The Week In Words

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Barbara Harper

Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

Just a further note — if you’ve posted a quote on your blog this past week, feel free to link it here as well. You don’t have to save it for Mondays. And please do read and comment even if you’re not posting quotes.

Here are a few I’ve read in various places:

From Elisabeth Elliot’s e-mail devotional, this one taken from a chapter titled “The Fear of Loss” in A Lamp For My Feet:

But to grasp [God’s blessings] selfishly and greedily, to hang onto them fiercely and allow myself to be enslaved by the fear of losing them, is to deny Christ. Do not fear, He says to us. I am with you.

I have to say, I have struggled with that — feeling the need to grasp fiercely some of God’s blessings for fear of losing them instead of trusting Him to give, to allow me to have as long as He sees fit and take away as He deems necessary. How much more restful it is just to trust Him.

Seen at girltalk:

“[Feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.” “. –G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 4, p. 440.

Also seen at girltalk:

“Marriage is a vocation. It is a task to which you are called. If it is a task, it means you work at it. It is not something which happens. You hear the call, you answer, you accept the task, you enter into it willingly and eagerly, you commit yourself to its disciplines and responsibilities and limitations and privileges and joys. You concentrate on it, giving yourself to it day after day in a lifelong Yes.” –Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman, p. 102

Seen on David McGuire‘s Facebook status:

Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it. ~ Raymond Chandler

From today’s reading in Our Daily Walk by F. B. Meyer commenting on the verse “Exercise thyself unto godliness” (I. Timothy 4:7):

Probably the trials and temptations of life are intended to give us that inward training which shall bring our spiritual muscles into play. In each of us there is much unused force; many moral and spiritual faculties, which would never be used, if it were not for the wrestling which we are compelled to take up with principalities and powers, with difficulty and sorrow.

If you have some family-friendly quotes you’d like to share, please leave the link to your “Week In Words” post with Mr. Linky below. I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well: this is a small enough meme so far that it is not hard to visit around with others who love to glean quotes from their reading as well.

The Week In Words Participants

1. bekahcubed

2. e-Mom @ Chrysalis

(Mr. Linky is closed for this week. Please see current Week In Words to add new links.)

The Week In Words

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Barbara Harper

Here are a few short quotes:

From a friend’s Facebook status:

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. ~Thomas Edison

From Diane‘s Facebook:

Jesus has promised to meet your needs. He hasn’t promised to supply all those cravings you’ve mistakenly told yourself are needs. ~ Paul Tripp

From Quoth She:

It takes a real storm in the average person’s life to make him realize how much worrying he has done over the squalls.
~ Bruce Barton

From Lori:

What you fill your mind with throughout the week will govern how you live your life. ~ Author Unknown

From Laura‘s Outnumbered Mom newsletter:

Who do you surround yourself with — fellow worriers or fellow warriors? Some people drag you down and some buoy you, so look for those “life preserver buddies” — the ones who hold you up when life tries to pull you down.

From Janet at Across the Page:

I am not here to realize myself, but to know Jesus. In Christian work the initiative is too often the realization that something has to be done and I must do it. That is never the attitude of the spiritual saint, his aim is to secure the realization of Jesus Christ in every set of circumstances he is in. ~ Oswald Chambers

From the Elisabeth Elliot devotional e-mail newsletter, this taken from her book A Lamp For My Feet:

Out of the deepest depths of human evil [the betrayal, mistreatment, and death of Christ] the good God brought salvation–the very salvation of man whose sinfulness killed the Son He sent.

From the July 12 reading from Our Daily Walk by F. B. Meyer:

Ah! our Lord Jesus wants our love, and He will not be satisfied if we give time, energy, and thought to His service, and forget Him.

