Keith Plummer > Keith's Quotes

“To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Apprenticeship assumes that knowing a trade not only comes by numbers and outlines but also by watching and inhabiting. Knowing is found in these forms, because teaching is. We teach not only by our words and assignments but also by the manner of our words and the ways we ourselves already embody the assignments we give.”
― Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being

“As much as we wish God would transfer his focus to more external and circumstantial matters, such as restored health, mortgage payments, and career transitions, God is primarily interested in pulling off an inside job. God is certainly at work all around us, but his primary transforming work is aimed at our minds and hearts.”
― Ramon Presson, When Will My Life Not Suck? Authentic Hope for the Disillusioned

“Discontentment holds today’s joy hostage with a list of demands of how things should be.”
― Ramon Presson, When Will My Life Not Suck? Authentic Hope for the Disillusioned

“Christian psychologist Larry Crabb makes the following challenging assessment: We treat personal discomfort as the central evil from which we need to be saved. When we blend the pursuit of comfort with Christianity, Jesus becomes a divine masseur whose demands we heed only after we are properly relaxed. But that is not the Christianity of the Bible. Christ offers hope, not relief, in the middle of suffering, and he commands us to pursue him hotly even when we’d rather stop and look after our own well-being.”
― Ramon Presson, When Will My Life Not Suck? Authentic Hope for the Disillusioned

“Good books and good friends were critical in Lewis’s conversion.”
― Devin Brown, A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis

“The path of obedient, faithful ministry begins when we drop our roles as busy religious salespeople working for God and instead recapture our calling to live with him and, in turn, invite others into that life.2 Sadly, this is increasingly difficult because often what is measured and rewarded is quite the opposite.”
― J R Briggs, Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure

“Sadly, this need to be needed fuels many of our pastoral motivations. Left unchecked, people begin to need us as pastor and confidant more than they need God as Savior and Father.”
― J R Briggs, Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure

“One of the four-letter F-words we use regularly in our churches reinforces a lack of authenticity: fine. As in, “How are you doing?” “Oh, I’m fine.” This exchange can be heard dozens of times Sunday morning. At times when we say this we aren’t fine—and we know it. Others may know it too, but we get a pass. How often are the regular Christian clichés we use nothing more than disguises for our hurt and pain?”
― J R Briggs, Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure

“Busyness is one of the pastor’s most effective tools of remaining at a safe relational and emotional distance.”
― J R Briggs, Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure

“When we wear the mask that we are only susceptible to small and respectable sins, we communicate to those around us a tame and tepid gospel.”
― J R Briggs, Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure

“Masks come off when the gospel is put on.”
― J R Briggs, Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure

“The doubter’s doubt is faith; his temptation is belief, and it is a temptation that has not been entirely quelled, even in a secular age.”
― James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

“Jesus entered the temple area and revealed that he was the perfect and final priest; even more, he was the entire temple. All the temple symbols suddenly came to life. He was the wash basin, the Water of Life. He was the bread of the Presence, the Bread of Life. He was the candlesticks, the Light of the World. He was the perfect priest, the Great High Priest who would offer the sacrifice, and he was the sacrifice itself, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Everything in the Old Testament temple was gathered together and fulfilled in Jesus.”
― Edward T. Welch, Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection

“Jesus freely placed your interest above his own. His desire was to elevate your status; in the process he lowered his own. He gave you the royal treatment: he works, you benefit. And you must accept this treatment.”
― Edward T. Welch, Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection

“If you want Jesus, you must be willing to accept the honor that goes with the relationship. Your royal status—ascribed to you, not achieved—has been unveiled.”
― Edward T. Welch, Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection

“Don’t let religious-sounding reluctance fool you. When you plead “unworthy” and refuse to be served by God, you place your judgment about yourself above God’s. You say you would prefer to go it alone, and you imply that your unworthiness goes beyond the scope of God’s mercy and grace. You must think that God cleanses you only from ordinary sins, not from the spectacular ones.”
― Edward T. Welch, Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection

“The NT writers have no need to prove the Trinity; the comings of Christ and the Spirit for our salvation have adequately proved that doctrine for both writers and the original readers of the NT.”
― Anonymous

“I set it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensées

“As men who naturally understand their own condition avoid nothing so much as rest, so there is nothing they leave undone in seeking turmoil.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensées

“The Lord Jesus Christ Himself is my inspiration. When the dominant note of my life becomes what others need, I will drown. The needs of this world are far beyond my capacity to meet. I do not take my orders from the needs I see, but from my Lord.”
― Diane Mandt Langberg, In Our Lives First: Meditations for Counselors

“Why is it necessary for us, if we are going to share the gospel with others, to love our enemies? Because the gospel’s central message is about God loving his enemies—which once included us. Paul writes, “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10). How can we profess that we have been transformed by a God who loved us even when we were his enemies, if we don’t love our enemies? The only way the world will believe in such a God is if they see those of us who call him Lord loving our enemies.”
― John S. Leonard, Get Real: Sharing Your Everyday Faith Every Day

“Loving our enemies also teaches us that the gospel is bigger and more important than any other issue. It trumps all divisions, prejudices, and hatred. The gospel is more important than any personal or political issues you may have with others.”
― John S. Leonard, Get Real: Sharing Your Everyday Faith Every Day

“If we’re going to share a gospel of grace, then we cannot decide who is and who is not worthy of God’s grace.”
― John S. Leonard, Get Real: Sharing Your Everyday Faith Every Day

“When we grip our phones and tablets, we’re holding the kind of information resource that governments would have killed for just a generation ago. And is it that experience of everyday information miracles, perhaps, that makes us all feel as though our own opinions are so worth sharing? After all, aren’t we—in an abstracted sense, at least—just as smart as everyone else in the room, as long as we’re sharing the same Wi-Fi connection? And therefore (goes the bullish leap in thinking) aren’t my opinions just as worthy of trumpeting?”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Arguably, the larger and more productive world that our technologies deliver is simultaneously an impoverished version of the older one—a version that rejects direct experience and therefore rejects an earlier conception of reality that had its own value. We see more, yet our vision is blurred; we feel more things, yet we are numbed.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“The endgame is this: Without absence in our lives, we risk fooling ourselves into believing that things (a message from a lover, the performance of a song, the face of a human body) matter less. De Beers hoards its diamonds to invent a scarcity that equals preciousness. Perhaps we now need to engineer scarcity in our communications, in our interactions, and in the things we consume. Otherwise our lives become like a Morse code transmission that’s lacking breaks—a swarm of noise blanketing the valuable data beneath.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“The brain itself is not, whatever we may like to believe, a multitasking device. And that is where our problem begins. Your brain does a certain amount of parallel processing in order to synthesize auditory and visual information into a single understanding of the world around you, but the brain’s attention is itself only a spotlight, capable of shining on one thing at a time. So the very word multitask is a misnomer. There is rapid-shifting minitasking, there is lame-spasms-of-effort-tasking but there is, alas, no such thing as multitasking.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“We just can’t handle solitude without a rich interior life.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection