Love Your Neighbour

The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:29-31)

One's neighbour is one's equal. One's neighbour is not the beloved, for whom you have passionate preference, nor your friend, for whom you have passionate preference. Nor is your neighbour, if you are well educated, the well-educated person with whom you have cultural equality - for with your neighbour you have before God the equality of humanity. Nor is your neighbour who is higher social status than you, that is, insofar as he is of higher social status he is not your neighbour, for to love him because he is of higher status that you can easily be partiality's condescension and to that extent self love.

No, to love one's neighbour means equality. It is encouraging in your relationship to people of distinction that in them you shall love your neighbour. In relation to those inferior it is humbling that in them you are not to love the inferior but shall love your neighbour. If you do this there is salvation, for you shall do it. Your neighbour is every man, for the basis of distinction he is not your neighbour, nor on the basis of likeness to you as being different from other men. He is your neighbour on the basis of equality with you before God; but this equality absolutely every man has, and he has it absolutely.

To love one's neighbour means, while remaining within the earthly distinctions allotted to one, essentially to will to exist equally for every human being without exception. to will to exist openly for other men only in the basis of advantages of one's earthly distinction is pride and arrogance, but the clever intention of not willing to exist for others at all in order secretly to enjoy the advantage of one's peers is cowardly pride. In both instances there is discord.

He who love his neighbour is tranquil. He is made tranquil by being content with the earthly distinction allocated to him, whether it be important or unimportant; moreover, he lets every earthly distinction regain its significance and be taken for what it is and ought to be worth in this life, for one shall not covet what is his neighbours; neither his wife, nor his donkey, nor, consequently, the advantages granted him in life. If they are denied to you, you shall rejoice that they are granted to him. Thus he who loves his neighbour is made tranquil. He neither cravenly shuns those mightier than he, but he loves his neighbour; nor does he proudly shun the less significant, but he loves his neighbour and wishes essentially to be equal to all men, whether he is actually known to many or not.
(Soren Kierkegaard)

An Atheist and A Bear

An atheist was walking through the woods.

"What majestic trees!"

"What powerful rivers!"

"What beautiful animal!"

He said to himself.

As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. He turned to look. He saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charge towards him.

He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder and saw the bear was closing in on him.

He looked over his shoulder again, and the bear was even closer. He tripped and fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw that the bear was right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw and raising his right paw to strike him.

At that instant the Atheist cried out, "Oh my God!"

Time Stopped.
The bear froze.
The forest was silent.

As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky. "You deny my existence for all these years, teach others I don 't exist and even credit creation to cosmic accident." "Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer"?
The atheist looked directly into the light, "It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps you could make the BEAR a Christian"?

"Very Well," said the voice.

The light went out. The sounds of the forest resumed. And the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed his head & spoke:

"Lord bless this food, which I am about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen

Kuala Lumpur - The Prehistoric City (VI)

Frederick Buechner - Secrets In The Dark: A Life in Sermons

Excerpts from Buechner's collection of sermons throughout the years:

*on Bible: it is possible to say that in spite of all its extraordinary variety, the Bible is held together by having a single plot. It is one that can be simply stated: God created the world, the world gets lost; God seeks to restore the world to the glory for which He created it. That means that the Bible is a book about you and me, whom He also made and lost and continually seeks, so you might say that what holds it together more than anything else is us. You might add to that, of course, that of all the books that humanity has produced, it is the one that more than any other - an din more senses than one - also holds us together.

*Loving God means rejoicing in him. It means trusting him when you can think of hundred reasons not to trust anything. It means praying to him even when you don't feel like it. It means watching for him in the beauty and sadness and gladness and mystery of your own life and of life around you. Loving each other doesn't mean loving each other in some sentimental, unrealistic, greeting card kind of way but the way families love each other even though they may fight tooth and nail and get fed up to the teeth with each other and drive each other crazy, yet all the time know deep down in their hearts that they belong to each other and need each other and can't imagine what life would be without each other - even the ones they often wish had never been born.

