COME INTO MY HEART

"Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey His commandments." (1 John 5:1,2 NRSV)

All of us are like [the prodigal] son, needing more desperately than anything else the strong and gentle embrace of the hands of God. We must be those hands for each other -- not someday, but today…

Let us be gentle with each other. Let us touch each other. Let us touch even those who seem in some superficial way to be different. For we are all of us sons and daughters of God.

I once heard Peter Storey, preaching in Johannesburg during the reign of apartheid, suggest that we should be prepared when we sing that old child's hymn: "Into my heart, into my heart, come into my heart, Lord Jesus." Storey imagined that Jesus' reply would be: "Okay, here I come, but I'm bringing all these other people with Me."

-- James C. Howell in Yours Are the Hands of Christ


#2496

SHARING IN THE SUFFERING

Jesus shares our suffering; He nurses us and heals us by His own wounds and stripes. As we go through our valleys, He keeps us constant company. And that is what makes the difference. His presence is joy.

-- Colleen Townsend Evans


#2495

BIBLICAL AND RELEVANT

I have long been convinced that it's not too difficult to be Biblical if you don't care about being relevant, and it's not too difficult to be relevant if you don't care about being Biblical. But to be Biblical and relevant is really the assignment confronting the seminary today. If we're going to impact a generation we cannot afford to become disengaged from the society to which God has called us to minister.

-- Dr. Howard Hendricks, Dallas Theological Seminary


#2494

THREE-DIMENSIONAL OBEDIENCE

The quest for the lost soul of Christianity always leads us back to the Bible. But discovering the wonders of Scripture requires more than reading. That's where the quest begins, but that's not where it ends. Not if you want to get it into your soul. You have to meditate on it. Then you have to live it out. Meditating on it turns one-dimensional knowledge into two-dimensional understanding. Living it out turns two-dimensional understanding into three-dimensional obedience.

-- Mark Batterson in Primal: A Quest for the Lost Soul of Christianity


#2492

TRUE REPENTANCE

Repentance is not necessarily the gloomy and self-loathing practice it is sometimes made out to be. To repent is not to be confirmed in what that little voice within keeps whispering: that you are no good, that everything bad that happens to you is your own fault, that if only others knew what you were really like, they would cease to care for or be interested in you. No.

True repentance begins with the felt knowledge that we are loved by God… Repentance consists not so much in flagellating ourselves over our "failures" as in courageously and painstakingly reorienting our priorities, unlearning old patterns, turning our faces, like the sunflower, toward the dawning of the light of God.

-- Wendy M. Wright in The Vigil: Keeping Watch in the Season of Christ's Coming (Nashville, Tenn.: Upper Room Books, 1992, used with permission)


#2491