Uncommon Courage

I picked up a Readers Digest Books published in 1941 that for some reason was in a stack near my couch.  As I paged through it I came across a title of a condensation "Reaching for the Stars" by Nora Waln (p.157) written in 1939 about her travels through Germany.  The following passage kind of blew me away and made me wonder what ever happened to this kind of character.  Sadly, it seems in very short supply today.

We drove to Kessel, where we went to find a stranger, of whom we had been asked to bring news to England. She was at her home, with her five children. Her husband, a pastor, was in a concentration camp. She was grateful for the invitation for some of her children to come to England, but thought Germans ought to stay in the Fatherland. The "cause" would be lost in Germany if those with eyes that saw the decline of morals, hearts that felt it, and tongues that dared rebuke it, went into exile.

"Father could come out at any time," a six year old told me. "God gives him courage to stay in."

"To come out," explained the daughter of eleven, "he has to sign a promise to support everything the Nazis do. He has to take the oath of blind obedience to Adolf Hitler. Our father is a Christian. A Christian cannot approve or be quiet in the face of the things the Nazis do."

"Christianity is a religion of love," offered the tiniest solemnly. "Love and sorrow for all whom the Nazis hurt; and love and sorrow for the Nazis, too."

The suffering of Christ

My Madeleine L'Engle devotional book this morning:  George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble -- times when I have seen people tempted to deny God -- when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his."

Mockingbird article: Axl Rose and Michael Jackson attend a Christian music festival -

In one of the most beautiful sections of the book, Sullivan recalls his own “Jesus phase.” But, as he writes, “a phase is supposed to end—or at least give way to other phases—not simply expand into a long preoccupation.” That is, he doesn’t harbor the usual emotional baggage or resentment. “It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It’s that I love Jesus Christ…. [Christ's] breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation.” Amen!

The Universe is God's

A while ago when I was at Berea College in Kentucky I was asked the usual earnest questions about creationism vs. evolution.

I laughed and said that I really couldn't get very excited about it. The only question worth asking is whether or not the universe is God's. If the answer is YES! then why get so excited about how? The important thing is that we are God's, created in love. And what about those seven days? In whose time are they? Eastern Standard Time? My daughter in San Francisco lives in a time zone three hours earlier than mine. In Australia, what time is it? Did God create in human time? Solar time? Galactic time? What about God's time? What matter if the first day took a few billennia of our time, and the second day a few billennia more?

I told the student at Berea that some form of evolution seems consistent with our present knowledge, and that I didn't think that God put the fossil skeletons of fish on the mountains of Nepal to test our faith, as some creationists teach.  But if I should find out tomorrow that God's method of creation was something quite different from either creationism or evolution, that would in no way shake my faith, because that is not where my faith is centered.

Madeleine L'Engle; Glimpses of Grace; October 24; pp. 282-283

Happiness and Service

"The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve." -- Albert Schweitzer

John Stott sums it up

For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. 

--- (John Stott)

 From Pr. Phil Ressler's Facebook post today

Truth - John Hus

I have chosen the way of truth;
   I have set my heart on your laws. -- Psalm 119:30

Seek the truth
Listen to the truth
Teach the truth
Love the truth
Abide by the truth
And defend the truth
Unto death.

John Hus, selected

Promises to Keep; Sept. 23; p. 305

He got it right!

The second order of business comes from the pen of Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and frontline fighter of the culture wars. He quotes from a letter sent to Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax.
“I am a stay-at-home mother of four who has tried to raise my family under the same strong Christian values that I grew up with,” the woman writes. “Therefore I was shocked when my oldest daughter, ‘Emily,’ suddenly announced she had ‘given up believing in God’ and decided to ‘come out’ as an atheist.”
Did you catch it? I thought for sure Al would miss this one. I thought he would put up a fight for the “strong Christian values” that should permeate every home in America. But I was wrong. Al got it. He says,
Christian values are the problem. Hell will be filled with people who were avidly committed to Christian values. Christian values cannot save anyone and never will. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a Christian value, and a comfortability with Christian values can blind sinners to their need for the gospel.
Wow. That needs to be preached from every Baptist pulpit this Sunday. And Methodist. And Lutheran. And Catholic. Can we please drop “Christian values” and refocus on the good news that Jesus bore our sins and our shame?

-- Guest Author, Internet Monk, September 20^th post.