And finally, I finished reading and doing the Bible study from Hoping for Something Better: Refusing to Settle for Life as Usual, a Bible study by Nancy Guthrie, but I am rereading the text to try to cement it in my mind a little better. The first chapter discusses the different things we are told about Jesus in Hebrews 1, and this quote is from pp. 10-11 concerning Jesus being the sin purifier in Hebrews 1:3:

When the radiance of God’s glory shines into our lives and reveals what is there, and we see ourselves for who we really are, we can’t help but wonder, How can I ever become clean again? It seems impossible….And while that may sound miserable — and it is — it is the best thing that can happen to us. It is when we realize that we are ruined, that we can’t clean up our act ourselves, that we recognize, perhaps for the first time, how relevant Jesus is. Jesus is the sin purifier. His blood is the only cleanser that will take away the stains sin has left in our lives.

We tend to compare ourselves to other people and think we look pretty good. But when we see ourselves the way God sees us — in contrast to the beauty and perfection of Christ — we see ourselves as we truly are…

We can come to Him as we are, and He will take away the ugliness of our sin and give us His own perfect righteousness. This is the gift that makes it possible for us to one day enter the very presence of God…

He will give you His own righteousness if you ask Him to, but He doesn’t rush into your life uninvited. Have you ever invited the sin purifier to cleanse you and cover you with His perfect righteousness?

Those snippets are from about seven paragraphs which expand on this truth a little more but would be too big a chunk to quote here.

The Week In Words

Posted on July 11, 2010 by Barbara Harper

Just a further note — if you’ve posted a quote on your blog this past week, feel free to link it here as well. You don’t have to save it for Mondays. 🙂 And please do read and comment even if you’re not posting quotes.

There were a few quotes that stood out to me from this week’s reading of Our Daily Walk by F. B. Meyer:

From July 6 on Galatians 6:1-10:

The sinful soul has to bear a heavy burden indeed; and too often his fellow-Christians pass him by with averted faces and frowns. No one visits him, or cares to be seen in his company, or tries to help him regain his former footing.

“Christ’s law,” which we are called to fulfil, is to seek out the erring one, to go after that which is lost, to restore the wanderer, to help carry his burden, considering lest we be tempted, and lapse into the same sin.

It’s all too true that when someone falls, we’re too concerned about being tainted by association, or we figure they don’t really want to hear from us.

From the July 7 reading on James 1, particularly the part about looking “into the perfect law of liberty”:

Do not stand gazing at the imperfections which the Word of God reveals, but having learnt where you come short, dare to believe that Jesus Christ is the true counterpart of your need; that He is strong where you are weak, and full where you are empty.

From the July 9 reading on Mark 8:32-38, especially v. 36, with the parts that particularly struck me in bold print:

It is not necessary for any man to make a cross; it is our part simply to take up that which God has laid down for us. The cross is no exceptional piece of asceticism, but it is the constant refusal to gratify our self-life; the perpetual dying to pride and self-indulgence, in order to follow Christ in His redemptive mission for the salvation of men. And it is in proportion as men live like this that they realize the deepest and truest and highest meaning of life. When we live only to save ourselves, to build warm nests, to avoid every discomfort and annoyance, to make money entirely for our own use and enjoyment, to invent schemes for our own pleasure, we become the most discontented and miserable of mankind. How many there are who have given themselves up to a life of selfishness and pleasure-seeking, only to find their capacity for joy has shrivelled, and their lives plunged into gloom and despair. They have lost their souls!

Finally, on page 177 of Hoping for Something Better: Refusing to Settle for Life as Usual, a Bible study by Nancy Guthrie, from the section commenting on the “sacrifice of praise” mentioned in Hebrews 13:15:

When we choose to praise God for His goodness, despite His allowing what we would nor describe as good into our lives, that is a sacrifice of praise. When we praise His for His sovereignty, even though we don’t understand the whys of His plans, that is a sacrifice of praise.

