“Just to be, just to do—these are the two great gifts of God, the foundations of every other gift. We need to return to these two great capacities again and again and cultivate them.
The events of daily life need to be placed in perspective by a deep sense of prayer, by learning how to be before God. Then, as reality closes in on us, we will perceive each event as the working of the Holy Spirit, carefully designed for our particular needs. Every event is a touch of the living finger of God, which is sketching in us—body, soul, and spirit—the true image of his Son, which the Father originally gave to us and is restoring.”
Excerpt, On Living Well by Eugene H. Peterson
https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-living-well/id1554018349
We are born with an instinctual drive toward excellence. We grow toward wholeness. We reach for the best. We have a thirst for goodness, a hunger for righteousness. And therefore the puzzle is why so many people live so badly. Not so wickedly, but so inanely. Not so cruelly, but so stupidly.
“Famous entertainers amuse a nation of bored insomniacs. Infamous criminals act out the aggressions of timid conformists. Petulant and spoiled athletes play games vicariously for lazy and apathetic spectators. People, aimless and bored, amuse themselves with trivia and trash. Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines.”
In expectation of Christ, we should prepare ourselves to participate wholeheartedly in God’s next move. We have a choice to make: Will we live slovenly with unbuttoned mind and disheveled spirit, thoughtlessly supposing that the same things are monotonously repeated over and over in creation and history? Or will we live alertly and ardently, convinced that God still comes and speaks? The expectant command is for us to awaken.
The act of belief is the single most significant thing about us. Our beliefs are far more important than our bank accounts, our reputations, or our schooling. Successful crooks have large bank accounts, undetected hypocrites have glowing reputations, and highly educated people pursue evil ends
Belief that doesn’t involve personal commitment to God is meaningless—a frivolous emotion. Belief should be the all-involving act of our lives. What it involves us in is what God is doing. The center of the action is God: he is creating, and he is saving; he is blessing, and he is preserving. The world is electric with meaning, fascinating in its beauty, alive with action—because the God of creation is in action. Belief involves us in participation in God’s action in the world.
It is a great waste and blasphemy when people are glib in the language of belief but avoid the everyday action of God.”
Has life gone flat on you? Is the old zest gone? Has life become, as James Michener suggested, “a falling-away, a gradual surrender of the dream”?*1 It has for many. Morals get flabby. Goals lose their magnetism. Imagination goes slack… Christ’s way of life is a holy attack on everything that leaks the brightness out of our lives or detracts from the promised joy of our faith. It demolishes anything that promises liberation but, in fact, imprisons us in boredom. Following him evokes a life pursued heartily and meaningfully.
I can bear witness that when I share the sufferings of others and confront the despair of life, I find another power working in me—the grace of Jesus Christ—that puts things together again in a way that feels strangely like joy.”
“I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.
Philippians 3:12–14, MSG”
Some things we overlook because they are so small. Others we overlook because they are so large, such as when people who live at the base of a huge mountain never look at it anymore, although they did often enough when they were children. But the mountain is the most significant geographical feature in their lives, shaping the weather, determining the soil, marking boundaries.
God is huge in that way—obvious, essential, inescapable—but even more so, for he is also personal and passionate and gracious and merciful. His outer largeness (“the heavens are telling the glory of God” [Psalm 19:1]) is matched by an inner largeness (“the joy of your salvation” [51:12]). We’ve all seen it, exclaimed over it, and been changed by it. But year after year of living in a world of such magnitude makes it easy to quit seeing it and to lose awareness of God in the urgent and everyday business of getting across the street without getting hit by an 18-wheeler. That is why we work together as a community to have awareness of the great presence of God in our lives. We seek to wake ourselves up, to make sure that the roar of the vacuum cleaner doesn’t drown out the knock of the treasured Guest at the door, to deliberately step out of the fast lane so that we can see and hear and touch the God who is around and within us and can shut up long enough so that we hear and truly listen to the story of God coming to us, born in Jesus. Born in us.”
We do not qualify as biblical simply by quoting the Bible.
We are biblical only when we share life in the wilderness with those who are tempted and fall, when we carry the cross of Jesus, and when we love extravagantly in Jesus’s name.
One of the extraordinary things about Jesus was that he unassumingly took his place among the ordinary men and women around him. Even after his resurrection, he appeared ordinary. Mary at the tomb looked at him and thought he was the gardener (see John 20:15). Two disciples on the Emmaus road thought he was just another traveler (see Luke 24:28–29). The disciples fishing on the Sea of Galilee didn’t recognize him on the shore (see John 21:1–4). Hundreds of people saw him walking along the roads and heard him talking to his friends and family and had no idea that God was in him, among them.
Why the secrecy? He didn’t make it easy for us to see God in him. But there were occasional and brief moments when the glory broke through blazingly and recognition was immediate.
If the word God or the experience of God is tribalized or nationalized or privatized, it is falsified. A packaged god is no god at all. This fact is not always easy to live with.
“Why do people still go to church? Why do we do it? It is simple. We come to see—to get our vision cleared of the ugliness and trash so that we can see what God is doing at the heart of it. We come to hear—to clear our ears of the noise of anger and lust that pollute the atmosphere and to listen to love spoken to our hearts, forgive forgiveness to our sins, mercy to our failures, and grace to our needs.”
Have you ever noticed the close relationship between the words think and thank? The change of a single vowel triggers a quantum leap in meaning. Thinking is a work of the mere intellect; thanking is an expression of the whole person. Thanking that is not preceded by thinking is shallow and inadequate, but thinking that does not transform to thanking is arid and sterile.” Excerpt, On Living Well, by Eugene H. Peterson
https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-living-well/id1554018349
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
On Living Well
Eugene H. Peterson
https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-living-well/id1554018349
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
On Living Well
Eugene H. Peterson
https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-living-well/id1554018349
This material may be protected by copyright.
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
On Living Well
Eugene H. Peterson
https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-living-well/id1554018349
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
On Living Well
Eugene H. Peterson
https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-living-well/id1554018349
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
On Living Well
Eugene H. Peterson
https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-living-well/id1554018349
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
On Living Well
Eugene H. Peterson
https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-living-well/id1554018349
This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From
On Living Well
Eugene H. Peterson
https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-living-well/id1554018349
This material may be protected by copyright.
ected by copyright.
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