salvific care

'May the souls so dearly purchased by the blood of our Lord not perish by our carelessness' - John Calvin (CO 46.301)

attributing miracles to God

'You may attribute miracles to God, but not nonsense' - C.S. Lewis

fig leaves!

The thing that keeps God out of our lives is not our sin. It is our compulsion to pretend, to cover up our nakedness with fig leaves, to climb sycamore trees to see without being seen - Pete Greig

Calvin's rules of prayer

# that we be disposed in mind and heart as befits those who enter conversation with God
# that in our petitions we ever sense our own insufficiency, and earnestly pondering how we need all that we seek, join with this prayer an earnest - nay, burning - desire to attain it
# that anyone who stands before God to pray, in his humility giving glory to God, abandon all thought of his own glory
# cast down and overcome by true humility, we should nonetheless be encouraged to pray by a sure hope that our prayer will be answered
John Calvin, Institutes 3.20

These make sense today as they did in the 16th century - and may stand as a corrctive to our sometimes sloppy attitude towards God and our spiritual discipline of prayer.

God and our prayer

'The power of prayer depends almost entirely upon our apprehension of who it is with whom we speak' - Andrew Murray.

dark & light

'We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light' - Plato

the truth

'The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it' - George Orwell

One foot raised . . .

We ought to learn to have one foot raised to take our departure when it pleases God - John Calvin. I like the image!

The Lord's willingness

See, the Lord's hand is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. Rather, your iniquities have been barriers between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear - Isaiah 59.1-2. Puts the responsibility where it belongs. And, the willingness, too!