Hoping can break your heart. That is why we carry one big hope, the secret hope you don't even dare to breathe: that when you have lost the something you were hoping for, and it might have been really, really big, there is a Someone you can put your hope in.
-- John Ortberg in Faith & Doubt
#2759
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
BELIEVING IN CHRIST'S RISING
To believe in Christ's rising and death's dying is also to live with the power and the challenge to rise up now from all our dark graves of suffering love. If sympathy for the world's wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded, if gratitude for what is good does not flame up, if insight is not deepened, if commitment to what is important is not strengthened, if aching for a new day is not intensified, if hope is weakened and faith diminished, if from the experience of death comes nothing good, then death has won. Then death, be proud.
-- Nicholas Wolterstorff in Lament for a Son
#2758
-- Nicholas Wolterstorff in Lament for a Son
#2758
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
THE PROMISES FROM GOD'S HEART
Are you brokenhearted? God's heart, the heart of Christ, there in the room with you, shares all you feel and offers to carry its full weight.
Do you feel unfree, captive, imprisoned in your life and spirit? The risen Christ, the mighty one, who comes in power without force, longs for your freedom and is able to free you.
Are you mourning, deeply sad, depressed? The Beloved grieves with you, weeps with you, sits with you in the dimness, and will send the Holy Spirit, the "Comforter."
Do you feel that your life is in ashes? If you bond with the living Jesus, you will rise from the ashes in undreamed beauty and healing power.
Have you been wounded from generations of a hurting family or some other wounded community? If you take this full pain into the Healer's heart, you will be released from the "devastations of many generations" and will release a powerful current of healing into that family history.
You may not yet be able fully to believe these promises, to trust this presence, or to feel this power. Do not try to contrive appropriate feelings. At this point, just simply hear what is being offered. The healing of truth, the ability to open to God's heart, often comes very slowly. Just rest quietly, breathing gently, while the promises from God's heart are given in your presence.
-- Flora Slosson Wuellner in Heart of Healing, Heart of Light, published by The Upper Room, Nashville, TN. Used with permission.
#2757
Do you feel unfree, captive, imprisoned in your life and spirit? The risen Christ, the mighty one, who comes in power without force, longs for your freedom and is able to free you.
Are you mourning, deeply sad, depressed? The Beloved grieves with you, weeps with you, sits with you in the dimness, and will send the Holy Spirit, the "Comforter."
Do you feel that your life is in ashes? If you bond with the living Jesus, you will rise from the ashes in undreamed beauty and healing power.
Have you been wounded from generations of a hurting family or some other wounded community? If you take this full pain into the Healer's heart, you will be released from the "devastations of many generations" and will release a powerful current of healing into that family history.
You may not yet be able fully to believe these promises, to trust this presence, or to feel this power. Do not try to contrive appropriate feelings. At this point, just simply hear what is being offered. The healing of truth, the ability to open to God's heart, often comes very slowly. Just rest quietly, breathing gently, while the promises from God's heart are given in your presence.
-- Flora Slosson Wuellner in Heart of Healing, Heart of Light, published by The Upper Room, Nashville, TN. Used with permission.
#2757
Monday, April 25, 2011
YET I WILL PRAISE THE RISEN LORD
Margaret Sangster Phippen wrote that in the mid 1950s her father, British minister W. E. Sangster, began to notice some uneasiness in his throat and a dragging in his leg. When he went to the doctor, he found that he had an incurable disease that caused progressive muscular atrophy. His muscles would gradually waste away, his voice would fail, his throat would soon become unable to swallow.
Sangster threw himself into his work in British home missions, figuring he could still write and he would have even more time for prayer. "Let me stay in the struggle Lord," he pleaded. "I don't mind if I can no longer be a general, but give me just a regiment to lead." He wrote articles and books, and helped organize prayer cells throughout England. "I'm only in the kindergarten of suffering," he told people who pitied him.
Gradually Sangster's legs became useless. His voice went completely. But he could still hold a pen, shakily. On Easter morning, just a few weeks before he died, he wrote a letter to his daughter. In it, he said, "It is terrible to wake up on Easter morning and have no voice to shout, 'He is risen!'--but it would be still more terrible to have a voice and not want to shout."
-- Vernon Grounds in Leadership, Vol. 8
#2756
Sangster threw himself into his work in British home missions, figuring he could still write and he would have even more time for prayer. "Let me stay in the struggle Lord," he pleaded. "I don't mind if I can no longer be a general, but give me just a regiment to lead." He wrote articles and books, and helped organize prayer cells throughout England. "I'm only in the kindergarten of suffering," he told people who pitied him.
Gradually Sangster's legs became useless. His voice went completely. But he could still hold a pen, shakily. On Easter morning, just a few weeks before he died, he wrote a letter to his daughter. In it, he said, "It is terrible to wake up on Easter morning and have no voice to shout, 'He is risen!'--but it would be still more terrible to have a voice and not want to shout."
-- Vernon Grounds in Leadership, Vol. 8
#2756
Friday, April 22, 2011
SIX HOURS ONE FRIDAY
"Surely this man was the Son of God." (Matthew 27:54)
Six hours on one Friday. Six hours that jut up on the plain of human history like Mount Everest in a desert. Six hours that have been deciphered, dissected, and debated for two thousand years.
What do these six hours signify? They claim to be the door in time through which eternity entered man's darkest caverns. They mark the moments that the Navigator descended into the deepest waters to leave anchor points for His followers.
What does that Friday mean? For the life blackened with failure, that Friday means forgiveness. For the heart scarred with futility, that Friday means purpose. And for the soul looking into this side of the tunnel of death, that Friday means deliverance.
-- Max Lucado in Six Hours One Friday
#2755
Six hours on one Friday. Six hours that jut up on the plain of human history like Mount Everest in a desert. Six hours that have been deciphered, dissected, and debated for two thousand years.
What do these six hours signify? They claim to be the door in time through which eternity entered man's darkest caverns. They mark the moments that the Navigator descended into the deepest waters to leave anchor points for His followers.
What does that Friday mean? For the life blackened with failure, that Friday means forgiveness. For the heart scarred with futility, that Friday means purpose. And for the soul looking into this side of the tunnel of death, that Friday means deliverance.
-- Max Lucado in Six Hours One Friday
#2755
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