World-wide mission is an optional extra - Martin Goldsmith

This highlights a basic weakness throughout our churches and Christian unions. World-wide mission is an optional extra to be indulged in by those who are spiritually keen and who happen to be interested in it. Those who try to stimulate a belief that world mission is an integral part of the life of the church find that such exhortations fail to make much impact. Why?

Is it, perhaps, because we do not see world-wide missions as a basic theme of the whole of the Bible? So often missionary work is made to hing on only a few verses: the Great Commission in Matthew 28; Acts 1:8; John 4:35; Romans 10:14-17. As a speaker, I attend large numbers of missionary meetings and often wish that other passages could sometime be used for the Bible Reading. Does mission really depend only on these few verses? If so, then it is surely right that mission should be minor theme in the church's teaching. Ministers would be right not to mention overseas mission except when they happen to be expounding these particular verses - and if they are systematic in their exposition of the Bible, they would not come upon these passages very often.

But the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation demonstrates God's love for all peoples and nations everywhere; He is the sovereign God over all the world. He has a purpose to for all nations This purpose is quietly worked out throughout the centuries as described in the Bible. God made the world . .  God loved the world . . . God sent His Son into the world to redeem,  and we look forward to the climax - 'a great multitude which no man can number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the lamb'.

Martin Goldsmith 

Don't Just Stand There 1976 

IVP Downers Grove, IL

Eros vs friendship CS Lewis

“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.

... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.”

― C.S. Lewis, 

The Four Loves

- Eros, Friends, Love, Interpretation

Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Christianity

Tom Holland

Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Christianity

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

Tom Holland

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/religion/2016/09/tom-holland-why-i-was-wrong-about-christianity

- Tom Holland, Christianity, Atheism 

The mystery of godliness... Ian thomas

The Mystery of Godliness - W. Ian Thomas

"The moment you come to realize that only God can make a man godly, you are left with no option but to find God, and to know God, and to let God be God in you and through you, whoever He may be--and this will leave you with no margin for picking and choosing--for there is only one God and He is absolute, and He made you expressly for Himself!

Beware lest even as a Christian, you fall into Satan's trap! You may have found and come to know God in the Lord Jesus Christ, receiving Him sincerely as your Redeemer, yet if you do not enter in the mystery of godliness and allow God to be in you the origin of His own image, you will seek to be godly by submitting yourself to external rules and regulations, and by conformity to behavior patterns imposed upon you by the particular Christian society which you have chosen, and in which you hope to be found 'acceptable.' You will in this way perpetuate the pagan habit of practicing religion in the energy of the 'flesh,' and in the very pursuit of righteousness commit idolatry in honoring 'Christianity' more than Christ!"

The Mystery of Godliness
by W. Ian Thomas

Time to die... Jim Elliot

When it comes time to die, make sure that all you have to do is die. —Jim Elliot

Knowledge... Holmes

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Holmes

- empiricism, Sherlock Holmes, Truth, knowledge,

The road Ahead...Thomas Merton

http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/p-10-roadahead.html

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following
your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. 

Amen. 
 

Thomas Merton

Pursuit of God preface Tozer

Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this." Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold "right opinions," probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us. Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it, no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way, as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, and taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts. This book is a modest attempt to aid God's hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its Harne. 

A. W. Tozer Chicago, Ill. June 16, 1948

On Fear, Shame and honor - Amos Oz

They could never be certain that they would not utter something ridiculous, and ridicule was something they lived in fear of. They were scared to death of it. 
Amos Oz a Tale of Love and Darkness

-Shame, Honour, Amos Oz, Culture, Ridicule, Israeli Literature

On Books - A take of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz

The one thing we had plenty of was books. They were everywhere: From wall to laden wall, in the passage and the kitchen and entrance and on every windowsill. Thousands of books, in every corner of the apartment. I had the feeling that people might come and go, be born and die, but books went on forever. When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid, or Vancouver.
If once or twice it happened that there was not enough money to buy food for Shabbat, my mother would look at Father, and Father would understand that the moment had come to make a sacrifice, and turn to the bookcase. He was an ethical man, and he knew that bread takes precedence over books and that the good of the child takes precedence over everything. I remember his hunched back as he walked through the doorway, on his way to Mr. Meyer's secondhand bookshop with two or three beloved tomes under his arm, looking as though it cut him to the quick. So must Abraham's back have been bowed as he set off early in the morning from his tent with Isaac on his shoulder, on their way to Mount Moriah.
I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and them, even other peoples books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather binding, that gave you gooseflesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. and there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative scent. Sometimes the cloth came away with cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells.
Father would generally return an hour or two later, without the book, laden with brown paper bags containing bread, egg, cheese, occasionally even a can of corned beef. But sometimes he would come back from the sacrifice with a broad smile on his face, without his beloved books but also without anything to eat: he had indeed sold his books, but had immediately bought other books to take their place, because he had found such wonderful treasures in the secondhand bookshop, the kind of opportunity you encounter only once in a lifetime, and he had been unable to control himself. My mother forgave him, and so did I. . .

- Israel literature, Books, Amos Oz,

Fast Company head knowledge vs heart knowledge

“We have discovered that what looks like a small stagger actually makes a huge difference. The trick is to actually sit in the seat. In fact our main sales tool is to ship seats to airlines so they can sit in them,” says Molon Labe founder Hank Scott. “I have watched this several times—airline executives see the seat, nod their head and then say they get it. Then we ask them to actually sit down, next to a big fella like our head sales guy Thomas [6-foot-6, 250 pounds]. Within a few seconds they [really] get it—they stop being an airline executive and switch into passenger modes
Fast Company fixing the middle seat

https://www.fastcompany.com/90377949/airlines-are-finally-fixing-the-middle-seat?utm_campaign=Compass&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter%E2%80%AC

Issogesis - Walter C. Kaiser

Biblical Integrity in an Age of Theological Pluralism
In my judgment, the most dramatic moment in the entire twentieth century came in 1946 when W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published their article “The Intentional Fallacy” in the Swanee Review. This shot would eventually be heard throughout the century and around the literary world. Most of the careful distinctions this duo made have now been lost in the popular versions of their work, which are now understood to advocate something like this: Whatever an author may have meant or intended to say by his or her written words is now irrelevant to the meanings we have come to assign as the meaning we see in that author’s text! On this basis, the reader is the one who sets the meaning for a text.
This astounding thesis changed all the rules of communication and interpretation. It gave the course for postmodernism, with its attendant methodologies, an enormous boost by setting a literary work free from its author’s affirmations and thought and substituting instead a multiplicity of meanings that were imputed to the work by each and every individual reader! This has become the heart of the integrity issue as the twenty-first century now struggles to see if the word integrity has any meaning left for our day!

Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament
A Guide for the Church
Walter C. Kaiser

It could be summed up in the famous words of Richard of Chichester's prayer - to enable men and women 'to know Jesus Christ more clearly, to love him more dearly, and to follow him more nearly'.
William Barclay
General Introduction to the 1975 Edition