The Week In Words

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Barbara Harper

Earlier this week, this post about enjoying each other’s gifts rather than feeling bad if we don’t measure up was on my mind — I’m not sure why. Actually, I was thinking about how I would adapt it for a talk, and I really don’t know why that came to mind, because it is not something I plan on doing! But just a few minutes later when I had devotions, I came across this very timely quote along the same lines on page 154 of Hoping for Something Better: Refusing to Settle for Life as Usual, a Bible study by Nancy Guthrie. This is in a section discussing Hebrews 12:1-2:

We’re not competing against each other: we’re encouraging each other. We’re competing against Satan, the world’s system, our own flesh. Let’s keep our focus on the race marked out for us, not on those around us.

As we each run our own race in the Christian life, we don’t need to measure ourselves by each other, either feeling proud when we do better or inferior or deflated or depressed if we don’t do something as well as someone else. The Bible tells us it is unwise to measure ourselves against each other in that way. We need to run the particular race God has set out for each of us, exercising the gifts He has given us to the best of our ability by His grace, and keep our focus on Him.

If you have some family-friendly quotes you’d like to share, please leave the link to your “Week In Words” post with Mr. Linky below.

The Week In Words

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Barbara Harper

Here are some interesting quotes I saw this week:

From ivman:

“Nobody sins because they want to be miserable. We somehow think we’re better off to sin than to obey.” – Drew Conley

That reminds me about the verse that there is pleasure in sin for a season — but just a season. The misery from it will come soonser or later, but people forget that.

This one is a quote within a quote within a quote. 🙂 Girltalk quotes C. J. Mahaney quoting John Piper about reading:

Is reading worth the time investment when so much is forgotten? John Piper says yes.

In a message long ago (July 12, 1981) he said this:

What I have learned from about twenty-years of serious reading is this: It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don’t begrudge the 99%.

Read, but not to remember everything. Read because that 1% that you remember has to potential to change your life.

That is such a comfort to me, because I have gotten so frustrated with myself because I do tend to remember just a few sentences or principles rather than feeling as if I have a grasp of the whole book.

This is from p. 59 of Hoping for Something Better: Refusing to Settle for Life as Usual, a Bible study by Nancy Guthrie. It is an expansion on a similar quote from C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity about Christ being able to sympathize and help us in temptation because He faced temptation and resisted:

Jesus doesn’t roll his eyes and wonder how we could even consider taking a step in the direction we’re being tempted in. He doesn’t take lightly our struggles with sin, because he knows what it is like to be tempted. Jesus was tempted in all the ways we are — yet he never gave in to sin.

We might think that if Jesus never sinned, he really doesn’t know what temptation is like, But if you think about it, only the person who tries to resist temptation knows how strong it is. The one who gives in after a few minutes doesn’t know what it would be like after a few hours. Who has experienced greater temptation: the one who is tempted and quickly gives in to the temptation or the one who holds on and holds out and doesn’t give in? Christ, in never yielding to temptation, knows more about the strength of temptation and the suffering involved in temptation than we will ever know. He’s our advocate who understands.

If you have some family-friendly quotes you’d like to share, please leave the link to your “Week In Words” post with Mr. Linky below, and don’t forget to leave a comment telling me what you think about these quotes. And whether you have any you’d like to share, if you like reading you might find some interesting quotes at the other participants: I hope you’ll visit them as well.

The Week In Words

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Barbara Harper

Here are some interesting quotes I saw this week:

From various friends’ Facebook status updates:

“Where the heart is willing, it will find a thousand ways. Where it is unwilling, it will find a thousand excuses.”~ Arlen Price

“The benefit of memorizing Scripture is so you can be thinking God’s thoughts; trading your thoughts for His; meditating on what’s important to God instead of what’s important to yourself.” ~ Nancy Leigh DeMoss.

Seen at Brenda‘s:

Right is right even if no one’s doing it.
Wrong is wrong even if everyone’s doing it.

Seen at Dawn‘s:

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. ~Mignon McLaughlin.

