Authors From The United States

"He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and will see the defect when the weavingof a life-time is unrolled. Neglect of one duty often renders us unfit for another. God "is a rewarder," and one great principle on which He dispenses His rewards is this — through our faithfulness in one thing He bestows grace upon us to be faithful in another."

"Disordered nerves are the origin of much religious despair, when the individual does not suspect it; and then the body and mind have a reciprocal influence upon each other, and it is difficult to tell which influences the other most. The physician is often blamed, when the fault lies with the minister. Depression never benefits body or soul. We are saved by hope."

"Decision is a vastly important thing with a convicted sinner. He must choose, or he must be lost. If he will not do it, he may expect the Divine Spirit to depart from him, and leave him to his own way."

"My observation continues to confirm me more and more in the opinion, that to experience religion is to experience the truth of the great doctrines of Divine grace."

"There are multitudes in our congregations who are just waiting while they ought to be acting. They must work, if they would have God work in them. There can be no religion without obedience."

"You have "done all you could" to save yourself; and yet you have accomplished nothing. Fly, then, to Christ, — to Christ, just as you are, just as unworthy — to Christ now, "while it is called to-day." Be assured you are welcomed to all His benefits."

"You must make your choice whether to hold on to some thing which cannot save you, or let go, and fall into the hands of the Lord."

"Mrs. M., you seem to be very sick." " Yes," said she, "I am dying." "And are you ready to die?" "Sir, God knows I have taken Him at His word, and I am not afraid to die."

"When he abandoned all attempt to save himself, Jesus Christ saved him. This was all he knew about it. And more, this was all there was about it."

"Anyone can fight the battles of just one day. It is only when you and I add the battles of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives us mad. It is the remorse or bitterness for something that happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time."

"I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me. (p. 51)"

"Rocking the vote may mean going to the booths and writing in our Candidate, because he doesn't seem to be on the ballot. (p. 335)"

"And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them."

"The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into"

"For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death."

"Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God's blessing on the poor rather than on the rich and would insist that it's not enough to just love your friends. I just began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said."

"“I asked participants who claimed to be "strong followers of Jesus" whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question, I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor."

"There are some things to die for but none to kill for."

"We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the Kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy, too. But I guess that's why God invented highlighers, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest."

"Mother Theresa always said, "Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta.”"

"And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about."

"I heard one of the teaching pastors at Willow Creek speak on the rich young ruler text that Rich (Mullins) had talked about in Wheaton's chapel. The teaching pastor had said, "now this doesn't mean you have to go sell your rollerblades and golf clubs," and he went on to "contextualize" the teaching to show that we just need to be careful not to make idols of our things. I wasn't so sure about that. Jesus doesn't tell the man to be a better steward, or to treat his workers fairly, or not to make money an idol. He tells this highly educated and devoutly religious young man that he lacks one thing: giving up everything he owns to give the poor. (p. 103)"

"We shall do even greater things because the love that lived in the radical Christ now lives within millions of ordinary radicals all over the planet. (p. 85)"

"I must say that I am still passionately pro-life, I just have a much more holistic sense of what it means to be for life, knowing that life does not just begin at conception and end at birth, and that if I am going to discourage abortion, I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers. (p. 44)"

"Over and over, when I ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, I can feel the Spirit whisper to me, "You tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet." (p. 65)"

"I remember hearing about an old comic strip back in the days of St. Ed's. Two guys are talking to each other, and one of them says he has a question for God. He wants to ask why God allows all of this poverty and war and suffering to exist in the world. And his friend says, "Well, why don't you ask?" The fellow shakes his head and says he's scared. When his friend asks why, he mutters, "I'm scared God will ask me the same question." (p. 65)"

"We were not interested in a Christianity that offered these families only mansions and streets of golds in heaven when all they wanted was a bed for their kids now. And many Christians had an extra one. (p. 64)"

"I guess God can use the mafia, but I would like God to use the church. (p. 63)"

"Perhaps the devil is just as likely to wear a three-piece suit as to have horns and a pitchfork. And perhaps the angels look more like the bums in the alley than like feathered white babies. (p. 50)"

"It is recognizing God's eternality that liberates our minds from their consumer inclination to reduce him to a commodity."

"Although the forces of consumerism would have us remain forever in Neverland by running after every product promising to satisfy our desire and alleviate our suffering, the invitation of Christ is precisely the opposite."

"Whether by trials of circumstance or by disciplines of choice, we cannot escape our calling to suffer with Christ."

"By conducting a media fast - turning off the television, radio, and computer - we stop the influx of poison that keeps us buying and desiring more."

"We are more than our base desires, and our lives are not sustained by gratifying them."

"Disciplines teach us to overcome the temptation to gratify our immediate desires so that we may attain a higher one."

"The "trials of ordinary existence" are the divine curricula for spiritual maturity."

"The transformation of our desires happens like all spiritual transformation - by following in the steps of Jesus. In a word, I believe the answer is suffering."

"Jesus is offering us a holiday at the sea, but we must be willing to abandon our mud pies in the slums."

"Jesus isn't interested in negotiating. He knows that death, the surrendering of our immediate desires, is how we can take hold of an even greater joy."

"Self-denial, the surrendering of immediate desires, is a prerequisite of the Christian life. This is noticeably absent in the gospel of Consumer Christianity."

"We do not desire too much, but too little."

"The dilemma posed by consumerism is not the endless manufacturing of desires, but the temptation to settle for desires far below what we were created for."

"Scripture and tradition tell us that formation into the likeness of Christ, also known as spiritual maturity, is not achieved by always getting what we want."

"To believe that employing consumer methods in the church will produce spiritually mature Christians is delusional thinking akin to expecting a dog to hatch from a chicken's egg."

"Scripture champions contentment and self-control, not the endless pursuit of personal desires. Teaching and modeling these increasingly un-American values is not a high priority in most churches."

"In less than a century, Christians have gone from opposing over-consumption at Christmas to demanding it be done in Christ's name alone."

"Let's break free from artificial relationships with unfeeling, uncaring, unloving institutions that cannot contain the unpredictable wind of God's Spirit, and focus instead on building soulish connections with real people filled with the breath of God."

"The influence of consumerism has led us to confuse institutions for people, means for the mission, and programs for the Spirit's power."

"Properly understood, the church is not an institution. It is the community of Jesus' followers on earth - men, women, an children filled with God's Spirit, living in communion with him, one another, and the world."

"Consumer Christianity seeks to construct programs to capture God's power and produce predetermined outcomes, rather than surrender to the mysterious movement of God's grace which, like the wind or fire, is beyond our control."