The Week In Words

Posted on May 16, 2011 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.

Sorry to be late today! We had a very good but very busy weekend! I just said good-bye to some dear out-of-town company. Without further ado, here are some quotes that spoke to me this week:

This is from Robin Lee Hatcher‘s Facebook page:

“He that revels in a well-chosen library, has innumerable dishes and all of admirable flavor.” — William Godwin

I love that characteization.

This is from another friend’s Facebook:

“It’s better to be an optimist who is sometimes wrong than a pessimist who is always right.”

I wouldn’t say I am a pessimist, but I probably lean slightly more that direction than the other. I thought this was much more poignant than saying “Look on the bright side” — which can seem a bit shallow if the bright side is a little hard to fathom at the moment.

And from Diane‘s Facebook:

“Satan is so much more in earnest than we are–he buys up the opportunity while we are wondering how much it will cost.”— Amy Carmichael

He is, sadly, more relentless in pursuing his goals — that is a rebuke to me.

If you’ve read anything that particularly spoke to you that you’d like to share, please either list it in the comments below or write a post on your blog and then put the link to that post (not your general blog link) in Mr. Linky below. I do ask that only family-friendly quotes be included. I hope you’ll visit some of the other participants as well and glean some great thoughts to ponder.

Don’t forget to leave a comment, even if you don’t have any quotes to share!

The Week in Words

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Barbara Harper

Here are some that ministered to me this past week:

From a devotional titled The Invitation by Derick Bingham. commenting on about the Pharisees casting out the blind man healed in John 9:

The truth was that the man’s spiritual sight was now dawning. He refuted the Pharisees on their own ground but they threw him out of the synagogue. They literally excommunicated him. But Jesus found him. What a moment! Being excommunicated from a dead religion and being found by the living Saviour is no mean swap.

Sometimes the thing we lose is something dead that needs to go to make way for true spiritual sight and truth and life to dawn.

Seen at Callapidder Days:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time. ~ C. S. Lewis

As many times as I have been convicted of this truth, I still need to hear it. I can get so caught up in my agenda, schedule, goals, etc., that I get resentful of interruptions or other bids for my time and attention. It’s interesting to read through the New Testament looking for interruptions. Mary was interrupted from whatever she was doing to hear the news that she was to bear the Messiah. Jesus and Jairus were interrupted on their way to Jairus’s ill daughter by a woman with an issue of blood. Jairus’s daughter died in the mean time, but was raised to life — an even greater miracle. Jesus was interrupted during times of solitary prayer, travel. God works through interruptions! That doesn’t mean we don’t plan and schedule, asking for His guidance as we do, but we remain open for events He had on the agenda that we didn’t know about.

From For the mother of teenagers who aches but a bit.

“It takes all the years of making a boy into a man — to teach a woman how to be a mother.” ~ Ann Voskamp.

So true — it’s a continual learning process, and we don’t feel we’re anywhere near getting a handle on being a mother until our children are almost grown. I am thankful for God’s sufficiency in my inadequacy!

And finally, from an Elisabeth Elliot e-mail devotional:

“Pray when you feel like praying. Pray when you don’t feel like praying. Pray until you do feel like praying.”

Don’t forget to leave a comment, even if you don’t have any quotes to share! 🙂

The Week In Words

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Barbara Harper

Here are some that ministered to me this past week:

From a devotional titled The Invitation by Derick Bingham. commenting on John 9:1-4:

[The blind man’s] suffering was not due to sin but was in fact a conduit for showing what God can do. He was about to become a legend for the glory of God…..Your circumstance may be dire; your health may be failing, your business may be collapsing, your plans may be wrecked, your finances stretched and your cupboard bare. You may be ready to quit. Don’t. Why? Because this circumstance you are in is not because you have done wrong but because God is about to reveal His works in you.

From Women’s Ministry in the Local Church by J. Ligon Duncan and Susan Hunt:

No matter how many bowls of soup we dish up at the soup kitchen, if we do it with rebellious hearts against those God has put in authority over us, it is not pleasing to Him (p. 90).

From a friend’s Facebook:

“Every job is a self portrait of the person who did it. Autograph you work with excellence.” ~ Unknown

This is something I wish every person could imprint on their brains! And their work!

From another friend’s Facebook:

“Keep out of your life all that will keep Christ out of your mind.”

From “Meeting God Alone” in On Asking God Why by Elisabeth Elliot:

The Bible is God’s message to everybody. We deceive ourselves if we claim to want to hear his voice but neglect the primary channel through which it comes.