*The words that God speaks to us in our own lives are the real miracles. They are not miracles that creat faith as we might think that a message written in the stars would create faith, but they are miracles that it takes faith to see - faith in the sense of openness, faith in the sense of willingness to wait, to watch, to listen, for the incredible presence of God here in the world among us.

*Power, success, happiness, as the world knows them, are his who will fight for them hard enough; but peace, love, joy are only from God. And God is the enemy whom Jacob fought there by the river, of course, and whom in one way or another, we all of us fight - God, the beloved enemy. Our enemy because, before giving us everything, he demands of us everything; before giving us life, he demands our lives - ourselves, our wills, our treasure.

*The world is full of people who seem to have listened to the wrong voice and are now engaged in a life's work in which they find no pleasure or purpose and who run the risk of suddenly realising someday that they have spent the only years that they are ever going to get in this world doing something that could not matter less to themselves or to anyone else. This does not mean, of course, people who are doing work that from outside look unglamorous and humdrum, because obviously such work as that may be crucial form of service and deeply creative. But it means people who are doing work that seems simply irrelevant not only to the great human needs and issues of our time but also to their own need to grow and develop as humans.

*a Prayer:
How can we pray to thee, thou Holy and hidden God, whose ways are not our ways, who reignest in awful mystery beyond the realm of space and time? Yet how can we not pray to thee, Heavenly Father, who knowest what it is to be a man because thou hast walked among us as a man, breaking with us the bread of our affliction and drinking deep of the cup of our despair? How can we not to pray to thee when it is thy very spirit alive within us that moves our lips in prayer?
Hear, O God, the prayers of all they children everywhere: for forgiveness & healing, for courage, for faith; prayers for the needs of others; prayer for the peace among the desperate nations. Whether thou givest or withholdest what we ask, whether thou answerest us in words that burn like fire or in silence that burns like fire, increase in us the knowledge that thou art always more near to us than breathing, that thy will for us is love.
And deep beneath all our asking, so deep beneath that we are all deaf to it ourselves, hear, O God, the secret song of every human heart praising thee for being what thou art, rejoicing with the morning stars that thou art our God and we thy children. Make strong and wild this secret song within until it burst forth at last to they glory and our saving. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

Quote Roll - Christianity

new quotation to be added time to time

FAITH
*Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ (Romans 10:17)
*I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from there', and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you. (Matt 17:20)
*Faith has hopes, therefore, for this life, but note well, on the strength of the absurd, not on the strength of human understanding, other wise it is only good sense, not faith. (Soren Kierkegaard)
*Faith is a way of looking at what there is to be seen in the world and in ourselves and hoping, trusting, believing against all evidence to the contrary that beneath the surface we see there is vastly more that we cannot see. (Frederick Buechner)
*Faith is trusting God enough to obey what He has said, and hope is having the confidence that God will do everything He has promised. (E.R. McMamus)
*Faith turns away from self and comes empty handed to God. Faith doesn't believe in itself; it believes in God. It doesn't try to manufacture confidence in itself; instead it turns to God. Faith implies that we bring nothing to God; it ask everything from God. (Jerry Sittser)
*Jesus taught that just a little bit of faith - faith the size of a mustard seed - is all we need, which is his way of saying quantity is not really the point. Only a little bit of faith is necessary so long as it is directed toward the right object, that is, toward God. In fact, faith is not really the main point. What matter is whom we place our faith in. Once we try to quantify faith, we misunderstand its nature. (Sittser)
*Faith is not like a stack of bargaining chips that we use in our relationship with God - if we have enough chips, we can pretty much force God to do whatever we want. (Sittser)
*Although faith may produce miracles, miracles do no necessarily produce faith. (Yancey)
*Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. (C.S. Lewis)
*If faith never encounters doubt, if truth never struggles with error, if good never battles with evil, how can faith know its own power? In my own pilgrimage, if I have to choose between a faith that has a stared doubt in the eye and made it blink, or a naive faith that has never known the firing line of doubt, I will choose the former every time.(Gary Parker,The Gift of Doubt)
*Faith turns away from self and comes empty-handed to God. Faith doesn't believe in itself; it believes in God. It doesn't try to manufacture confidence in itself; instead, it turns to God. Faith implies that we bring nothing to God; it asks everything from God. (Sittser)

