Food for Thought Friday

This collection of juicy quotes comes from a recent post by Russell Moore entitled, "7 Books That Changed My Life." Yes, indeed. There's some life-changing truth here. Read on, chew, and be changed.

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 

“The truly penitent man longs to wipe out the effects of sin, not merely to forget sin. But who can wipe out the effects of sin? Others are suffering because of our past sins; and we can attain no real peace until we suffer in their stead. We long to go back into the tangle of our life, and make right the things that are wrong—or at least to suffer where we have caused others to suffer.”

Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, 

“The decisions you think are the most important turn out not to matter so much after all,” he wrote, “But whether or not you mail the letter, the way you say goodbye or decide not to say it, the afternoon you cancel everything and drive out to the beach to watch the tide come in—these are to be the moments when souls are won or lost, including quite possibly your own.”

“By faith we are to understand if we are to understand it at all, that the madness and lostness we see all around us and within us are not the last truth about the world but only the next to the last truth.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.”

“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state and never its tool.”

Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land, 

“Just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist.”

“The good news is that in becoming the minority in all countries, a remnant, the Church also becomes a world church in the true sense, bound to no culture, not even to the West of the old Christendom, by no means triumphant but rather a pilgrim church witnessing to a world in travail and yet a world to which it will appear ever stranger and more outlandish.”