Don’t forget to leave a comment, even if you don’t have any quotes to share! 🙂

The Week In Words

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Barbara Harper

Here are some that ministered to me this past week:

From Counterintuitive Words of Comfort for the Hurting at Wendy Alsup’s Practical Theology for Women:

I am beginning to see that the primary point of long periods of silence by God during our earthly sorrows and suffering is that we show His worthiness of our belief and trust based fully on who He is and not on what things He gives us. Satan can’t believe we would trust God just based on His character and not on the blessings on earth He gives us. That’s Satan’s taunt–“They only worship you because you are good to them. They’d never worship you if you didn’t answer their prayers and take care of them like they expect.”

From a booklet titled Selfishness: From Loving Yourself to Loving Your Neighbor by Lou Priolo:

Thine own will is a corrupt and sinful will, and therefore unfit to be thy governor: What! Wilt thou choose an unjust, a wicked, an unmerciful governor that is inclined to do evil?…To prefer self will before the will of God, is, as the Jews, to prefer a murderer, Barabbas, before the Lord of life…When God is content to be your governor, prefer not such foolish sinners as yourself before Him ~ Richard Baxter, The Practical Works of Richard Baxter, Vol. 3, pp 400-401.

Very convicting and eye-opening.

And from p. 16 of the same booklet:

We are so selfish — that is, our love of self is so strong — that a love much stronger than our own is required to overpower it.

And please do comment even if you don’t have quotes to share!

The Week In Words

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Barbara Harper

I thought I’d share a few quotes related to Easter this week. Many of them have appeared on my blog in past years.

God expects from men something more…at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress. — Robert South

People say the cross is a sign of how much man is worth. That’s not true. The cross is a sign of how depraved we really are, that it took the death of God’s own Son. The only thing that could save a people like us was the death of God’s own Son under the wrath of His own Father paying the price, rising again from the dead. Powerful to say, this is the Gospel of Jesus. — Paul Washer

We greatly need the cheer of this precious Easter truth. We make too little of the place our Lord has gone to prepare for us. We rob ourselves greatly when we try to reduce heaven to a mere state of ecstatic feeling. We need the cheer which comes of having the eye of faith fixed on the better country and the city that hath the foundations. Such a certainty of an inheritance that is real and that cannot fade away goes far to mitigate the pangs which come of the fires and floods and disasters and frauds which so often despoil God’s people of their earthly possessions; for we know that the things seen are temporal, but the things not seen are eternal, and they are only a few heart-beats away. – E.P. Goodwin

IF you come to seek His face, not in the empty sepulchre, but in the living power of His presence, as indeed realizing that He has finished His glorious work, and is alive for evermore, then your hearts will be full of true Easter joy, and that joy will shed itself abroad in your homes. And let your joy not end with the hymns and the prayers and the communions in His house. Take with you the joy of Easter to the home, and make that home bright with more unselfish love, more hearty service; take it into your work, and do all in the name of the Lord Jesus; take it to your heart, and let that heart rise anew on Easter wings to a higher, a gladder, a fuller life; take it to the dear grave-side and say there the two words “Jesus lives!” and find in them the secret of calm expectation, the hope of eternal reunion. – John Ellerton

There are many tombs where we may be held if we succumb to the powers of sin and death. Hatred, self-pity, bitterness, resentment–these are tombs. By the power that raised Jesus Christ from that sealed and guarded tomb we may be delivered from whatever seals us off from life. Jesus came to give us life, nothing less than life, “abundant” life….Do you know someone you are praying for who is living in the darkness of such a tomb? Has it seemed that there is no more possibility of getting through to him than to someone buried? Resentment has sealed him off from any approach. Pray for the power of the resurrection to release him. Refuse, by the grace of God, to be held back by his bitterness. Then ask the Lord to help you to meet him next time in the consciousness of Christ risen. Instead of dreading the meeting because of the thought of former disastrous meetings, face it with joy. Christ is risen! Christ is risen! — Elisabeth Elliot, “Death Shall Not Hold Us,” from A Lamp For My Feet

And please do comment even if you don’t have quotes to share!

The Week In Words

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Barbara Harper

This is one of those weeks when I have many I want to share, but I am afraid if I share all of them at once, some will lose their impact and get lost in the shuffle. But if I try to leave some for another week when I don’t have any….well, so far there has been only one week like that! So I think I will just get started and then decide what to do.

This is a quote from a former pastor on a friend’s Facebook:

“Obedience is not legalism. It is the beautiful response of spirit-enabled people to say yes to God.” — Mark Minnick

That’s a rich one that really needs some time to meditate on. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced being accused of legalism when you were simply trying to obey something you felt Scripture taught (and another differed on), but I have. Or, on the other hand, some people so emphasize grace that they don’t seem to see a need for obedience because they have grace for their disobedience. God provides grace in abundance when we fail, but He provides grace to obey and avoid failing, too if we ask Him (speaking here of the everday walk of a Christian — we all need God’s grace for salvation because we all have failed in the first place.)