Turbulence Times
*Suffering - the main difference seems to lie in their focus of attention. Those obsessed with questions about cause ("what did I do to deserve this? What is God trying to tell me? Am I being punished?") often turned against God. In contrast, the triumphant sufferers took individual responsibility for their own responses and trusted God despite the discomfort. (Yancey)
*When we play it safe, we squeeze God out of the formula. If we go only where we know and do what we're certain will succeed, we remove our need for God. Whenever we response to God's initiation, our need for God becomes heightened. Whenever we take on God-size challenge, self-sufficiency is no longer an option. (McMamus)
*Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day (2Cor4:16-17) - For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.
*Choose to trust God that He will take care of everything, rather than worrying.
*How do you know when God is at the center of your life? When God's at the center, you worship. When He's not, you worry. Worry is the warning light that God has been shoved to the sideline. The moment you put Him back at the center, you will have peace again.(Warren)
*Where is God when it hurts? He is in us - not in the things that hurt - helping to transform bad into good. We can safely say that God can bring good out of evil; we cannot say that God brings about the evil in hope of producing good. (Yancey)
*However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name. (1 Peter 4:16)
*Why do bad things happen to good people? If you have often pondered that problem you are not alone. There's only one answer: God allow bad things to happen to his people only if He sees a way of turning the bad into a greater good. (Selwyn Huges)
*Job has understood that God's wisdom and greatness are such that no human can ever fully grasp them. Job's mistake was that his idea of God was too small. When he realises the greatness of God, his problem disappear.
*God often deals with our problems and difficulties, not by removing them, but by giving us a greater vision of himself. This may not remove the irritating circumstances, but it deepens our convictions that God knows what He is doing.(Selwyn Huges)
*If God sends us on stormy paths, he will provide strong shoes. (Corrie Ten Booms)




Prayer
*The point of prayer after all, is the relationship itself, not the things we get from the relationship. (Sittser)
*The reason we don't pray anymore - and probably don't see more answers to prayer, is not because we don't know how to pray but because we don't really need to pray. We are not desperate enough. (Sittser)
*Our prideful prayers put God into a dilemma - if he fails to answer our prayers, God appears mean and distant; if he answer our prayers, we end up worse than before.(Sittser)
*Prayer, I have found, does not work like a vending machine: insert request, receive answer.
*Prayer is never rejected so long as we do not cease to pray. The chief failure of prayer is it cessation. (P.T. Forsyth)
*We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties. (Oswald Chambers)
*Like other means of power, prayer too is subject to abuse. Our prayers can become selfish and mean and petty. God therefore shows us mercy by not answering all our prayers. If God did answer all our prayers, we would become corrupt beyond measure, praying as if prayer was like a credit card with no limits(Sittser)
*Our prayers lay the track down for which God's power can come. Like a mighty locomotive, His power is irresistible, but it cannot reach us without rails. (Watchman Nee)
*To be a Christian and to pray are one and the same thing.(Karl Barth)
*Heaven is full of answers to prayer to which no one even bothered to ask. (Billy Graham)
*Believers do not pray with the view of informing God about things unknown to Him, or of exciting him to do his duty, or of urging Him as though He were reluctant. On the contrary, they pray in order that they may arouse themselves to seek him, that they may exercise their faith in meditating on His promise, that they may relieve themselves from their anxieties by pouring them into His bossom; in a word that they may declare that from Him alone they hope & expect, both for themselves and for others, all good things. (John Calvin)
*Risk that God respects is fueled by a passion for His purpose and a willingness to subjugate our lives to His mission. Prayer moves from God, what is Your will for my life? to God, what is your will, and how can I give my life to fulfill it? (McManus)
*If a prayer's ultimate intent is to fulfill God's will, we can move with confidence, even if God doesn't answer that prayer the way we expect. The more slosely we reflect God's heqart in our prayers, the more often our request will match His response. (McManus)
*Prayer is not about informing God of your needs, nor is it even about trying to convince God to help you. Prayer is about connecting to God. It is abour experiencing His presence and moving with Him in intimate communion. (McManus)


