Lament is not a path to worship but the path of worship.  -- Michael Card

For when there is a question as to whether a man is good, one does not ask what he believes, or what he hopes, but what he loves.
  --Augustine

At some times you stand perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, uncertain whether to combat it by force or by humble love. Always decide, “I will combat it by humble love.” If you make up your mind about that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humbly is a terrible force. It is the strongest of all things and there is nothing like it.  --Dostoevsky

We cannot skip from the Fall to the Cross. God chose, instead of sending his Son to redeem Adam and Eve, to wait. And what God did between the time of Adam and Eve and Jesus Christ was to work redemption in the form of community. The Old Testament is about Israel; the New Testament is about Jesus and the church. The Bible is about God’s people, the community of faith. The church is not an institution that provides benefits for individual Christians so they can carry on their personal relationship with God until that church can no longer provide what they need. Instead, the church is the focus of God’s redemptive work on earth in the present age. --Scot McKnight

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.  --Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Spiritual formation is not an option….Spiritual formation is the primal reality of life. Every unit of life is an experience of spiritual formation. Every action taken, every response made, every dynamic of relationship, every thought held, every emotion allowed…we are shaped into some kind of being….The question is not whether to undertake spiritual formation; the question is what kind of spiritual formation are we engaged in. Are we being increasingly conformed to the world, or are we being increasingly conformed to the image of Christ?  --M. Robert Mulholland, Jr.,

One of my grave concerns is that the church has joined forces with the world in a conspiracy of noise, busyness, and hurry. The outcome is that we are distracted from a life of intimacy with God and each other. Most churches are frighteningly busy places, offering little if any encouragement to adhere to God’s counsel: “Be still, and know that I am God!”  -- Fil Anderson

Our love for God must begin with God’s love for us.    
--C.S. Lewis

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

And only he who sees takes off his shoes;

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

--Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul, and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart. --John Calvin

Christians…ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars. --Francis Schaeffer

The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work that you need most to do and that the world most needs to have done. The place God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.  --Frederick Buechner

Our spiritual journey must lead through the desert or else our healing will be the product of our own will and wisdom. It is in the silence of the desert that we hear our dependence on noise. It is in the poverty of the desert that we see clearly our attachments to the trinkets and baubles we cling to for security and pleasure. The desert shatters the soul’s arrogance and leaves body and soul crying out in thirst and hunger. In the desert we trust God or die.   --Dan Allender

When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. --Dietrich Bonhoeffer