This Sunday’s readings: Luke 14:25-27
Reflections
Reading: C.S. Lewis excerpt, Counting the Cost
So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
The believer’s cross is no longer any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension, the bearing of which is demanded. The believer’s cross must be, like his Lord’s, the price of his social nonconformity. It is not, like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictable suffering; it is the end of the path freely chosen after counting the cost. It is not, like Luther’s or Thomas Muntzer’s or Zinzendorf’s or Kierkegaard’s cross, an inward wrestling of the sensitive soul with self and sin; it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come.
~ John Howard, 1939- , former Australian politician
I think too often people, even Christians, really short-change what salvation really is about. We picture it as really nothing more than us walking on streets of gold in white robes, and always smiling…but still being our puny little selves, just a bit cleaner. Needless to say, I don’t think we really grasp what God is up to.
~ Joel Edmund Anderson, from blogpost, Nov 14, 2015, counting the cost
We are not sent into this world mainly to enjoy the loveliness therein, nor to sit us down in passive ease; no, we were sent here for action. The soul that seeks to do the will of God with a pure heart, fervently, does not yield to the lethargy of ease.
~ Dorothea Dix, 1802-1887, nurse, advocate for mentally ill
Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.
~ Brother Lawrence, 1614-1691, lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris
The thing at bottom is this, that men have low thoughts of God, and high thoughts of themselves; and therefore it is that they look upon God as having so little right, and they so much.
~ Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758, New England pastor and theologian