On spending time with Jesus (all from a book Carly lent me called Secrets of the Secret Place by Bob Sorge)

"Intimacy precedes insight. Passion precedes purpose. First comes the secret place, then comes divine guidance. God doesn't simply want to get you on the right path. He wants to enjoy you throughout the journey. ... God's primary desire for your life is not that you discover His will and walk in it; His primary desire is that you draw near to Him and come to know Him. God wants to be known! And then He desires that from that knowing relationship there come a tender walking together in His purpose."

"When we step into the presence of God, we are exposing ourselves to eternally powerful forces. Everything within us changes when we touch the radiating glory that emits from His face. ...When you're in His presence for extended periods, the molecular composition of your soul gets restructured. You start to think differently, and you don't even know why. You start to have different passions and interests, and you don't even know why. God is changing you on the inside in ways you can't cognitively analyze. All you know is, sinful affections that once pulled at your soul no longer have their former power over you. The secret is simply this: large chunks of time in God's presence- loving Him and imbibing in His word."

"'For the LORD God is a sun' (Psalm 84:11). As my Sun, the Lord is my light, my warmth, the one around whom my life revolves, and He is the one who brings forth fruit from the garden of my life. His Spirit waters my life, His word nourishes my life, and His face is the power that cases the fruit of my garden to grow. As a planet revolves around the sun, I want my life to revolve around Christ. ... I want to be close - blazing with the same holy fire that radiates from His face."

"If you will seek Him with all your heart, He will guide you to the ancient river that runs deep in the heart of God. As you chase Him with every ounce of your strength, He will bring you to the fountain of divine life. when the life of God begins to flow into your world of impossibilities, this is the stuff of miracles. The life of God cannot be stopped! If you drink of this river, everything in you and around you will begin to shake and shudder under the groundswell of God's power released. ...Learn to abide in Christ!"

On the Cross:

"The cross is the safest place on earth. It is the place where the most violent winds will whip your soul, but also where you will enjoy the greatest immunity from Satan's devices. by embracing the cross, you are dying to every mechanism in your soul that Satan can use against you. The highest pain produces the highest freedom. There is no strategy against crucified saints because they do not love their lives even unto death."
-Bob Sorge

"I take, O cross, thy shadow
For my abiding place
I ask no other sunshine than
The sunshine of His face
Content to let the world go by
To know no gain or loss
My sinful self my only shame
My glory all the cross."
-Elizabeth C. Clephane

"Here at the cross is the man who loves his enemies, the man whose righteousness is greater than that of the Pharisees, who being rich became poor, who gives his robe to those who took his cloak, who prays for those who despitefully use him. The cross is not a detour or a hurdle on the way to the kingdom, nor is it even the way to the kingdom; it is the kingdom come."
-John Howard Yoder

"Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other."
-Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

On the Love of God:

"Why does God content himself with the slow, unencouraging way of making righteousness grow rather than avenging it? That's how love is. Love has its own power, the only power ultimately capable of conquering the human heart."
-Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

On Prayer:

"I forget that my prayers matter to God. I forget that I am helping my neighbors to their eternal destinations. I forget that the choices I make today bring delight- or grief - to the Lord of the Universe. I live in a world of trees and telephones and fax machines, and the reality of this material universe tends to overwhelm my faith in a spiritual universe suffusing it all. I look into the blank blue sky and see nothing.
By ascending, Jesus took the risk of being forgotten."
-Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

On Christ:

"If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth...then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth."
-Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as his body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall."
-John Updike

"For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in eyes, and lovely in limbs not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces."
-Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Christ bears the wounds of the church, his body, just as he bore the wounds of crucifixion. I sometimes wonder which have hurt worse."
-Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

On Grace:

Legalism like the Pharisees' will always fail, not because it is too strict but because it is not strict enough. Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land bu tin the safety net of absolute grace."

On the Church:

"The church is where God lives. What Jesus brought to a few- healing, grace, the good-news message of God's love - the church can now bring to all. That was the challenge, or Great Commission, that Jesus gave just before vanishing from the numbed disciples' sight."
-Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

"All your dissatisfaction with the Church seems to me to come from an incomplete understanding of sin. What you seem actually to demand is that the Church put the kingdom of heaven on earth right here now, that the Holy Ghost be translated at once into all flesh. ...The Church is founded on Peter who denied Christ three times and who couldn't walk on the water by himself. You are expecting his successors to walk on the water. All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others. To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs."
-Flannery O'Connor

"The Church exists... to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to the world's own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise."
-Karl Barth

On Kingdom Living:

"Passing laws to enforce morality serves a necessary function, to dam up evil, but it never solves human problems. If a century from now all that historians can say about evangelicals of the 1990s is that they stood for family values, then we will have failed the mission Jesus gave us to accomplish: to communicate God's reconciling love to sinners."
-Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

"Our real challenge, the focus of our energy, should not be to Christianize the United States (always a losing battle) but rather strive to be God's kingdom in an increasingly hostile world."
-Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

"As America slides, I will work and pray for the kingdom of God to advance. If the gates of hell cannot prevail against he church, the contemporary political scene hardly offers much threat."
-Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

Tonight, the Johnson's (Kyle and Melissa, and their children Taylor, Nathan, and Abe) invited me over for dinner! This is the couple I babysit for occasionally on Sunday nights with the three rowdy, sweet boys all under the age of 6 :). It was SO good! The first 30 minutes or so were crazy, but Kyle was sweet enough to take care of the boys and wash them and put them to bed and such while Melissa and I had some quality time. It was so encouraging, and just awesome to get to know them more! They were missionaries in Afghanistan and other parts of Central Asia for 10 years. Talking to Melissa was just great because her and I have had similar spiritual journeys, and of course she's further ahead of me and offered some wisdom and insight :). One of my favorite things we talked about tonight was making Jesus your lifeline. Very challenging. But in this time of my life especially, I need to nail that down. If I ever get married, and my husband dies of cancer a few years later and I'm left with two kids (which just happened to her sister), I HAVE to be able to say that all I need is Jesus. If I get married, if I don't. If I live in America, if I live overseas. HE'S the One getting me through. If I put my hope and life in anything else or in anyone else's hands, it will fail. "No one whose hope is in the Lord will ever be put to shame!"

Goodnight, loves. Enjoy your Friday tomorrow!