Food is part of God’s creating. A right relationship with food points us toward Him…. The table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where He becomes present to us.
The Spirit is the reason we can build a church and have confidence that we will get it at least a little bit right.
And I understood that I ought not ask for a prayer language until I could ask without making it the test of my entire faith.
… I am not the author of my prayers; when they come, they come from God.
It is a great gift when God gives me a stirring, a feeling, a something-at-all in prayer. But work is being done whether I feel it or not.
I knew, as soon as I woke up, that the dream had come from God and it was about the reality of Jesus. The truth of Him. The He was a person whose pronouns you had to capitalize. That He was God.
The anxious heart, in its flailings, loses its hold on whatever grace God has bestowed upon it, and is sapped of the strength to “resist the temptations of the Evil One, who is all the more ready to fish…in troubled waters.
It means the God who worries about our sins is not only God the judge, but also God the caretaker. He worries about sin because He craves righteousness, but also, simply, because He loves us.
Ellie tells me, often, some variation on this theme: that I am a little too invested in how I’m feeling about church and God, and perhaps not invested enough in how I am serving church, God, neighbor.
It’s not all about mountaintops. Mostly it’s about training so that you’ll know the mountaintop for what it is when you get there.
(Meanwhile, other people seem to be getting along with God just fine, very well indeed. Why not me?)
The change, I think, that conversion gradually effects on your heart is this: you come, over some stretched-out time, to want to do the things that God wants you to do, because you want to be close to Him.
It turns out there is something worse than attending a wedding where you don’t know anyone: attending a wedding where you know six people, and they are all your ex-husband’s best friends.