British scholar Tony Lane explains that “the love of God implies his wrath. Without his wrath God simply does not love in the sense that the Bible portrays his love.” God’s love is not sentimental; it is holy. It is tender, but not squishy. It involves not only compassion, kindness, and mercy beyond measure (what the New Testament calls grace) but also indignation against injustice and unremitting opposition to all that is evil.
– Timothy George (full article here)
This feast is an eternal feast. You be not invited to feast daintily for once, and then [return] to your old beggarly famished condition you were in before; but this royal provision is to be your perpetual entertainment. You may live upon such food forever and ever. You shall enter into the house of God, and you shall go no more out. You have been hungry and thirsty in times past, but if you come to this gospel feast you shall hunger nor thirst no more. Revelation 7:16, “They shall hunger no more, nor thirst any more.” John 6:35, “He that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.” At God’s right hand there are pleasures forevermore. There you may always eat and drink, and always be satisfied and yet never be glutted. You may eat and drink abundantly and never be in danger of excesses.
– Jonathan Edwards
We are great, my friend; we shall not be saved for trampling that greatness under foot… Come then; leap upon these mountains, skip upon these hills and heights of earth. The road to Heaven does not run from the world but through it. The longest Session of all is no discontinuation of these sessions here, but a lifting of them by priestly love. It is a place for men, not ghosts–for the risen gorgeousness of the New Earth and for the glorious earthiness of the True Jerusalem.
Eat well then. Between our love and His Priesthood, He make all things new. Our Last Home will be home indeed.
– Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb
As parents, as human beings, it is far too easy to get sucked into the vortex of materialism and greed that has so taken over our society.
Bigger is not always better and less is often more.
Are we accumulating “stuff” for our children or are we enriching and developing their lives and hearts?
From HousetoHome. Read the whole thing here.
(Jean Louis Théodore Géricault, 1822)
The 1984 movie Amadeus, which depicts the rivalry between Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, is often cited as a classic example of envy. Here’s an article that, while not written from a posture of Christian faith, offers keen insight into how envy works.
Quoting the work of philosopher, Alain de Botton, the article tries to redeem envy from its reputation as a deadly sin and offers a positive role for it in our lives:
The real problem with envy is not feeling it, but what you do with it. Envy is a highly beneficial emotion in so far as it goads us towards things we are capable of getting.
Is envy a deadly sin, as the Bible suggests? Or is it, as de Botton claims, ‘a goad to greatness’?
“He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart he had become a dragon himself.”
(C.S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader)
“Now is it a suitable thing to tell what are the seven deadly sins, this is to say, chieftains of sins. They all run on one leash, but in diverse manners. Now are they called chieftains, forasmuch as they are chief and origin of all other sins. Of the root of these seven sins, then, is Pride the general root of all harms. For of this root spring certain branches, as Anger, Envy, Accidia or Sloth, Avarice or Covetousness (to common understanding), Gluttony, and Lechery.”
(Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parson’s Tale)
7 Deadly Sins 