“Worldly afflictions do often happen to them [christians], but the evil of them [worldly afflictions] doesn’t befall them. They may be exposed to difficulties, losses, and troubles, but he is not properly in danger of them, except as he may be said to be in danger of that which cannot do him any hurt.”
Jonathan Edwards
“Christians are not safe from evil things but they are safe from the evil of all things.”
Tim Keller summarising Jonathan Edwards
“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
Romans 8:37 (ESV)
Memory
“Memory is the residue of thought.” -Daniel T. Willingham
Prayer and trust
“The things we trust God with are revealed in the things we pray about and the things we fail to pray about really exposes the things we foolishly think we can handle on our own.”
H.B. Charles
The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards
Faramir smiled. “A pert servant, Master Samwise. But nay: the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards. Yet there was naught in this to praise. I had no lure or desire to do other than I have done.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
On tradition
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.”
Jaroslav Pelikan
Weeds
“The only thing I need to do to end up with a garden of weeds is nothing.”
Life without God
“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
– Bertrand Russel
The natural product of a universe without a transcendent and immanent God is unyielding despair.
Athanasius Contra Mundum
“If the world is against the truth, then I am against the world.”
– Athanasius of Alexandria
On every great work of God
“I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God: first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.”
James Hudson Taylor
The Great Judgement Morning – Bertram H. Shadduck
I dreamed that the great judgment morning
Had dawned, and the trumpet had blown;
I dreamed that the nations had gathered
To judgment before the white throne;
From the throne came a bright, shining angel,
And he stood on the land and the sea,
And he swore with his hand raised to Heaven,
That time was no longer to be.
Refrain:
And, oh, what a weeping and wailing,
As the lost were told of their fate;
They cried for the rocks and the mountains,
They prayed, but their prayer was too late.
The rich man was there, but his money
Had melted and vanished away;
A pauper he stood in the judgment,
His debts were too heavy to pay;
The great man was there, but his greatness,
When death came, was left far behind!
The angel that opened the records,
Not a trace of his greatness could find.
The widow was there with the orphans,
God heard and remembered their cries;
No sorrow in heaven forever,
God wiped all the tears from their eyes;
The gambler was there and the drunkard,
And the man that had sold them the drink,
With the people who gave him the license,
Together in hell they did sink.
The moral man came to the judgment,
But self-righteous rags would not do;
The men who had crucified Jesus
Had passed off as moral men, too;
The soul that had put off salvation,
“Not tonight; I’ll get saved by and by,
No time now to think of religion!”
At last they had found time to die.
The Tngs 