Status Updates From A Long Obedience in the Sam...

I don’t feel like praising. The biblical response to this, is, “ lift up your praising hands to the Holy place, and bless God!” You can lift up your hands for Charles of how you feel; it is a simple motor movement. You may not be able to command your heart, but you can command your arms. Lifting your arms is a blessing; just maybe your heart will get the message and be lifted up also in praise.

Chapter 3

All the water in all the oceans cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside. Nor can all the trouble in the world harm us unless it gets within us. That is the promise of the psalm: "GOD guards you from every evil."

The danger of Christian discipleship is that we have two religions: a glorious, Sunday gospel that sets us free from the world; and an everyday religion that we make do with during the week.

Chapter 2

The first step toward God is a step away from the lies of the world. It is a renunciation of the lies we have been told about ourselves and our neighbors and our universe.

Every Christian has some variation on this immigrant plot to tell.
My whole life lived camping among quarreling neighbors." But we don't have to live there any longer. Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us to lit

Chapter 1

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

For recognizing and resisting the stream of the world's ways there are two biblical designations for people of faith that are extremely useful: disciple and pilgrim

What Kelly betrayed in extremis is all many people know of religion: a religion to help them with their fears but that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of; a religion made of moments of craziness but that is remote and shadowy in the clear light of the sun and the routines of every day. The most religious places in the world, as a matter of fact, are not churches but battlefields and mental hospitals.

In this chapter on Christian Community, Peterson hits every right note. Phenomenal work.

"Each act of obedience by the Christian is a modest proof, unequivocal for all its imperfection, of the reality of what he attests." - Karl Barth

"Obedience is fulfilled by hope."

"What we require is obedience-the strength to stand and the willingness to leap, and the sense to know when to do which. Which is exactly what we get when an accurate memory of God's ways is combined with a lovely hope in his promises"