Every relationship for a Christian is an opportunity to love another person like God has loved us. To lay down our desires and do what’s in his or her best interest. To care for him or her even when there’s nothing in it for us. To want that person’s purity and holiness because it pleases God and protects him or her.
Some of you may think ministry is a grand adventure. Ministry, however, is simply loving the person in front of you. Its about stopping for the one and being the very fragrance of Jesus to a lost and dying world.
(via favoredgrace)
We are too busy to pray, and so we are too busy to have power.
(via consecratedliving)
At the Cross we see both the depths of our depravity and the heights of God’s amazing love for us. We witness both the terrifying intensity of God’s just wrath for sin and His unspeakable mercy and love for sinners.
Prayer isn’t a time for holy thoughts, or purity, or carefully crafted phrases, she was discovering. It’s a time for rage, for pain, for despair and hope. A time to sit in the dirt and joy of everyday life, to purge herself of the questions that plagued her by flinging them at God. Sometimes when she prayed, all she could do was sit there with her torso ripped apart and her guts in her hand. When you pray you sweat blood.
and i had a full breakfast about thirty minutes ago and I’M STILL SO HUNGRY and i have six pages to write by four.
update: when you’ve been up for five hours, you forget that it’s still early (9:24 am). now i have a little over four pages left, i think.
“They wanted to pray together, but not see each other, before the ceremony.”
(via sarahrd)
We should not be entertained by the sins for which Christ died.
brothers, rise up. your sisters need you to show them their worth, strength, & potential.
sisters, rise up. your brothers need you to show them their worth, strength, & potential.
Swarthmore TEDx Talk on Social Change
Stop fighting the war on poverty and start fighting the war on pathological power.
“Are you willing to fight the war on pathological power even if it means you giving up your own power?”
n. a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for Him.
It is okay to want the love of someone else. It is okay that you are not happy when you go without encouragement. I made you to love and to be loved. You are designed to have relationships, and not just with me. Hear me when I say that I am all you need. You do not need anyone else. I am all you need, but I am also the minimum that you need. There are many members to the family of God. Do not doubt me, I will always provide, for I know the desires of your heart and I am faithful to fulfill them. Seek first my kingdom, and I will bless you with deep friendships. I will provide people who are committed to you in love.
Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and He will say: Here am I.
(1) In contemporary Western symbolism, the heart is the seat of emotions: e.g., “I love you with all my heart.” But in the symbol-world of Scripture, the heart is the seat of the whole person. It is closer to what we mean by “mind,” though in English “mind” is perhaps a little too restrictively cerebral.
(2) So “guard your heart” means more than “be careful what, or whom, you love”—though it cannot easily mean less than that. It means something like, “Be careful what you treasure; be careful on what you set your affections and thoughts.”
(3) For the “heart,” in this usage, “is the wellspring of life.” It directs the rest of life. What you set your mind and emotions on determines where you go and what you do. It may easily pollute all of life. The imagery is perhaps all the clearer in this section of Proverbs because the ensuing verses mention other organs: “Put away perversity from your mouth; keep corrupt talk far from your lips. Let your eyes look straight ahead…. Make level paths for your feet” (Prov. 4:24-26). But above all, guard your heart, “for it is the wellspring of life.” It is the source of everything in a way that, say, the feet are not. Jesus picks up much the same imagery. “You brood of vipers,” he says to one group, “how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him” (Matt. 12:34-35, italics added). So guard your heart.
(4) Make this duty of paramount importance: “Above all else, guard your heart.” One can see why. If the heart is nothing other than the center of your entire personality, that is what must be preserved. If your religion is merely external, while your “heart” is a seething mass of self-interest, what good is the religion? If your heart is ardently pursuing peripheral things (not necessarily prurient things), then from a Christian perspective you soon come to be occupied with the merely peripheral. If what you dream of is possessing a certain thing, if what you pant for is a certain salary or reputation, that shapes your life. But if above all else you see it to be your duty to guard your heart, that resolve will translate itself into choices of what you read, how you pray, what you linger over. It will prompt self-examination and confession, repentance, and faith, and will transform the rest of your life.
— D.A. Carson’s For the Love of God devotional