This was seen at Challies in a review of the book Written in Tears by Luke Veldt which he wrote after reading Psalm 103 every day for a year after his teen-age daughter suddenly died. I haven’t read the book yet, but I want to.

Sometimes people of faith have a hard time remembering that suffering was an excruciatingly painful process for Job. ‘The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord,’ we quote Job brightly—forgetting that when he said it he had shaved his head and torn his clothes and that a few days later he was sitting on an ash heap, covering in painful boils and cursing the day he was born.

Don’t try to make the pain go away. The pain doesn’t go away. Hurt with me.

Rich advice for anyone wanting to help anyone suffering.

From a devotional titled The Invitation by Derick Bingham. commenting on John 7:37, 44:

You are not big enough to be the goal of your own existence. Make Him your goal.

The next few are from Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross: Experiencing the Passion and Power of Easter, compiled by Nancy Guthrie.

From Adrian Rogers on Isaiah 53:7 concerning Jesus’s silence before His accusers (p. 53):

If Jesus had risen up in His own defense during His trials, I believe He would have been so powerful and irrefutable in making His defense that no governor, high priest, or other legal authority could have stood against Him! In other words, if Jesus had taken up His own defense with the intention of refuting His accusers and proving His innocence, He would have won! But we would have lost, and we would be lost for all eternity.

I had never thought about it that way before, but I am sure that that is at least one of the reasons for His silence.

And from Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Hebrews 2:14-15 (p. 77-78):

The world was very pleased with itself, was it not, as it looked upon him there dying upon the cross? That is why they laugh. That is why they are joking. At last they had got him, they had nailed him, they had killed him. He was finished….. The devil thought he was defeating Christ, but Christ was reconciling us to God, defeating the devil and delivering us out of His clutches.

If it was not so deadly serious, the irony would be amusing that when the devil did his worst against Christ, Christ was using that very act to redeem men and deliver them from the devil.

I think I will stop there today — I have another lengthy one but I think I will save it for its own post.

And please do comment even if you don’t have quotes to share!

The Week In Words

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Barbara Harper

I have just a couple this week:

I am only about 24 pages into Women’s Ministry in the Local Church by J. Ligon Duncan and Susan Hunt, but this quote stood out to me:

If we lack interest in the church we lack what for Jesus was a consuming passion. Jesus loved the church and gave himself for it (Eph. 5:25). ~ Dr. Edmund Clowney

There seems to be a disregard or even a disdain for church these days, and this is a needed reminder of just how important it is in God’s eyes.

Then in Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross: Experiencing the Passion and Power of Easter, compiled by Nancy Guthrie, J. Ligon Duncan III shares in the chapter “Betrayed, Denied, Deserted.” speaking of the moment when Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss:

We cannot help but admire the dignity of the Lord Jesus Christ as he goes through this indignity. He does it with magnanimity and with the sense that he is nor forsaken. He is not out of control. God’s providence is ruling over all. So the character and the calmness of Jesus remind us and provide an example for us in the midst of our own trials (p. 38-39).

And later in the same chapter:

In this statement, Jesus is stressing that is not not going to the cross because God lacks the power to stop it. Nor does Jesus lack the ability to ask of God to spare him. Instead, Jesus is going to the cross because he has chosen to go to the cross. He is not a passive victim. He is the prime actor. (p. 40).

This is so important to remember, especially as people’s thoughts turn toward the cross this season and they perhaps watch films dealing with the death of Christ. There are little clues throughout the gospels that Jesus was not a “passive victim,” but was very much in control of what happened when, and he went through it all willingly.

And please do comment even if you don’t have quotes to share!

The Week In Words

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Barbara Harper

Here are a few that spoke to me this week:

From a friend’s Facebook:

“Christ does not exist in order to make much of us. We exist in order to enjoy making much of him. Christ is not glorious so that we get wealthy or healthy. Christ is glorious, so that rich or poor, sick or sound, we might be satisfied in him.” ~ Piper

There is such an “It’s all about me” focus in Christianity today. It’s not. It’s all about Him. That He extends grace for us to participate at all in His plan is just amazing.

From Diane‘s Facebook:

Minister out of overflow of relationship with the Father, not out of undertow of the ministry (Mk 1:35). (Pastor Mark Smith via Nancy Leigh DeMoss)

This one has been coming back to mind often since I first read it. It’s a much needed emphasis — it’s so easy to get dragged down in the “undertow.” As Diane said, we usually have it backwards.

