![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My mom bought this interesting book the other day. It's all about grace and is really just phenominal. I wanted to share a few excerpts from it.
"We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt. This and so much more is sheer gift; it is not reward for our faithfullness, our generous disposition, or our heroic life of prayer. Even our fidelity is a gift. 'If we but turn to God,' said St. Augustine, 'that itself is a gift from God.' My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it."
"If a random sample of one thousand American Christians were taken today, the majority would define faith as belief in the existence of God. In earlier times it did not take faith to believe that God existed--almost everybody took that for granted. Rather, faith had to do with one's relationship to God--whether one trusted in God. The difference between faith as 'belief in something that may or may not exist' and faith as 'trusting in God' is enormous. The first is a matter of the head, the second a matter of the heart. The first can leaveus unchanged, the second intrinsically brings change."
"We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.
In his famous Christmas sermon in 1522, Martin Luther cried out: 'O that God should desire that my interpretation and that of all teachers should disappear, and each Christian should come straight to the Scripture alone and to the pure word of God! You see from this babbling of mine the immeasurable difference between the word of God and all human words, and how no man can adequately reach and explain a single word of God with all his words. It is an eternal word and must be understood and contemplated with a quiet mind. No one else can understand except a mind that contemplates in silence. For anyone who could achieve this without commentary or interpretation, my commentaries and those of everyone else could not only be of no usem but merely a hindrance. Go to the Bible itself, dear Christians, and let my expostitions and those of all scholars be no more than a tool with which to build aright, so that we can understand, taste and abide in the simple and pure word of God; for God dwells alone in Zion.'"
I especially like those last few lines.
"We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt. This and so much more is sheer gift; it is not reward for our faithfullness, our generous disposition, or our heroic life of prayer. Even our fidelity is a gift. 'If we but turn to God,' said St. Augustine, 'that itself is a gift from God.' My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it."
"If a random sample of one thousand American Christians were taken today, the majority would define faith as belief in the existence of God. In earlier times it did not take faith to believe that God existed--almost everybody took that for granted. Rather, faith had to do with one's relationship to God--whether one trusted in God. The difference between faith as 'belief in something that may or may not exist' and faith as 'trusting in God' is enormous. The first is a matter of the head, the second a matter of the heart. The first can leaveus unchanged, the second intrinsically brings change."
"We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.
In his famous Christmas sermon in 1522, Martin Luther cried out: 'O that God should desire that my interpretation and that of all teachers should disappear, and each Christian should come straight to the Scripture alone and to the pure word of God! You see from this babbling of mine the immeasurable difference between the word of God and all human words, and how no man can adequately reach and explain a single word of God with all his words. It is an eternal word and must be understood and contemplated with a quiet mind. No one else can understand except a mind that contemplates in silence. For anyone who could achieve this without commentary or interpretation, my commentaries and those of everyone else could not only be of no usem but merely a hindrance. Go to the Bible itself, dear Christians, and let my expostitions and those of all scholars be no more than a tool with which to build aright, so that we can understand, taste and abide in the simple and pure word of God; for God dwells alone in Zion.'"
I especially like those last few lines.
