Traveling Light Relay

The setting in which this is happening to this man is a setting of suffering. The reason this man is willing to believe and able to believe and moving toward Jesus is because tremendous suffering has come into his life. What would possess a man of his stature and royalty to walk 25 miles to see an illiterate Carpenter? The only thing that moves us toward Jesus, in most cases, is suffering. I think we need to be honest about that.

— Tim Keller
from a sermon on John 4

One night, a [Pharisee] came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn’t do.

Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” … He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.”

He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic–that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.” He said, in other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.”

— Martin Luther King
from speech given August 16, 1967, Atlanta, Georgia

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says “If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.” I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature; either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be in the one kind of creature is heaven: that is it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be in the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.
— C.S. Lewis

There is nothing drab about worship: but something rather exciting as we wait for God to move. There is nothing clerical about it: every member is involved. There is nothing verbose about it: silence can be golden. “There was silence in heaven for about half an hour” when the ascended Jesus disclosed himself (Rev. 8:1) Time after time I have known a divine stillness fall upon a congregation when the Spirit of God has been active in it. Nobody moves. Nobody wants to go. Sometimes it is a total silence. Sometimes it leads into informal praise. But everyone knows that the Lord has made his presence felt.
— Michael Green, from
Living the Story: Biblical Spirituality for Everyday Christians

The essential and primary invitation is to join God. We do this through becoming a disciple of Jesus who includes us in his own relationship with the Father. This is much more than joining the church. Becoming an adherent of the church without becoming an adherent of Jesus leads almost inevitably to following followers of Jesus instead of following Jesus Himself.
— R. Paul Stevens, from
Living the Story: Biblical Spirituality for Everyday Christians

We never seem to be satisfied with what we possess or achieve; we are restless and crave what is novel.
As Plato puts it, we are like leaky vessels. It is as though we were containers into which we keep pouring things, but we never get filled up because there is a hole in each container and something is always leaking out. So we spend our lives trying to attain fullness, satisfaction, and completeness, and yet we never do. We go on thinking that if we only we had just a bit more, then we would be satisfied; if we had something else, then our potential would be realized, our happiness assured, and our fulfillment achieved.
— Diogenes Allen