I’ve marked a number of quotes in Hoping for Something Better: Refusing to Settle for Life as Usual, a Bible study by Nancy Guthrie. The parts emphasized in each one are my emphasis, the parts that particularly jumped out at me.:

Christianity is corporate. There are no lone rangers in the body. We need each other. And we need to encourage each other. Maybe you are full of courage today. If so, then offer some of yours to someone else. Don’t operate in the body looking only to get your needs met. Look for needs that you can uniquely meet, and in the process you’ll find your needs uniquely met. (p. 117).

[In regard to those who say they can’t forgive themselves…] If God says we are forgiven, who are we to keep punishing ourselves? If we refuse to forgive ourselves, it is as if we are saying that we are greater than God, that our judgment is higher than His. (p. 105).

When God forgives, it doesn’t mean He looks at our sin and says, “It doesn’t matter. It is no big deal.” When He said He would forgive our wickedness, He knew what it would cost. He knew that the price for sin would be paid through the death of a perfect sacrifice — His own Son. (p. 97).

While Hebrew 4:1 has an invitation, it also has a warning. “Since the promise of entering His rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it”….In the New Living translation this verse reads, “We ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience it.” Here we learn that there is something worth being afraid of — terrified of — in this life: unbelief, not trusting God. It is a scary thing to hear and know the promises of God and to choose not to trust them — to decide we don’t really need them or want them, to walk away from them rather than enter into them. (p. 46).

Forgive me for including quite so many: I know that the more there is, the longer the post, the more people’s eyes glaze over and they tend to skim rather than read carefully. I know quotes make more impact when there are just a few succinct ones. Yet…I didn’t feel I could leave any of these out.

If you have some family-friendly quotes you’d like to share, please leave the link to your “Week In Words” post with Mr. Linky below, and don’t forget to leave a comment telling me what you think about these quotes. 🙂 And whether you have any you’d like to share, if you like reading you might find some interesting quotes at the other participants: I hope you’ll visit them as well.

The Week In Words

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Barbara Harper

I am sorry to be so late with this today. Getting back from a trip with its associated laundry and grocery runs, company, and then having the kids over til pretty late last night prevented me from pre-preparing a this post, then I slept in a little to recover from all of that. 🙂

I saw this first quote at Carrie’s in her review of the book Purity: A Godly Woman’s Adornment by Lydia Brownback. This is her succinct definition of purity:

“It is to have a single goal, a single focus, and a single purpose for ourselves and for our lives. . . . At its core, purity is having a heart for the Lord that isn’t watered down or polluted by lesser things.”

I don’t have that book, but I do have the one on Trust in the series waiting for me.

This quote is longer than I would usually share here, but I felt it was all needed. This is from the June 14 reading of Our Daily Walk by F. B. Meyer. You can read the whole excerpt here by scrolling down to June 14. In discussing the man with the one talent from the parable of the talents, Meyer says the person with one talent may feel discouraged by his limitations. Then he goes on to say:

But the world will never be saved and helped unless the one-talented people, who are the great majority, can be aroused to a sense of their responsibility. Five men can put the whole energy of their manhood behind their single talents, whilst the one man with five talents has only the driving power of one. It is probably a greater thing in God’s sight to use one talent faithfully than many. No one notices the man with his humble one talent. There is no outburst of praise or cheering. It is a greater test of the quality of the soul to go on doing one small thing well, than to be able to turn with brilliant versatility from one talent to another. …

But the one thing that our Lord demands of each of us is to be faithful–faithful in a very little. He is watching each of us with great eagerness as we live our daily life, because He knows, as we cannot realise, how much our position in the other world depends on our fidelity in this. It is for our sake that He is so anxious that we should make good use of our one talent.

Have you only one talent? Are you doing anything with it? Remember it is the ounce-weight that may turn the scales where hundred-weights are balanced; it is the tiny tug that can move the great liner. Be thou faithful in thy very little, and thou shalt receive the “Well done” of thy Lord.

If you’re joining us for The Week In Words with your own post, please leave a link to your family-friendly quotes for today below so other participants can read them. And please feel free to read and comment whether you have a link to share or not!

