Jeff Ragan > Recent Status Updates

"Vraiment, je vous l'assure: quand naitra le monde nouveau et que le Fils de l'homme aura pris place sur son trone glorieux, vous qui m'avez suivi, vous siegerez...sur douze trones pour gouverner les douze tribus d'Israel. Tous ceux qui auront quitte, a cause de moi, leurs maisons...leur pere ou leur mere, leurs enfants ou leur terre, recevront cent fois plus et auront part a la vie eternelle." - Matthieu 19:28-29

"Even if it be granted that the difference between man and his nearest allies is as great in corporeal structure as some naturalists maintain, and although we must grant that the difference between them is immense in mental power, yet the facts...appear to declare, in the plainest manner, that man is descended from some lower form, notwithstanding that connecting-links have not hitherto been discovered" (331).

"Love does not eliminate the gifts in the present; rather, it is absolutely essential to Christian life both now and forever. The gifts/manifestations, on the other hand, are not forever; they are to help build up the body in the gathered assembly of God's people - but only in the present, when such edification is needed" (717).

"I'm doing just what he is doing-only in my own way. He is withdrawing man's spirit from the looters, I'm withdrawing the products of man's spirit. He is depriving them of reason, I'm depriving them of wealth. He is draining the soul of the world, I'm draining its body. His is the lesson they have to learn...& I'm hastening their scholastic progress...I'm simply complying with their moral code..." (694).

"Venez a moi, vous tous qui etes accables sous le poids d'un lourd fardeau, et je vous donnerai de repos. Prenez mon joug sur vous et mettez-vous a mon ecole, car je suis doux et humble de coeur, et vous trouverez le repos pour vous-memes. Oui, mon joug est facile a porter et la charge que je vous impose est legere." - Matthiew 11:28-30

"Pindar was not popular in his lifetime, and for some centuries yet he will continue to enjoy the lifeless immortality of those writers whom all men praise and no one reads. While the world was moving forward he asked it to sand still and it left him so far behind that though younger than Aeschylus he seems older than Alcman" (377).

"...Paul's description of love begins with this twofold description of God, who through Christ has been shown to be forbearing and kind toward those who deserve divine judgment. The obvious implication, of course, is that this is how God's people (i.e., the Corinthians themselves, not to mention all others who would claim to belong to Christ) through Christ and the Spirit are to be toward others" (705-6)

"The price of all metals, though liable to slow and gradual variations, varies less from year to year than that of almost any other part of the rude produce of land; and the price of the precious metals is even less liable to sudden variations than that of the coarse ones. The durableness of metals is the foundation of this extraordinary steadiness of price" (91).

"Pour entrer dans le royaume des cieux, il ne suffit pas de me dire: 'Seigneur! Seigneur!' Il faut accomplir la volonte de mon Pere celeste. Au jour de jugement, nombreux sont ceux qui me diront: 'Seigneur! Seigneur! Nous avons prophetise en ton nom, nous avons chasse des demons en ton nom,..' Je leur declarerai alors: 'Je ne vous ai jamais connus! Allez-vous-en, vous qui pratiquez le mal!'" - Matthieu 7:21-23

"In the breeding of domestic animals, the elimination of those individuals,...which are in any marked manner inferior, is by no means an unimportant element towards success...and with mankind some of the worst dispositions, which occasionally without any assignable cause make their appearance in families, may perhaps be reversions to a savage state fro which we are not removed by very many generations" (325).

"...what is involved here are two opposing views as to what it means to be people of the Spirit. For the Corinthians it meant 'speaking in tongues' & having wisdom & knowledge...without a commensurate concern for truly Christian behavior. For Paul it meant...to be full of the ...Holy Spirit...to behave as those 'sanctified in Christ Jesus & called to be his holy people' (1:2)...to 'walk in love'" (698).

"'I quit,' said Quentin Daniels 'because, if there are degrees of damnation, the scientist who places his mind in the service of brute force is the longest-range murderer on earth'" (683).

