• “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” — C. S. Lewis

• “Non-Christian investigators of nature are as successful as they are because they work with stolen capital.” — Cornelius Van Til

• “I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something.” — Jackie Mason

• “I will keep the ground that God has given me and perhaps in his grace, he will ignite me again. But ignite me or not, in his grace, in his power, I will hold the ground.” — John Knox

• “The measure of a great teacher isn’t what he or she knows; it’s what the students know.” — John C. Maxwell

• “What is the best safeguard against false doctrine? The Bible regularly read, regularly prayed over, regularly studied.” — J. C. Ryle

• “We should never do what we cannot pray God to bless.” — James Smith

• “When she married you, she gave you her life to spend. Are you spending your life wisely?” — Dan Horn

• “I began my education at a very early age—in fact, right after I left college.” — Winston Churchill

• “People fall in private, long before they fall in public. The tree falls with a great crash, but the secret decay which accounts for it, is often not discovered until it is down on the ground.” — J. C. Ryle

• “[N]ot one particle remains to man as a ground of boasting. The whole is of God.” — John Calvin (Institutes 2.3.6)

• “Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your own living room by people you wouldn’t have in your house.” — David Frost

• “Question everything but Scripture.” — Geoff Botkin

• “Heaven is eternity in the presence of God through a Mediator. Hell is eternity in the presence of God with no Mediator.” — Tony Reinke

• “Every post is honorable in which a man can serve his country.” — George Washington

• “People will not look forward to posterity who will not look backward to their ancestors.” — Edmund Burke

• “Some people get an education without going to college; the rest get it after they get out.” — Mark Twain

• “Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.” — Martin Luther

• “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
 — Edmund Burke

• “[T]he ministry of Satan is employed to instigate the reprobate, whenever the Lord, in the course of his providence, has any purpose to accomplish in them...” — John Calvin (Institutes 2.4.5)

• “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” — Sir Richard Steele

• “The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page.” — St. Augustine

• “My dear friend, when grief presses you to the dust, worship there.” — C. H. Spurgeon

• “The very familiarity of blessings sometimes makes us insensible to their value."— J. C. Ryle

• “People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do.” — Thomas Sowell

• “One proud, surly, lordly word, one needless contention, one covetous action, may cut the throat of many a sermon. Take heed to yourselves, lest your example contradict your doctrine.” — Richard Baxter

• “TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they’ll have with twenty-six. Open your child’s imagination. Open a book.” — Unknown

• “If you don’t fear God, you’ll fear everything.” — Dan Horn

• “The happiest people don’t have the best of everything, they simply make the best of everything they have.” — Unknown

• “I’m not lost.” — Frank Churchill

• “I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book.” — Groucho Marx

• “Drag and Drop for Windows users: DRAG your peecee off your desk, and DROP it in the trash.” — some forum member’s tagline

• “Man does not need to know exhaustively in order to know truly and certainly.” — Cornelius Van Til

• “A lot of men have a wishbone where they ought to have a backbone.” — Unknown

• “Dreams don’t work unless you do.” — John C. Maxwell

• “A ship in the harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are built for.” — John Shedd

• “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.” 
— Martin Luther

• “Self-righteousness is being more aware of and irritated by the sins of others than you are conscious of and grieved by your own.” — Paul Tripp

• “True education is not giving in the answer, it’s in showing them how to find it.” — Kelly Crawford

• "When a Christian shuns fellowship with other Christians, the devil smiles. When he stops studying the Bible, the devil laughs. When he stops praying, the devil shouts for joy." — Corrie ten Boom

• “The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it.” — La Rochefoucauld

• “Thanks, modest girls. Appreciated by a male whose time studying the ground is proportional to each degree of rising temperature.” — Unknown

• “Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.” — Elias Boudinot

• “The cold water of persecution is often thrown on the church’s face to fetch her to herself when she is in a swoon of indolence or pride.” — C. H. Spurgeon

• “Paul’s life was a prophetic book for Jews to read and see how to be saved, so our lives should be an easy to read book for the lost on how they can easily be saved.” — Ken Ham

• “Luther once said, ‘The devil hates goose quills,’ and, doubtless, he has good reason, for ready writers, by the Holy Spirit’s blessing, have done his kingdom much damage.” — C. H. Spurgeon

• “Even if you are on the right track, but just sit there, you will still get run over.” — Will Rogers

• “Be as careful of the books you read as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter.” — Paxton Hood

— May 28th, 2012 —

Guest Post: “Is God Boring?” by Jon Acuff

Sometimes it just hits me: God didn’t have to make life anything more than functional. He didn’t have to give us colors, or beauty, or music, or emotions. But He did, and we often take it for granted. A while back I ran across this article written by Jon Acuff on this subject and I thought he did a great job. Acuff says it better than I could.

Last summer I got stung four times by jellyfish while visiting Tybee Island. If you don’t follow me on Twitter than you probably missed that fascinating series of tweets that mostly involved me saying stuff like “Got stung by a jelly fish again today! Why does this keep happening?”
 
Looking back on it a year later it’s pretty obvious why it kept happening. I was in the ocean. Where jellyfish live. And I have amazing skin. Pores most people kill for. Just completely irresistible to most forms of marine life. The bigger question is, “Why am I not constantly getting stung by jellyfish, even when I’m not in the ocean? What is keeping them away from me in the grocery store or when I’m playing jai lai?”
 
Once I had chopped some wood and wrestled a bear so I could forget the pain of the stings, two activities I regularly do to offset the lack of manliness my unbelievable skin generates, I forgot all about the jellyfish.
 
Until the aquarium.
 
I saw a trio of jellyfish floating in the water and the first thought I had was one I was not expecting,
 
“The world didn’t have to be beautiful.”
 
Have you ever thought about that?
 
Jellyfish didn’t need to look like canopied dreams, flying underwater with a grace that shames ballet dancers.
 
Sunsets didn’t have to look like paint sets exploded against the wall, slowly falling down the horizon.
 
The tide on this planet didn’t need to dance with the pull of a glowing sphere thousands of miles away.
 
God didn’t have to make the world beautiful.
 
He could have designed sunsets like we designed light switches. On, off. He could have been utilitarian. Function meets function with form nowhere to be found. Instead, the deeper we explore the planet, the more we see the creativity he’s whimsically hidden on every inch.
 
Fish that provide their own light. Slugs that are neon and fireworked. Hundreds of species of butterflies migrating thousands of miles on wings that are gossamer thin. He’s playful in his design, curious and colorful in ways we can barely scratch the surface of.
 
Though we often paint God in two colors, “gray” and “angry,” the more I see the world, the harder it is for me to think he’s vanilla.

Posted on May 28th, 2012 by Kyle Shepherd | Tags: ,awe |

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