renewal

George Foreman looks as if he might have organically appeared out of the very ground around the church.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.

Cross and resurrection are the South and North polls, true gospel polarities, of a single, undivided, salvation world. Remove either Paul and you've got salvation.

Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life__hey have never felt its breath, its heartbeat__owever much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

When you enter heaven you shall find Him there bearing the dew of His youth; and through eternity the Lord Jesus shall still remain the perennial spring of joy, and life, and glory to His people.

Let your soul be washed by the waves of love to feel the joy of life.

He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.

As you call people to submit to the Person of Christ, you can trust the Spirit of Christ to lead them to salvation.

Christianity tells a big story. It allows us to see our own story in a new way.

Amazing tributaries feeding where the rivers will never flow....

The author offers Paul Tripp's analogy that most of the strategies for growth in the Christian life amounts to stapling live roses on a dead bush.

After her initial conversion as a teenager, the author writes, "I was sent back into a world that no longer looked familiar to me. I had to relearn how to do everything.

The author cites researcher David Howard's idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.

I didn't know how faith felt when it grew incrementally.

We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested. The flower that wilted last year is gone. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather they are replaced. It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid. And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.

Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.

Jesus takes the chaos of the world upon Himself.

The bottle of the creature cracks and dries up, but the well of the Creator never fails; happy is he who dwells at the well.