Quote of the Day

...What we see in these two incidents is that God seems relatively unconcerned with giving specific answers to the anguished questions of Habakkuk and Job.  He answers them, but not point for point.  This suggests that all our questions about God's wisdom and justice and love may not be all that important to God in the end - or at least not as important as other things.  This doesn't mean we can't ask them.  In Christ, we have the freedom to speak what's on our hearts and minds.  God isn't going to cast us from his presence because we ask him some tough questions.  It just means that we shouldn't take our questions too seriously, because apparently God doesn't take them too seriously.

It may shock us to hear it put that way.  We think pretty highly of ourselves an dour questions.  We think it's our right to ask such questions and to demand such answers, even from God.  But God does not seem to share this view.  In the Bible, whenever God is asked a question that throws into doubt his kindness or justice, he more or less refuses to answer.......As the Cross demonstrates, God takes us seriously.  he takes our sin seriously.  But he continues to show relative indifference to our questions.  He does not answer them to our intellectual satisfaction, he refuses to submit himself to our interrogations.

That's because the really important question in the Bible is not any question we ask of God but the question he asks of us.  And though it is appropriate to ponder any number of questions...our questions must always take a backseat....

- From Mark Galli's book -  God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins

Quote of the Day

Everything we encounter today is used by God to prepare us for tomorrow. he wastes no trials, withholds no blessings, nor does he hold back  on the discipline of his soldiers.  All he does prepares us for future usefulness as vessels of honor.

- From Polycarp: a destroyer of our gods - by Rick Lambert

Quote of the Day

Our task is not to help people see God favorably but to see him accurately.  God has the power to touch hearts and to draw people his love and grace while they fully affirm his holiness and justice...God has appointed us to faithfully deliver his message, not to compose and edit it.  He has already written the message - it's called the Bible.  Who are we to spin it and tame it , or presume to be more loving than Jesus, who with outrageous love took upon himself the horrific penalty from our sin?  God's position is already taken; we need not apply.   We do not own the Christian faith.  It isn't ours to revise.  God's Word wasn't entrusted to us so that we could give it away piece-meal, leaving the next generation with the leftovers.  If we go on decade after decade parceling out fragments of the faith, what will be left?  When we abandon truths Christians once died for, will we no longer have truths worth living for?

- Randy Alcorn
From the Forward to 'God Wins:  Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins' - by Mark Galli