Legalism is a wicked lie that puts a mirror in front of our faces and makes us think we are looking at Christ when we are actually adoring the ghost of our own self-righteousness.
If we’re being honest, we don’t call ourselves royalty. If we’re being honest, we call ourselves timid, confused, and insecure. All our self-loathing and self-promoting is a thin veil covering over our frightening conviction that we are nobodies.
A wide gap separates a reader who simply consumes books from a reader who diligently seeks wisdom.
In a world so easily satisfied with images, it’s too easy to waste our lives watching mindless television and squandering our free time away with entertainment. We have a higher calling. God has called us to live our lives by faith and not by sight – and this can mean nothing less than committing our lives to the pursuit of language, revelation, and great books.
My heart is like a country but half subdued, where all things are in an unsettled state, and mutinies and insurrections are daily happening. I hope I hate the rebels that disturb the King’s peace. I am glad when I can point them out, lay hold of them, and bring them to him for justice. But they have many lurking-holes, and sometimes they come disguised like friends, so that I do not know them, till their works discover them.10.
If you follow Christ, the world will unfollow you.
As a result, we suffer from Neomania – an addition to anything new within the last five minutes.
Christian growth is never measured by a Christian’s satisfaction in himself.
Don’t allow unfinished books to pile up in a mountain of guilt. Show patience with a book, but cut the ties when necessary and move on.
Keeping Christ in view at all times is, by far, the hardest – and the most essential – part of our calling as Christians.
The Christian’s hope is based not on our unsettling feelings of joy in Christ, but on Christ himself.
John Newton’s final recorded words: “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Savior.
The Christian lives “a strange mysterious life” that seems to swing daily from darkness into light, from peace into strife. Time and time again, our Friend breaks into this strange and mysterious riddle of life and empowers us for a sweet and stable life in the storm.
True freedom from the bondage of technology comes not mainly from throwing away the smartphone, but from filling the void with the glories of Jesus that you are trying to fill with the pleasures of the device.
The only way out of spiritual immaturity is to walk by faith when the affections are dry and the presence of God appears to have been withdrawn.
The progressive cure for our maladies is looking to Christ’s glory as we endure the proper medications of necessary pain and trials, the bitter circumstances that make us whiny patients.61 Yet Christ is always on call, his patience is infinite, and he bears with our complaints as he works out our spiritual health.62 Only in him do sinners find healing.
Illuminated by the gospel, we now perceive and enjoy God’s truth, goodness, and beauty – whether it’s in the blazing sun of the inspired Word of God, in the moonlight of creation, or in the starlight of great books.
Books are great tools, but they are disappointing gods. And once books become idols, those idols will leave us deeply unsatisfied.
Our lives are consolidated on our phones: our calendars, our cameras, our pictures, our work, our news, our weather, our email, our shopping – all of it can be managed with state-of-the-art apps in powerful little devices we carry everywhere. Even the GPS app on my phone, which guided me to a new coffee shop today, possesses thirty thousand times the processing speed of the seventy-pound onboard navigational computer that guided Apollo 11 to the surface of the moon.
What is most decisive is God’s Joy Project is not that we fully grasp it, but that our sovereign God fully grasps us.