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“When I was a young man, I heard D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones comment that he would not go across the street to hear himself preach. Now that I am close to the age he was when I heard him, I am beginning to understand. It is rare for me to finish a sermon without feeling somewhere between slightly discouraged and moderately depressed that I have not preached with more unction, that I have not articulated these glorious truths more powerfully and with greater insight, and so forth. But I cannot allow that to drive me to despair; rather, it must drive me to a greater grasp of the simple and profound truth that we preach and visit and serve under the gospel of grace, and God accepts us because of his Son. I must learn to accept myself not because of my putative successes but because of the merits of God’s Son. The ministry is so open-ended that one never feels that all possible work has been done, or done as well as one might like. There are always more people to visit, more studying to be done, more preparations to do. What Christians must do, what Christian leaders must do, is constantly remember that we serve our God and Maker and Redeemer under the gospel of grace. Dad’s diaries show he understood this truth in theory, and sometimes exulted in it (as when he was reading from Machen’s What is Faith?), but quite frankly, his sense of failure sometimes blinded him to the glory of gospel freedom.”
D. A. Carson, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 92-3.
“We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly.”
Sometimes boredom gets the best of us and, like Maugham, we need to change locations (in his case, from London to Paris). W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 63.
“The old doctrine is quite true you know – that one must attribute everything to the grace of God, and nothing to oneself. Yet as long as one is a conceited ass, there is no good pretending not to be. My self satisfaction cannot be hidden from God, whether I express it to you or not: rather the little bit of self-satisfaction which I (probably wrongly) believe myself to be fighting against, is probably merely a drop in the bottomless ocean of vanity and self-approval which the Great Eye (or Great I) sees in me.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 877; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 30 January, 1930.
“They then addressed themselves to the water, and, entering, Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he said, ‘I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head all the waves go over me. Selah. . . . Ah! my friend, ‘the sorrows of death have compassed me about;’ I shall not see the land that flows with milk and honey.”
Christian’s cry, as he crosses the “River,” aka, ‘The River of Death;’ John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, chapter 19.
“. . . theological theories are like detectives’ theories in whodunits; they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of ‘mystery stories’ is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain).”
Reflecting negatively on our tendency to expect our theological models to erase mystery; J. I. Packer, “What did the cross achieve: The logic of penal substitution,” Lecture delivered at Tyndale House, Cambridge, 17 July, 1973.
“You have to honor failure because failure is just the negative space around success.”
Randy Nelson, the head of the internal education program at Pixar called Pixar University. Author Austin Bunn, interviewing Nelson, remarks that Pixar makes art a “team sport by having people do it together and fail publicly at it.” See Wired Magazine, June 2004, 133.
“I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“I have no more right to the name of a poet, than a maker of mouse-traps has to that of an engineer.”
Comments of poet, William Cowper; Geoffrey Tillotson, et al., eds. Eighteenth-Century English Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1969, 1311.
“I also learned that honesty is not such a lonely word, as I think Billy Joel said, but is, in fact, the best policy . . . which I think Shakespeare said. Or Jesus.”
Quoting character Michael Scott; article by Scott Brown, “What We Can Learn from The Office.” Wired Magazine (April 2007), 145.
Although his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica presented the notion of gravitational pull, Isaac Newton ultimately coined the phrase hypotheses non fingo (I frame no hypotheses) because he still could not describe the origin of gravity.
Michio Kaku, Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 98.
