Category: Random

Ray Ortlund on Proverbs 1:8-19:

Have you ever felt that envy and resentment deep inside? It is where violence begins. Your heart is lying in wait for blood. When this rage pops up to the surface, observe yourself carefully. You will probably recruit others to your cause. Sin tends to recruit. Watch those thoughts and feelings creeping into conversations with other people. You will want to get others on your side.

Look at [Proverbs 1:14]: “Throw in your lot among us; we will all have one purse.” A cause, even a negative cause, provides a group to belong to. It is one way we nurse our grudges, and it feels good. But whenever we gather around grievance rather than Jesus, that is counterfeit community, black-market relationships, and that negativity is in collision with reality. It cannot succeed long-term.

Joseph Loconte on the Great War:

For the intellectual class as well as the ordinary man on the street, the Great War had defamed the values of the Old World, along with the religious doctrines that helped to underwrite them. Moral advancement, even the idea of morality itself, seemed an illusion. . . . [T]he war to make the world safe for democracy, the holy war to advance Christian ideals, was an unholy delusion.

Lord, teach us to pray!

That request sounds odd to our modern ears. Why would anyone need instruction in prayer?

Ahh, but that question betrays our misunderstanding. Most often, we confuse prayer with wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, and pouring out of feelings. No. Prayer is different. Prayer is finding a way to talk to God. For that to happen, we need Christ, the Christ of the Bible.

Charles H. Spurgeon:

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28).”

These words, from the mouth of any other man, would be ridiculous, and even blasphemous. Take the greatest poet, the greatest teacher of philosophy, or the greatest king, and anyone with the biggest soul, who among them would dare to say to all the laboring and heavy laden ones in the whole human race. “Come to me, and I will give you rest”?

Where do you find wings broad enough to spread over every sorrowing soul, except the wings of Christ? Where do you find a harbor big enough to hold all the navies of the world, to give refuge to every storm-worn vessel that ever crossed the sea; —where, but in the haven of the soul of Christ, in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead; and, therefore, in whom there is room enough and to spare for all the troubled children of men?