A friend of mine says, “I always thought grace meant you could do stuff.” As in, “It was hard to make it through, but God gave me grace.”

Cheap grace, on the other hand, means you can’t do stuff, but that it’s okay. It also means God can’t do stuff. It means that God can’t really change people, but He pretends that He has, and we call it grace because we don’t want to hurt His feelings.
Continue reading “Expensive grace”

Entertainment comes from the Latin words meaning “to hold between.” Do you really want someone to hold you between? No, you say, it’s not entertainment, it’s recreation. Then when will you be recreated and what will you do when you are? Or is it that God really has a purpose for only part of your time and you need to kill the rest, killing yourself as well? Did God give you too much time to keep your interest without artificial assistance? Do you want him to give you less time? Are you afraid that if you decide to serve him with your whole life, he won’t allow you enough rest to keep healthy and happy? Do you believe you need to steal breaks from him, as from an unreasonable boss who expects you to keep going until you collapse?

“You’d be bored to tears in heaven, if you’re not ecstatic about God now.”

– Keith Green

The professions of teaching and social work are respectable, but not because they can do a better job than parents. Like a dishwasher, they are useful as ways to automate parenting. An automatic dishwasher usually does an inferior job, but it works when a human dishwasher isn’t available. In the same way, no classroom, however well-equipped, can approach the student/teacher ratio, professional dedication or understanding of the students that a committed homeschooling parent can. Public schools stay in business because, like orphanages, they can do their work even without parents if necessary.

At root, many modern conveniences were not developed for people’s needs, but for the Industrial Age. Your automatic dishwasher was not designed for cleaner dishes, it was designed for automatic dishes. You have become used to washing the food off them before putting them in the dishwasher, precisely because it can’t clean dishes as well as you can.

“True conversion is a rare thing; but recovering from a false hope of conversion, after continuing in it for some time, is much more rare.”

– from Jonathan Edwards

You can’t drive north by always driving south. It doesn’t matter how quickly or carefully you drive. You can’t drive both east and west. You can’t drive north by always driving west. The residents of Helena, Montana, would love to have you visit, but you won’t get there if you never take the road to Helena. If you sincerely want to visit Helena but drive 100 miles to the east of it, you won’t arrive where you want to go, and it’s nobody’s fault but your own. In the same way, God doesn’t want to lose you, but if you go everywhere but to him, you shouldn’t blame him for what eventually happens to you.

Many founders of religious groups would hardly recognize their modern-day successors. That would surely be true of George Fox, the originator of the Friends (Quakers) movement.
Continue reading “Searching for George Fox”

If God hadn’t created the world, nobody would have known the difference, and he could have saved himself a lot of trouble.

We think we need God to add, but instead, we need to subtract. We need to turn around, to go home, to go back to become the people we were meant to be. “Fill my cup, Lord,” we sing, except that we’ve already filled it ourselves. “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,” we sing, except that we’re already guiding ourselves.