From the Livesay Blog:

Better to love God and die unknown than to love the world and be a hero; better to be content with poverty than to die a slave to wealth; better to have taken some risks and lost than to have done nothing and succeeded at it. -E. Lutzer

Much to ponder there.

Seen at Challies:

It is a dangerous crisis when a proud heart meets with flattering lips. —John Flavel

True — like a flame to kindling.

From Warren Wiersbe’s With the Word, p. 258:

The past can be a rudder that guides you or an anchor that hinders you.

That’s true. We can’t do anything about the sins of the past except confess them to God and learn from them. Nor should we rest on past victories and neglect going forward and seeking God’s grace for today. As the children of Israel needed to gather manna every day, so we need God’s strength and sustenance every day. “As thy days, so shall thy strength [be]” (Deuteronomy 33:25b).

And please — feel free to comment even if you don’t have quotes to share!

The Week In Words

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Barbara Harper

Here are a few that spoke to me this week:

This is from an Elisabeth Elliot e-mail devotional taken from a a chapter called “God’s Hep For God’s Assignment” taken from the book A Lamp For My Feet:

Sometimes a task we have begun takes on seemingly crushing size, and we wonder what ever gave us the notion that we could accomplish it. There is no way out, no way around it, and yet we cannot contemplate actually carrying it through. The rearing of children or the writing of a book are illustrations that come to mind. Let us recall that the task is a divinely appointed one, and divine aid is therefore to be expected. Expect it! Ask for it, wait for it, believe that God gives it. Offer to Him the job itself, along with your fears and misgivings about it. He will not fail or be discouraged. Let his courage encourage you. The day will come when the task will be finished. Trust Him for it.

“For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded, therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed” (Is 50:7 AV).

I’ve certainly been there; you?

This was seen at the M.O.B. (Mother of Boys) Society:

“Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world” – John Milton

This was from one of Claudia Barba’s “Monday Morning Club” newsletter:

Are you annoyed this morning by the wrench some monkey has thrown into your careful plan for today? Relax and remember: interruptions aren’t hindrances to ministry. They are ministry.

From Ann Voskamp, on being out of our comfort zones:

It’s only in the uncomfortable places that we can experience the tenderness of the Comforter.

This is from a devotional titled The Invitation by Derick Bingham. commenting on John 4:6:

Christ experienced the limitations of human life. Here He is wearied with His journey. It is worth remembering that human life does have its limitations. We cannot, as human beings, be everywhere and do everything. Much better to understand that certain things in life are not for us and to concentrate on the things in life that are. Christ was weary in doing His Father’s will but He was not weary of it. In coming to fulfill His Father’s will He had put himself under its limitations. So must we if we would know contentment. In Christian service you can feel limited and weary in what you can do but you can also know deep contentment that nothing else can bring.

This reminded me of a post I wrote very early on my blog about Limitations and how they define rather than hinder our ministry.

And please — feel free to comment even if you don’t have quotes to share!

The Week In Words

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Barbara Harper

From a friend’s Facebook:

God often puts us in situations that are too much for us so that we will learn that no situation is too much for Him. ~ Edward Luther

Sadly, sometimes we don’t look up to Him until we’re overwhelmed, but when we do and find Him faithful and able, hopefully then we begin to seek Him and to lean on Him more in everyday life.

From Lisa‘s sidebar:

God comforts us not to make us comfortable but to make us comforters.” -John Henry Jowett

And from yet another friend’s Facebook:

If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward. ~Thomas Edison

That is a great perspective and a good reason not to be discouraged by failure.

I’m almost halfway through Ann Voskamp‘s One Thousand Gifts and have marked several places, but one quote that arrested me the last couple of days opens Chapter Six on page 102:

“Every time you feel in God’s creatures something pleasing and attractive, do not let your attention be arrested by them alone, but, passing them by, transfer your thought to God and say; “Oh my God, if Thy creations are so full of beauty, delight and joy, how infinitely more full of beauty, delight and joy art Thou Thyself, Creator of all!” ~ Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain

I have felt that way even in listening to secular music or viewing beauty in art or words as well as nature — that swell of praise to God for the beauty He has created that reflects Himself.

Then Ann says, on page 106:

I am beset by chronic soul amnesia. I am empty of truth and need the refilling. I need come every day — bend, clutch, and remember — for who can gather the manna but once, hoarding, and store away sustenance in the mind for all of the living?

Chronic soul amnesia — so apt. We can’t gather all the truth we need at once to last us all of our living: we need to come to God daily, gathering the manna for that day’s needs.

And please — feel free to comment even if you don’t have quotes to share!