God
*God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sum ready worked out in our own case to show us how it works. We have then to go on and apply the rule to all other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the thing called selves. (Lewis)
*God is glory whether He does anything to demonstrate it or not. His glory does not depend on man's existence.
*Theology is the study of God and his ways. For all we know, dung beetles may study us and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be touched and amused than irritated. One hopes that God feels likewise. (Buechner)
*God is not a cruel slave driver or a bully who uses brute force to coerce us into submission. He doesn't try to break our will, but woos us to himself so that we might offer ourselves freely to him. God is a lover and liberator, and surrending to him brings freedom, not bondage. When we completely surrender ourselves to Jesus, we discover that he is not a tyrant, but a savior; not a boss, but a brother; not a dictator, but a friend (R. Warren)
*I am the lord of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me? (Jeremiah 32:27)
*God insist on focusing his power on the energy of restraint, because no pyrotechnic display of omnipotence will achieve the response he desires. Although power can force obedience, only love can summon a response of love, which is the one thing God wants from us and the reason He created us. Why does God content himself with the slow, un-encouraging way of making righteousness grew rather than avenging it? That's how love is. Love has its own power, the only power ultimately capable of conquering the human heart.(Yancey)
*God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by truth.(1John 1:5)
*The older you get, the more it takes to fill your heart with wonder, and only God is big enough to do that. Not only is He big enough, but in Christian terms he is also near enough.(Ravi Zacharias)


Jesus
*I'm impressed that when Son of God became a human being he played by the rules, harsh rules: small towns do not treat kindly young boys who grow up with questionable paternity. (Yancey)
*Today, people even us Jesus' name to curse by. How strange it would sound if, when a business man miss a golf putt, he yelled"Thomas Jefferson!" or if a plumber screamed"Mahatma Gandhi" when his pipe wrench mashed a finger. We cannot get away from this man Jesus. (Yancey)
*Jesus left few traces of himself on the earth. He wrote no books or even pamphlets. A wanderer, he left no home or even belongings that could be enshrined in a museum. He did not marry, settle down, and begin a dynasty. We would, in fact, know nothing about him except from the traces he left in human beings. That was his design. The law and the prophets has focus like a beam of light on the One who was to come, and now that light, as if hitting a prism, would fracture and shoot out in a human spectrum of waves and colours.(Yancey)
*Jesus left his house of his heavenly father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through a cross to his father's home. All of this he did, not as a rebellious son, but as the obedient son, sent out to bring home all the lost children of God. Jesus is the prodigal son of the prodigal father who gave away everything the Father had entrusted to him so that I could become like him and return with him to his Father's home. (Henri Nouwen)
*Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcise. But he did meet sksptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert. Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver's part, and some who heard Jesus' strongest word about grace and forgiveness turned away unrepentant.(Yancey)
*In Jesus, God found a way relating to human beings that did not involve fear.(Yancey)
*Suppose we hear an unknown man spoken off by many men. Suppose we are puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to this fartness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation...would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Perhaps(in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. (GK Chesterton)
*The other God were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; but to our wounds only God's wound can speak, and not a god has wound but Thou alone. (Edward Shilito)
*By claiming to be the truth, Jesus implies that all He affirms is true and that nothing He say is false. If it is the true that the foundational pursuit of life is meaning, then that meaning must be within the confines of truth, and that truth cannot be found apart from Jesus. In searching for ourselves, we can never know ourselves until we know him. Jesus made a profound statement when He said that He had come to reveal the hearts of men. The impassioned search for ourselves culminates only when we find him, whom to know is truth. Then and then alone, we are set free for the purposes of our creator.(Ravi Zacharias)