"Moi, je suis l'Eternel et je n'ai pas change. A cause de cela, descendants de Jacob, vous n'avez pas encore ete extermines. Depuis le temps de vos ancetres, vous vous detournez de mes lois et vous n'y obeissez pas. Revenez donc a moi, et moi, je reviendrai a vous, declare l'Eternel, le Seigneur des armees celestes." - Malachie 3:6-7

"...the profoundest question that ethics can ask: is a natural ethic possible? Can morality survive without supernatural belief? Can philosophy, by molding an effective secular moral code, save the civilization which its freedom of thought has threatened to destroy? (372).

"Tongues are fine, he will go on to affirm, provided they are interpreted. But not everyone should speak in tongues when the church assembles for worship. That makes everyone the same, which is like a body with only one part" (689).

"[Silver's] price would sink gradually lower and lower till it fell to its natural price or to what was just sufficient to pay, according to their natural rates, the wages of the labour, the profits of the stock, and the rent of the land, which must e paid in order to bring it from the mine to the market" (87).

"Pousse des cris de joie et sois dans l'allegresse, communaute de Sion, car je viens habiter chez toi, l'Eternel le declare. En ce jour-la, beaucoup de nations s'attacheront a l'Eternel et deviendront mon peuple. Et je demeurerai au milieu de vous tous, et vous saurez que l'Eternel, le Seigneur des armees celestes, m'a envoye vers vous." - Zacharie 3:14-15

"Whatever makes any bad action familiar to the mind, renders its performance by so much the easier. As Marcus Aurelius long ago said, 'Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts'" (318).

"'If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?' This interchange of the sense organs makes it clear that Paul's point is not the 'inferiority' of one to the other. The point is the need for all members; otherwise some function of the body would be missing" (676).

"All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work - and that which is its source - as the standard of their moral values,t hey will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost...The source of work? Man's mind, Miss Taggart, man's reasoning mind" (677).

"...l'Eternel ton Dieu est au milieu de toi un guerrier qui te sauve. Il sera transporte de joie a ton sujet et il te renouvellera dans son amour pour toi. Oui, a cause de toi, il poussera des cris de joie, et il exultera." - Sophonie 3:17

"The announcement of the relativity of knowledge did not make men modest, as it should, but disposed every man to consider himself the measure of all things; every clever youth could now feel himself fit to sit in judgment upon the moral code of his people, reject it if he could not understand and approve it, and then be free to rationalize his desires as the virtues of an emancipated soul" (362).

"Paul saw the Spirit as the key to everything in the Christian life. It seems mandatory that such prevail again if there is to be effective Christianity in our day. But let the one who says that not force their own brand of 'spiritual unity' on the church as simply another human machination. Our desperate need is surely for a sovereign work of the Spirit to do among us what all our "programmed unity cannot" (673).

"A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them" (311).

"Mais moi, c'est a cause de l'Eternel que je veux me rejouir, j'exulterai de joie a cause du Dieu qui me sauve. L'Eternel, le Seigneur, c'est lui ma force: il rend mes pieds pareils a ceux des biches, il me fait cheminer sur les lieux eleves." - Habaquq 3:18-19

"Labour, it must always be remembered, and not any particular commodity or set of commodities, is the real measure of the value both of silver and of all other commodities" (81).

"Indeed, the truly remarkable feature of this catalogue is the attribution to 'each one' of a whole gamut of supernatural activities in the same matter-of-fact way that contemporary church leaders would list positions on an organizational chart!" (655-6).

"But she knew that there was no meaning in motors or factories or trains, that their only meaning was in man's enjoyment of his life, which they served...for the power and the radiant vision within him which had seen the earth as a place of enjoyment and had known that the work of achieving one's happiness was the purpose, the sanction and the meaning of life" (670).

"Dans l'avenir, il adviendra que la montagne sur laquelle est le Temple de l'Eternel sera fermement etablie a-dessus des montagnes...et les peuples y afflueront. Des nations nombreuses viendront et se diront les unes aux autres: Venez, montons au mont de l'Eternel, au Temple du Dieu de Jacob! Il nous enseignera les voies qu'il a prescrites, nour suivrons ses sentiers" - Michee 3:1-2

"The age of Pericles resembled our own in the variety and disorder of its thought, and in the challenge that it offered to every traditional standard and belief. But no age has ever rivaled that of Pericles in the number and grandeur of its philosophical ideas, or in the vigor and exuberance with which they were debated" (349).