Friday, July 18, 2014
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Monday, July 14, 2014
Psalms That are A Response To Living and Moving and Having Our Being In God
“The function of this kind of psalm is theological, that is, to praise and thank God. But such a psalm also has a social function of importance. It is to articulate and maintain a “sacred canopy” under which the community of faith can live out its life with freedom from anxiety. That is, life is not simply a task to be achieved, an endless construction of a viable world made by effort and human ingenuity. There is a givenness to be relied on, guaranteed by none other than God. That givenness is here before us, stands over us, endures beyond us, and surrounds us behind and before.”
http://ref.ly/o/spiritltypsalms/35640 via the Logos Bible Android app.
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
Tuesday, July 08, 2014
The Counter Cultural Nature of Trusting (and resting in) Jesus
“Such a grid in two movements reveals an understanding of life that is fundamentally alien to our culture. The dominant ideology of our culture is committed to continuity and success and to the avoidance of pain, hurt, and loss. The dominant culture is also resistant to genuine newness and real surprise. It is curious but true, that surprise is as unwelcome as is loss. And our culture is organized to prevent the experience of both.
This means that when we practice either move—into disorientation or into new orientation—we engage in a countercultural activity, which by some will be perceived as subversive. Perhaps that is why the complaint psalms have nearly dropped out of usage. Where the worshiping community seriously articulates these two moves, it affirms an understanding of reality that knows that if we try to keep our lives we will lose them, and that when lost for the gospel, we will be given life (Mark 8:35). Such a practice of the Psalms cannot be taken for granted in our culture, but will be done only if there is resolved intentionality to live life in a more excellent way.”
--Walter Brueggemann
http://ref.ly/o/spiritltypsalms/31768 via the Logos Bible Android app.
Monday, July 07, 2014
Parallel of Our Difficulties with The Psalms
“One move we make is out of a settled orientation into a season of disorientation. This move is experienced partly as changed circumstance, but it is much more a personal awareness and acknowledgment of the changed circumstance. This may be an abrupt or a slowly dawning acknowledgment. It constitutes a dismantling of the old, known world and a relinquishment of safe, reliable confidence in God’s good creation. The movement of dismantling includes a rush of negativities, including rage, resentment, guilt, shame, isolation, despair, hatred, and hostility. It is that move that characterizes much of the Psalms in the form of complaint and lament.”
--Walter Brueggemann
http://ref.ly/o/spiritltypsalms/25104 via the Logos Bible Android app.
Thursday, July 03, 2014
The Spirit of Prayer
“The spirit of the soul is in itself nothing else but a spirit breathed forth from the life of God, for the sole purpose that the life, nature, working, and inclinations of God might be manifest in it.
“The Spirit of prayer is a pressing forth of the soul out of this earthly life; it is a stretching with all its desires after the life of God; it is a leaving, as far as it can, all its own spirit, in order to receive a Spirit from above—to be one life, one love, one spirit with Christ in God. This prayer, which is an emptying all of its own natural desires an opening of itself for the light and love of God to enter into it, is the prayer in the name of Christ to with nothing is denied. The love that God has for the soul—His eternal, never ceasing desire to enter into it, to dwell in it, and to open the birth of His Holy Word and spirit in it—stays until the door of the heart opens for it. For nothing can keep God out of the soul, or hinder His holy union with it, except the heart that is turned away from Him.
“A will that is surrender to worldliness is much like Nebuchadnezzar, who ‘was driven from men and ate grass like oxen’ (Daniel 4.33). Such a will has the same life as the beasts of the field, for earthly desires maintain the same life in a man as an ox. It is suitable for earthly food to be only desired and use for the support of the earthly body; but when the desire, the delight, the longing of the soul is set up on earthly things, then humanity is degraded, is fallen from God, and the life of the soul is made as earthly and animal as the life of the body.”
—William Law as quoted by Andrew Murray in God's Best Secrets.
Tuesday, July 01, 2014
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