Grace - no one is keeping score!

Grace cannot prevail … until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.

Robert Farrar Capon

C.S. Lewis' reflections on Devotions

“I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

C.S. Lewis

Scandalous Grace

I love the scandalous grace Jesus sets forth in his provocative parable of the vineyard workers. Everybody got paid a day's wage. Everybody.

The vineyard owner was more interested in giving people what they need than paying people what they earned. God is like that. Jesus said so.

Brian Zahnd

For those who wonder if God the Father at the core is unpredictable

God is like Jesus.
God has always been like Jesus.
There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.
We haven’t always known this—
But now we do.

Brian Zahnd

Faith and Acceptance

"Faith is not a gimmick we can use to ace somebody who's basically against us into being favorable to us. You have to grant me it's trust in a relationship with someone who's already accepted us. Okay?"

Robert Farrar Capon

Christ's Death on the Cross wasn’t to satisfy God but instead to change our minds about how we perceive Him

Christ is a divine offering to humankind, not a human offering to God. – Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Instead of us bringing a sacrifice to God to appease him, through the cross God brings a sacrifice to us to reconcile us. – Derek Flood

Tolkien on Food and Cheer

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." — J.R.R. Tolkien

What really is the Good News?

The gospel is not the news that we can receive Jesus into our lives; the gospel is the news that Jesus has received us into His.

C. Baxter Kruger

What the World Needs

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

—Howard Thurman

The most important idea to ever grasp

“And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.” 
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

"the opposite of sin is faith, and never virtue"
Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

This to be is the hardest, but the most important lesson to learn. I am still learning it and I will for the rest of my days.
(Me)

Is there value in avoiding Criticism?

“Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing” ~Aristotle

How to truly help another

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”

― Benjamin Disraeli

Your story

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you

Maya Angelou

Beauty

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

LEO TOLSTOY, The Kreutzer Sonata

The Beginning of Love

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

Thomas Merton

Where's it coming from?

Whatever is done out of fullness increases fullness and whatever is done out of emptiness increases emptiness.

Greg Boyd
Twitter may 2011

Source of Happiness

The most dependable sources of happiness are those that lie at "the intersection of pleasure and meaning"

Tal Ben-Shahar

Suffering and Imagination

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.


Rob Bell

God's Plans

It's not that everything happens as part of God's plan, but the infinitely wise God has a plan for everything that happens.


Gregory Boyd - Twitter Feed - Feb. 2011

People

"When we begin to view people as ideology-carriers rather than human beings, we begin to travel a dark road."

John Ortberg (from his Blog - January 2011)