“God is our loving, true, self-forgetting, friend. All delight, all hope and all beauty are in God. God is–therefore to be is blessed.”
quotes from my commonplace book.
“Christians in general are far too anxious to be definite, and have finished, well polished systems, forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite the surer it is to be wrong–the more impossible it is to be right.”
quotes from my commonplace book.
“It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true object they must attach themselves to false.”
–Blaise Pascal, Pensees II:81
Quotes from my commonplace book.
“And what completes our incapability of knowing things is the fact that they are simple and that we are composed of two opposite natures, different in kind, soul and body. For it is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual and if any one maintain that we are simply corporeal, this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself.”
–Blaise Pascal, Pensee’s Section II:72
Quotes from my commonplace book.
“Nothing is more dangerous than to rely only upon a correct belief, and a fervent spirit, and to assume that as long as you believe the right things and are zealous and keen and active concerning them, you are therefore of necessity a Christian.”
–D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Quotes from my commonplace book.
“We do harm to the cause of Christ if we claim as miraculous something which can easily be explained on a natural level.”
–D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Quotes from my commonplace book.
The church leaders who are seemingly most concerned about the dropout rate of that demographic are the very ones who create the weekend experiences that this demographic finds entirely uncompelling. To say it another way, the group responsible for connecting eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds to local congregations are the catalysts for driving them away.
. . . somebody’s kids are attending your church. If you have kids, they are attending your church. Every Sunday you are either instilling a deeper love and appreciation for the church or you are doing what most pastors do and providing them with one more reason not to attend when they no longer have to. That’s a big deal.
Andy Stanley, Deep & Wide
That is a big deal. According to Thom Rainer in a research project initiated by Lifeway, the number of kids walking away from faith and the church outnumber the adults who are coming to faith each year. I think it is because we have missed an opportunity. We have treated the youngest ones as though they are not important until they become adults. Then we follow that up by doing church the way we like it rather than the way we can reach the next generation.
God intends that we should win people in the days of their youth while their hearts are young and sensitive. But we are apt to let the springtime pass and then with great effort create a religious fervor by our own efforts and win men to Christ. We work hard, spend thousands of dollars and at the best get disappointingly small returns. We have waited too long. That which we should do is to work with God in His seasons.
–Henrietta Mears
If we save every adult on the planet, but lose the next generation, what’s the point? The church is always one generation away from extinction. Not on my watch!
“He is Truth, and all that we can see [that is] beautiful and true is in Him and we were taught by Him to see it. Perhaps it is a very bad want of faith in Him to doubt whether He means what we see.”
–George MacDonald
Quotes from my commonplace book.
My commonplace book is a small notebook I carry with me almost everywhere I go. It’s a bit old-school, but in it I write down quotes or thoughts that are meaningful amongst the common and everyday. They are things I turn to in difficult times to remind me of what is important and has been important to me. There is something about paging through the history of your own thought life and rethinking important thoughts to remind you of who you are.
I stumbled upon the idea when researching W.H. Auden in college. He also kept a commonplace book which was published in 1970 as “A Certain World: A Commonplace Book”. He described it as the closest thing he would write to an autobiography; it was, he wrote, “a map of my planet.”
How do you curate what is important to you?
“What we call ‘evil’ is the only and best shape, which for the person and his condition at the time, that could be assumed by the best good.”
–George MacDonald
