Weekend Edition, September 17-19, 2010

"My own love and desire for my kids' love is so strong that it opened my eyes to how much God desires and loves us.  Through this experience, I came to understand that my desire for my children is only a faint echo of God's great love for me and for every person He made.  I am just an earthly, sinful father, and I love my kids so much it hurts.  How could I not trust a heavenly, perfect Father who loves me infinitely more than I will ever love my kids?" ---Francis Chan in Crazy Love

"I accepted a pressing invitation to go to Plaistow.  At five in the evening I expounded there, and at eight again.  But most of the hearers were very quiet and unconcerned.  In the morning, therefore, I spoke stronger words.  But it is only the voice of the Son of God which is able to wake the dead." ---John Wesley, Monday, September 10, 1739

"Maturity does not come easily.  It comes gradually, usually the result of a lifelong search.  None of us reaches it without help.  The help we all need is that strange thing we call encouragement.  It is hard to describe but when you receive it, you know you have been given something more valuable than money." ---Walter Albritton in Life is Short, So Laugh Often, Live Fully and Love Deeply

"He [Jesus] sets aside his glory, clothes himself with humility, and sneaks into the enemy camp, under cover of night, to whisper words of love to his own: 'I have come for you.'  The coming of Jesus of Nazareth was . . . like the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan.  A dangerous mission, a great invasion, a daring raid into enemy territory, to save the free world, but also to save one man.  In the midst of the great invasion, like the storming of the beaches at Normandy, God yet sets his eye on one lost soul.  On you." ---John Eldredge in Epic

"Much of the effort and opportunity of springtime rests in the depth and degree of our faith.  Life provides no assurances that the planting of seeds will provide the reaping of crops.  We have only the demonstrated experiences of others to draw upon.  The storms of life could cancel our efforts expended in the fields of opportunity.  But to expend no effort during the spring will assure no results during the fall." ---Jim Rohn in The Seasons of Life

"The value of the individual story of Christ's healing power lies largely in the undeniable fact that each human life stands at a unique point in the total web of human experience, and, as a consequence, each one has an approach to others which is not identical with the opportunity of any other human being.  If I do not open the door for another, it may never be opened, for it is possible that I may be the only one who holds this particular key." ---Elton Trueblood in The Company of the Committed

"Totalitarian are the claims of Christ.  No vestige of reservation of 'our' rights can remain.  Straddle arrangements and compromises between our allegiances to the surface level and the divine Center cannot endure.  Unless the willingness is present to be stripped of our last earthly dignity and hope, and yet still praise Him, we have no message in this our day of refugees, bodily and spiritual.  Nor have we yielded to the monitions of the Inner Instructor." ---Thomas Kelly in A Testament of Devotion

"Satan does not tempt us to do wrong things; he tempts us in order to make us lose what God has put into us by regeneration, viz., the possibility of being of value to God.  He does not come on the line of tempting us to sin, but on the line of shifting the point of view, and only the Spirit of God can detect this as a temptation of the devil." ---Oswald Chambers

"If you had live in Rome in those [Paul's] days, where would you have thought the future was?  The typical person would have looked to Nero's palace for the power and the future, believing that the significant figure was the emperor ruling from his throne.  The reality is that today, two thousand years later, we name our dogs Nero and our sons Paul.  The world's ways are never the ways of God, and the world's people are never the people of God.  The one who cast a long shadow over the next two thousand years was one who was tucked away in a simple house and shackled to a Roman soldier, not the one who sat on the throne, dictating to people how they should please him." ---Dennis Kinlaw in This Day With the Master