Quote of the Day #2

“Yes, Anne Rice has renounced Christianity. Maybe it’s a permanent move away from the gospel, showing that she never quite made it all the way into communion with Christ. If so, let’s represent Christ and continue to point her to the Jesus she finds in some way mystifying. It could be that Anne is a Christian who is having a wave of doubt and rejection. So did the Apostle Peter, who also renounced Christianity and, as a matter of fact, cursed Jesus personally in the process. But when Jesus finds Peter in Galilee (right back on the fishing boats where he’d been called from in the first place!), he never even mentions the incident at the fireside.

“A lot of us (and I include myself in this) are a lot like James and John in the Christ-rejecting village. We want to call down fire from heaven on the opponents of Christianity (Lk. 9:51-54). That seems so prophetic and Christian and it also happens to confirm us to be right. Jesus’ response to this zeal ought to stop us in our tracks: ‘Jesus turned and rebuked them. And they went on to another village’(Lk. 9:56).

“Anne Rice hasn’t rejected you. Anne Rice hasn’t betrayed you. Would you pray for her, and for the other smoldering wicks and about-to-bolt potential prodigals in your church (and maybe in your home)? It could be Anne has been deeply hurt by what she has seen in Christianity. Or it could be that, like Jesus’ disciples, the closer she’s drawing to Christ, the more she is made uncomfortable by it. Let’s love her.”

Quote of the Day

“Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.”

****

“And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, ’If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?’”

Quotes of the Day

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For tenyears, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

****

“As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

The Nowism of the Gospel

Paul Tripp on how grace is needed not just for the after-life, but for the here-and-now-life:

1. Grace will decimate what you think of you, while it gives you a security of identity you’ve never had. 
   
   
2. Grace will expose your deepest sins of heart, while it covers every failure with the blood of Jesus. 
   
   
3. Grace will make you face how weak you are, while it blesses you with power beyond your ability to calculate.
   
   
4. Grace will take control out of your hands, while it blesses you with the care of One who plan is unshakable and perfect in every way. 

Click here for explanations of all the points.

Orchestra Fail

Quote of the Day

“So I sometimes talk to my church about the ‘ministry of being normal’.  As believers, we are necessarilly going to have a lot of distance between us and those who don’t follow Christ.  We live differently, love differently, hope differntely.  We’re citizens of a different country.

“But it might be helpful if we limit the distance between us and the world in a lot of other ways.  We don’t have to flaunt our lack of a TV and be weird and preachy about grinding your own grain.  That only serves to put unnecessary distance between us and the people we’re trying to reach.  Instead, we should try to engage the world around us, know what our neighbors care about, and try to inhabit the same universe they do. 

“If they are going to persecute us, let us at least be for things that really have something to do with being a Christian.”

Quote of the Day

“Let me straighten these people out. And you can put it in print. My guy [Rev. Euliss ‘Sonny’ Dewey, the title character] killed a guy out of anger, right? But he wasn’t one half as bad as King David in the Psalms, who sent a man off to be killed so he could be with his wife. Every time I read the Psalms I think of that. But on the other hand, I heard that Billy Graham liked the movie, and many, many preachers did. Rev. James Robison of Fort Worth said I could use anything from any of his services to put in the film. So I’m not mocking.

“If Hollywood had done this, they would have mocked these people. No, I did not mock these people. I didn’t patronize these people. I’ve been in many, many churches, Pentecostal churches. I could have made these people look bad if I wanted to. So you can tell these people I did not mock these people or condescend at all. Had I done it in a Hollywood movie, we would have patronized these people. That’s why I had to do the movie myself.”