The Week In Words

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Barbara Harper

This first quote is from Hope and Help For Your Nerves by Dr. Claire Weekes, p.118:

You are never defeated while you are ready to go on. The road to recovery is beset with many temporary failures. It is like traveling across the foothills toward the mountains. You travel downhill so often that it is difficult to realize that, in spite of this, you are still climbing.

There are so many applications of this beyond just the scope of this book. Any recovery from anything, any improvement, any change of bad habits for a good one, etc., all have that up and down aspect, but that word picture of going through the foothills is such a great one: we’re still climbing even though we’re on and up-and-down path, and we’re never defeated unless we give up.

I haven’t been using Joy and Strength as a devotional book this year, but I used it for a number of years and marked some of my favorite quotations from it. The June 6 reading is:

I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou shalt enlarge my heart.
PSALMS 119:32

My hands also will I lift up unto Thy commandments, which I have loved.
PSALMS 119:48

LOVE is higher than duty. But the reason is that love in reality contains duty in itself. Love without a sense of duty is a mere delusion, from which we cannot too soon set ourselves free. Love is duty and something more.
FREDERICK TEMPLE

THINK not anything little, wherein we may fulfil His commandments. It is in the midst of common and ordinary duties that our life is placed; common occupations make up our lives. By faith and love we obey; but by obedience are the faith and love, which God gives us, strengthened. Then shall we indeed love our Lord, when we seek to please Him in all things, speak or are silent, sleep or wake, labor or rest, do or suffer, with a single eye to His service. God give us grace so to love Him, that we may in all things see Him; in all, obey; and, obeying, see Him more clearly and love Him less unworthily; and so, in that blissful harmony of obedience and of love, be prepared to see Him “face to face.”
EDWARD B. PUSEY

I like the thoughts about how love and duty are intertwined. We tend to shrink away from words like “duty” and “obedience,” yet they show what and how we love.

And going along with the above quotes is this from page 46 of Jane Austen’s Little Instruction Book, a “mini-book” compilation of quotes from her books.

There is one thing…which a man can always do, if he chooses, and that is, his duty; not by maneuvering and finessing, but by vigour and resolution. Mr. Knightly, Emma.

I would add that without Him we can do nothing (John 15:5), but we “can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth” us (Philippians 4:13).

If you’re joining us for The Week In Words with your own post, please leave a link to your family-friendly quotes for today below so other participants can read them.

The Week In Words

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Barbara Harper

This is from A Lamp For My Feet by Elisabeth Elliot as seen in the e-mail Elisabeth Elliot devotionals:

To listen to one word and go out and obey it is better than having the most exalted “religious experience.” “The man who has received my commands and obeys them–he it is who loves me: and he who loves me will be loved by my Father; and I will love him and disclose myself to him” (Jn 14:21). There is the order: hear, do, know.

This Hudson Taylor quote was seen on a friend’s Facebook status:

“Let us give of our work, our thoughts, our plans, ourselves, our lives, our loved ones, all unto His hands. When you have given all to God, there will be nothing left for you to be troubled about.”

I was going to include Memorial Day quotes here but then decided to put them in a separate post.

Please leave a link to your family-friendly quotes for today below so other participants can read them. Have a good Memorial Day! I’m not sure what ours will be like. We’re having a thunderstorm right now and I have a bear of a cold. I plan on sleeping as much as needed!

Memorial Day 2010

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Barbara Harper

All we have of freedom, all we use or know -—
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

~ Rudyard Kipling, “The Old Issue.”

But the freedom that they fought for, and the country grand they wrought for,
Is their monument to-day, and for aye.

~Thomas Dunn English, “The Battle of Monmouth“

This was sent to me in an e-mail, and I have seen it popping up in blogs and on Facebook:

The 3rd Grade class of Tussing Elementary School in Colonial Heights, Virginia.did an original song giving tribute to those in the military. The song is called “Thank You Soldiers!”