Just Quotes

My wife and I flew out to Phoenix this past week to visit our daughter and son-in-law. We had a great time eating ourselves into oblivion, walking their dog Sydney, watching movies, playing cards and the Wii, and even climbing a mountain (it was an easy trail, no big deal). On the trip out and back I did a little reading – John Ortberg’s book, Love Beyond Reason, and Dave Gibbons’ book, The Monkey and the Fish. Ortberg’s book is warm and encouraging, and Gibbons’ book is challenging – let me share a few quotes from each.

From Ortberg –

“As Lewis Smedes put it, it may be a very bad thing that I needed God to die for me, but it is a wonderful thing that God thinks I’m worth dying for.”

“Love notices. Love listens. Love remembers.”

“The secret is to be so filled with the life of Jesus that in touching the world, instead of its infecting us, we infect it.”

“If there is one way that human beings consistently underestimate God’s love, it is perhaps in his loving longing to forgive.”

“The church is a place for people who need do-overs. That is what God does.”

From Gibbons –

“Jesus is the trickiest part of the Christian faith to understand and the most difficult part for churches to keep alive.”

“You can be a church and lose your perspective on what activities are truly valuable.”

“The issue is not just sharing our message but becoming the message... And since our message is Jesus’ message – the extravagant love of God for a needy world – the stakes could not be higher.”

In reaction to a church member’s acknowledgment that he had gone into enormous debt to get things, having a picture of a BMW on his desk that he wanted to buy – “I asked myself, ‘What is my BMW? What picture have I placed on my desk? What really motivates me to do the things I do?’”

Just quotes... but inasmuch as they continue to be on my mind, maybe they are far more.