Home > Work > Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Spiritual Theology #4)
1 " Parables release the adrenaline of urgency into our bloodstream. "
― Eugene H. Peterson , Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Spiritual Theology #4)
2 " I had escaped the snare of certitude that I welcomed so avidly at first and entered, via the name of Jesus, the wide and comprehensive company of Jesus. "
3 " The Holy Spirit's instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are NOT His instruments. Nathaniel Hawthorne "
4 " We learn the language of prayer by immersing ourselves in the language that God uses to reveal Himself to us. "
5 " Apart from childhood and crisis, prayers have a way of being abstracted from the homely and distinctive details that are part and parcel of our ordinary and daily life. "
6 " The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind. Emily Dickinson "
7 " God uses language to create and command us. "
8 " Language consists in equal parts of speaking and silence. "
9 " There is nothing quite as destructive to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the use of language that dismisses the way Jesus talks and prays and takes up instead the rhetoric of smiling salesmanship or vicious invective. "
10 " Self-justification is a verbal defense for restoring the appearance of righteousness without doing anything about the substance. "
11 " The temptations that use the raw material of good for evil can continue unrecognized for a long time without awareness. "
12 " When it comes to doing something about what is wrong in the world, Jesus is best known for his fondness for the minute, the invisible, the quiet, the slow – yeast, salt, seeds, light. And manure. "
13 " Money and machines anesthetize neediness. They put us in charge, in control. As long as the money holds out and the machines are in good repair, we don't need to pray. "
14 " The end is where we start from. T.S. Eliot "
15 " The church is the primary arena in which we learn that glory does not consist in what we do for God but in what God does for us. "
16 " Action without prayer thins out into something very exterior. A prayerless life can result in effective action and accomplish magnificent things, but if there is no developed interiority, the action never enters into the depth and intimacy of relationships. "
17 " Prayer is a way of language practiced in the presence of God in which we become more than ourselves while remaining ourselves. "
18 " Spontaneities offer one kind of pleasure and taste of sanctity, repetitions another equally pleasurable and holy. "
19 " As we grow into maturity in Christ our distinctiveness is accentuated, not blunted. General directions, useful as they are, don't take into account the details that face us as holiness takes root in the particular social and personal place we are planted. "
20 " Preaching reveals God in action here and now -- for ME. "