Man(yeah ....me too)
*God Knows we all have our wilderness and our temptations too - not the temptation to work evil probably, because by grace or luck we don't have what it takes for more than momentary longings in that direction, but the temptation to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one - to settle for niceness & usefulness and busyness instead of holiness, to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead of for truth.(Buechner)
* Most people tend to have two advisers, one for the moment of danger when they are afraid. Then when things are going well they would rather have nothing to do with him, for the sight of him reminds them how weak they were, and now they would like to think that they succeeded through their own strength - not God's. (Kierkegaard)
*A man rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the scarcity of evidence. A man rejects God because of a moral assistance that refuses to admit his need for God. (Ravi Zacharias)

Pride/Self Centered
*In God you came up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison - you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.(Lewis)
*Pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted to pleased. The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom.(Lewis)
*Self-love or pride is a sin when, instead of leading you to share with others the self you love, it leads you to keep your self in perpetual safe-deposit. You not only don't accrue any interest that way, but become less and less interesting everyday. (Buechner)
*You cannot arrive at your life's purpose by starting with a focus on yourself. You must begin with God, your creator. You exist only because God wills that you exist. You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense. (R. Warren)
*Pride is he ground in which all the other sins grow, and the parent from which all the other sin come. (William Barclay)


Christianity
*Christianity has been the first to bring the idea of synergism into force, and that is where finitude first receives its validity. It is where speculation first acquires its true fulcrum, and freedom its substance. Christianity's first specification of synergism is sin. Sin is therefore not simpy finitude, but sin contains an element of freedom and free finitude. (Kierkegaard)
*Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us. (Lewis)
*If Christianity only means one more bit of god advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more make no difference. (Lewis)
*Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin all over again after each stumble - because the Christ life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ himself carried out.(CS Lewis)
*A Christian is one who is on the way, though not necessary very far along it, and who has at least some dim and half-baked idea of whom to thank. A Christian isn't necessary nicer than anybody else. Just better-informed. (Buechner)
*The very idea of being a hristian is to remounce self and become entirely consecrated to God. A man has no more right to withhold anything from God than he has to rob or steal. For a man to withhold from Gos is a higher crime against Him tan a man can commit against his fellow man, in as much as Gos is the owner of all things is an infinitely higher sense than man can be the owner of anything (Charles Finney)
*Christianity does not promise the ultimate in personal pleasure, a life oriented around hedonism. Rather, it romises an ordering of life - a putting together, not a reduction - so that we realise pleasures as thye were intende by our Creator. Otherwise, we risk, indulging to our own destruction, like an alcoholic who determines how much to drink. Abuse arise from regarding pleasures as an end itself rather that a pointer to something more.(Yancey)

Worship
*Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purifying of imagination b His beauty, opening oof heart to His love, and submission of will to his purpose. All this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of all expressions of which we are capable. (Archbishop William Temple)
*External worship are useless unless they are inward reality as well. We may have attended church; have we ever really worship God? We may have said prayers; have we ever really prayed? We may have read the Bible; have we ever let God speak to us through it and doen what He had said? It is no good approaching God with our lips if our heart are far from him. To do so is sheer humbug.(John Stott)
*The deepest level of worship is praising God in spite of pain, thanking God during a trial, trusting Him when tempted, surrending while suffering, and loving him when he seems distant. (R. Warren)

Devil
*You must keep in mind why the devil wants you to have enemies: if you respond to your enemy in the wrong way, the devil gains a foothold in your life.(Wiersbe)