Tag Archive - Jesus

Divine Conspiracy – Ch.3

September 14, 2010 in Jesus, Reading with 1 Comment

Here are some of my favorite quotes from chapter 3 of Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy:

“Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.”

“The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.”

“We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right.”

“As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.”

God According to Adam Clarke

September 6, 2010 in Jesus, Poetry, Spirituality with 0 Comments

Adam Clarke“[God is] the eternal, independent, and self existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.”

Adam Clarke, 1762-1832

The Smell of Jesus

August 28, 2010 in Bible, Jesus with 2 Comments

“For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life.” 2 Corinthians 2:15-16a

Some of you may know that I had a very interesting job in high school. I sold cologne at the mall. Yes, I was that guy that sprayed cards and handed them to you as you walked by. It was an odd job, but I absolutely loved it.

Nautica Competition CologneYou quickly learn how subjective our sense of smell is. I was selling the cologne from Nautica. One person would tell me that they absolutely loved a fragrance, and the very next person would gag at the smell of it. Apart from the sales/persuasion part of it, I learned that there isn’t a “best” smell out there that everyone can agree on.

So what a powerful analogy that Paul compares Christians as the “pleasing aroma of Christ.” To some, we are the smell of life. And that is an intriguing idea when you are bogged down in the stench of the sinful world. But to others, we are an “aroma that brings death.” We are a reminder that there is Truth, and that God is in control no matter how people choose to disregard Him.

But in all of this, I think the most dangerous people are Christians with no aroma at all. Self described “Christians” who either don’t have their own relationship with God, who don’t have His Spirit filling their lives, and as a result they don’t even smell like Christ. Or, it could be Christians who have so accepted other smells from the world that it overrides the smell of Christ in their life. These people tell the world that Christ doesn’t smell any different than anything else, and people thus conclude that He must be irrelevant for their lives.

What does your life smell like?

Divine Conspiracy – Ch. 2

August 23, 2010 in Jesus, Reading with 0 Comments

Here are some of my favorite ideas from chapter 2 of Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy.

“But, to be quite frank, grace is cheap from the point of view of those who need it.”

“Helmut Thielicke points out that we often wonder if the celebrities who advertise foods and beverages actually consume what they are selling. He goes on to say that this is the very question most pressing for those of us who speak for Christ. Surely something has gone wrong when moral failures are so massive and widespread among us. Perhaps we are not eating what we are selling. More likely, I think, what we are ‘selling’ is irrelevant to our real existence and without power over daily life.”

“But we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now–the eternal kind of life–as the target. The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as natural parts.”

“Right at the heart of this alienation lies the absence of Jesus the teacher from our lives. Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him.”

“We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself–when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it.”

“We must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. We can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.”

Are You Thirsty?

August 12, 2010 in Jesus with 2 Comments

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:13-14

What incredibly profound words, especially when all around us are realizations of how thirsty we truly are. Here is an incredible picture that I came across from a collection called “Absence of Water” by Gigi Cifali. This is poetically heartbreaking and an artistic reminder of our need/love for water. It is from the Moseley Baths in Birmingham that opened in 1907 and closed in 2004.

Absence of Water 1 - Gigi Cifali

I’ve also noticed the tag line for a very popular ad campaign. The Dos Equis beer commercials feature “the most interesting man in the world.” He ends each of his commercials with the phrase: “stay thirsty my friends.”

It dawned on me that this is exactly the message of the world. Stay thirsty. Try as hard as you can to quench your thirst, but realize that you can’t, and ultimately enjoy being thirsty and left wanting more. Jesus, by complete contrast, tells us that He can fill us in a way that will cause us to never thirst again. But we have to choose where we go when we are thirsty. Will we go to the never-ending options that the world shows us? Or will we take our thirst to the One who can quench it?

Are you thirsty?

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