2003, Vol 19, No 2, page 29)
“The strongest pressures we face to avoid Scripture’s teachings are when those teachings run contrary to some popular and cherished cultural viewpoint. One only need consider the Bible’s teaching on such ‘controversial’ issues as salvation that is found exclusively through faith in Christ, to realize that our temptation to compromise comes most forcefully where our culture finds biblical teaching repulsive.”
Bruce A. Ware (quoted in Moody, Mar/Apr 2003, page 37)
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