Having finished my paper and my final exam, I now have time to read "fun books"! My first choice was Dan Allender's The Healing Path, which had been highly recommended to me. He covers so much in the book, but I selected a few quotes regarding hope and the struggle for faith in the face of suffering.
“Pain is seldom expected nor embraced when it comes. It is often denied or swept under the spiritual rug of ‘God’s sovereignty’... Few of us enter the tragedy of living in a fallen world and simultaneously struggle with God until our hearts bleed with hope.” p. 5
“Indeed, God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives. But that plan may be to labor for forty years with a recalcitrant, hard-hearted youth group that ages and dies in the wilderness, with only a few who make it into the Promised Land. How could God’s best for Moses be to bring the man to the brink of what he’d worked his whole life to achieve, and then bar him from enjoying it before he died? The fact is, God’s perfect plan might include untold suffering that has no clear purpose or meaning in this life.” p. 13.
“How are we to groan inwardly and also wait expectantly? It seems that when we groan most deeply, we most urgently anticipate resolution for our pain. But we cannot hope unless we learn to wait, and we cannot learn to wait if we have put God on our schedule.” p. 39
“The goal of evil is to destroy our future by stealing our hope.” p. 83
“To be truly human--to feel, to doubt, to struggle, to seek, ask, and knock without having to have an immediate answer or much of an answer at all.” p. 146
“My heart will never become any bigger than that in which or in whom I hope. But when my hope is centered on the coming redemption, I begin to take on His glory.” p. 146
“Bold prayer bombards heaven relentlessly with the cries of our soul.” p. 175
...and my new favorite...
“Hope is not an absence of sorrow but a refusal to allow powerlessness to silence our cry or to shake our confidence in God.” p. 151
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Future Grace - John Piper
A Hunger For God - John PiperThe Voyage of the Dawn Treader - C.S. LewisThe Silver Chair - C.S. LewisThe Last Battle - C.S. LewisBiblical Christian Ethics - David JonesMorality: The Catholic View - Servais PinckaersThe Elements of Moral Philosophy - James and Stuart Rachels
The Message of the Sermon on the Mount - John StottRediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics - Stephen Grabill (finally!)A Conflict of Visions - Thomas SowellThe Nature of Sufffering and the Goals of Medicine - Eric J. Cassell
Evangelical Ethics - John Jefferson DavisThe Heartache No One Sees - Sheila WalshThe Healing Path - Dan Allender
The Spirit of Adoption: At Home In God's Family - Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner
Fatherless America - David BlankenhornSuffering and the Sovereignty of God - edited by John Piper and Justin Taylor
Discovering God's Will - Sinclair Ferguson
"Hope is practised through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God's mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness. Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! It thus transforms our impatience and our doubts into the sure hope that God holds the world in his hands and that... in spite of all darkness he ultimately triumphs in glory." --Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est
“Hope is not an absence of sorrow but a refusal to allow powerlessness to silence our cry or to shake our confidence in God.” --Dan Allender, The Healing Path
About Me
- Carolyn
- “The happy life is joy born of truth.” --Augustine
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Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see... By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose Architect and Builder is God... But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood... Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our "God is a consuming fire."
--Hebrews 11:1, 8-10, 12:22-24, 28-29
Copyright © 2006-2007 Carolyn. All rights reserved.
2 comments:
Thank you for taking time to post all these quotes. My copy of the "The Healing Path" was once littered with post-it notes, and then I took them all out to loan the book to a friend. Wish I had kept those quotes! It was back in 2000 that I read that book; I plan to re-read it, and THIS TIME, I'll write/circle/underline directly in the book!
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