“What this means for our reading the Scriptures is that seeing the glory of God may not always awaken, first, the sweetness of his worth and beauty. It may awaken the sorrows of remembered sin and remaining corruption in our hearts. “Savoring” this painful truth would mean welcoming it rather than denying it or twisting it. It would mean being thankful and letting the rebuke and the correction have their full effect in contrition and humility. And it would mean letting it lead us to the mercies of God and the sweet relief that comes from his saving grace in Christ.”
― Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture
― Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture
“Addiction is the result of an emptiness in the soul, not of what’s put into the body. Spiritual harm is much more insidious and is the real reason empty selves turn to drugs and alcohol. In a culture of alienation and fragmentation, people search for something to save them from their pain. For many, drugs and alcohol become substitute saviors. However, these substances are an inadequate replacement for the real thing. Drugs and alcohol can only anesthetize people, dulling life for a few fleeting moments, but they cannot satisfy empty souls. Instead, they compound brokenness and multiply the devastation of sin. Real rescue can be found only in God’s Story.”
― A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World
― A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World
“Common sense requires modern man’s recognition of the scientific method as a spectacularly useful instrumentality for transforming our environment. Respect and gratitude are indeed due the scientist for many comforts and conveniences furnished to modern living, often as the fruit of painstakingly sacrificial research and experimentation, although in recent times not often without financial reward. This practical success of science inclines many persons to a tacit acceptance of the scientific world-picture of external reality as a realm merely of impersonal processes and mathematically connectible sequences. Charles H. Malik observes rightly that all too often the highly merited prestige of scientists in their own fields of competence is transferred to areas of publicly expressed opinion in which they are novices.”
― God, Revelation and Authority
― God, Revelation and Authority
“We do not proclaim grace so that anyone will make light of sin or of our duty to resist it. We herald God’s amazing mercy in order to join with the Spirit in stirring up in his people such a love for God that, when the day of evil comes, they will gladly put on the full armor he provides. Then, despite the hardships and the pain God’s people may face in the battle, they will stand strong in the power of his might.”
― Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength
― Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength
“Rationalism has swerved between two radical extremes in its attitude toward revelation. There is the widespread present admission that reason is barren as a source of final truth, but that it would be a sell-out to madness to invoke revelational theology. But a very different tradition in the history of philosophy, not without recent representatives, holds that philosophy finds its ideal intellectual expression and summit in theology. For Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and even Spinoza, philosophy is at its apex an intellectual love of the Divine. It is this regard for theology as “the inner side of a philosophy,” to use Miss Emmet’s phrase (The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, p. 150), that turns some systems of metaphysics into a religious faith, albeit a false one. Such outlooks on the surface eliminate a direct clash between philosophy and theology. But, insofar as theology is viewed as the capstone of speculative philosophy, they do so only by denying the comprehensive intellectual implications of revealed theology, and in principle even deny to theology its own right of survival on the basis of special divine disclosure. Sooner or later—and usually sooner than its advocates think—this view works itself around to the other, in which rationalists suspect and disown all theology, only to discover at last that in doing so they have both idolatrized reason and emptied it into a vain thing.”
― God, Revelation and Authority
― God, Revelation and Authority
Jim’s 2025 Year in Books
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