Josh Reynolds

“Mercy, GOD, mercy!”: the prayer is not an attempt to get God to do what he is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that he does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“What is true is that in all these despairing and strained efforts to believe, what we really wanted was not to believe. That is, we didn’t want that which is the first requirement of faith, namely, to surrender ourselves totally, not to think of ourselves anymore, to extinguish completely our need for recognition and recognize God alone, to put our trust and dare to believe in God alone. We would surrender what was uncomfortable to us, but not that which we cared about! To have faith means to trust and to dare unconditionally, and that we didn’t want; we wanted to set conditions, and thereby we missed the whole point, and our whole effort was not genuine. We did not want to believe. If”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The reason many of us do not ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts. Subjected”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society