Melissa at Breath of Life hosts a weekly carnival called The Week In Words,which involves sharing something from your reading that inspires you, causes you to laugh, cry, or dream, or just resonates with you in some way.

Here are some of the words that stood out to me this week. I’m not going to comment on them: they speak for themselves, and I don’t want to take away from the power of them.

Seen at ivman’s blague:

“To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.” – Benjamin Franklin

I forgot where I saw this, but I have seen it before:

Upon a life I did not live,
upon a death I did not die;
anothers life, another’s death,
I stake my whole eternity.
-Horatius Bonar

From the March 27 reading of Our Daily Walk by F. B. Meyer:

A quiet heart. I do not say a quiet life—that may be impossible, but a heart free from care, from feverish passion, from the intrusion of unworthy ambition, pride or vanity. The habit of meditating on God’s Word helps to induce the quiet heart and devout spirit which realizes the Lord’s presence. The Bible is like the garden in which the Lord God walked in the cool of the day; read it much and prayerfully, and you will meet Him in its glades.

From a chapter of Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross: Experiencing the Passion and Power of Easter titled “The Most Important Word in the Universe” by Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr.:

God’s anger shows how serious His love is.

His wrath is the solemn determination of a doctor cutting away the cancer that’s killing his patient.

In human religions, it’s the worshipper who placates the offended deity with rituals and sacrifices and bribes. But in the gospel, it is God Himself who provides the offering.

He detests our evil with all the intensity of the divine  personality. If you want to know what your sin deserves from God, don’t look within yourself, don’t look at your own emotions. Look at the man on the cross — tormented, gasping, bleeding. Take a long, thoughtful look. God was presenting something to you there. God was saying something about his perfect emotions toward your sin. He was displaying his wrath.

The God you have offended doesn’t demand your blood; he gives his own in Jesus Christ.

Who qualifies to enjoy the liberating power of the death of Christ? Sinners. They’re the only people he died for. If your problems are always someone else’s fault, if you come to God standing upright and ready to make your own case, the cross condemns you. But if you’re far from God, if you’ve sinned and you keep on sinning and you’re ashamed and wish you could trade in your record for a better one, if your conscience knows that you deserve the wrath of God and your only hope is God’s mercy in Christ, then he longs for you to know…he sees you through the death of Christ…He longs for you to know that your sins have been nailed to the cross.