Friday Food For Thought

Some tasty morsels I've chewed on recently:

Bryan Loritts, "Portrait of a Diverse Church" (Bible Study Magazine, Mar/Apr 2016):

"Something in you has to be discontent with just a multiethnic sanctuary -- you've got to want a multiethnic dinner table."

David Powlison, "Straight Talk":

"Jesus never said a pointless word to other people. He was never just marking time or keeping things that matter at arm's length. He always engages the important matters. he never just describes, analyzes, and complains about what's wrong. His conversations always go somewhere helpful. Jesus speaks life-giving words: candid, constructive, relevant, and redemptive. And one of the constructive things Jesus talks about is helping us to assess the quality of what we talk about. 'The mouth speaks out of the abundance of the heart' -- either good or evil (Matt 12:34)."

Tim Keller, Galatians For You (53):

Galatians 2:14 But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas ...

"Literally, Paul says that he was 'not ortho-walking with the gospel'. (The prefix ortho means to be straight--so we go to an orthodontist to straighten out our teeth.) ...

This gospel has a vast number of implications for all of life. It is our job to bring everything in our lives 'in line' with the thrust, or direction, of the gospel. We are to think out its implications in every area of our lives, and seek to bring our thinking, feeling, and behavior 'in line'. 

Christian living is therefore a continual realignment process—one of bringing everything in line with the truth of the gospel."