Camarie Weeks > Recent Status Updates

“Let us so live that all may see that to us the things of God are the first things, and the glory of God the first aim in our lives—to follow Christ our grand object in time present—to be with Christ our grand desire in time to come.”

“Don’t just flee your bad works, flee your good works too. Flee them both and collapse into the open arms of Jesus Christ.”

“To the degree that you have grasped the substitutionary vicarious death of Jesus Christ on the cross, you will walk in love. If you don’t walk in love, you haven’t grasped the doctrine.”

2. Do we believe our future matters to us more than it does to God? (Feeling pressure of responsibility-that it’s on me to provide or protect what I love) Remember that our Father did not spare his own Son but freely gave him up for us all. Everything we encounter is from “the hand which was once nailed to the cross for us” and none of those things will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ.

“Applying hope - how to draw on the hope of heaven to relieve anxiety in the meantime. Two questions to help diagnose:
1. Are we more attached to what is possible than to what God has promised us? (More attached to what we can lose than to what we can’t.) Remember we are born again to a living hope, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for us.”
to be continued…

Convicting: “How we spend our moments is how we spend our lives.”

“Seeing this Savior and trusting in him, he feels peace and hope, and willingly does battle against the foes of his soul. He sees his own many sins—his weak heart, a tempting world, a busy devil; if he looked only at them he might well despair. But he sees a mighty Savior, an interceding Savior, a sympathizing Savior—his blood, righteousness, everlasting priesthood—and he believes that all this is his own.”

“There’s so much I don’t understand, but my heart tells me You do all things well.”

“In the great day of judgment…The question will not be how we talked and what we professed, but how we lived and what we did.”

“If you want God’s grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing.”

“When pain comes, it is not simply to hurt us, to teach us a lesson, to whip us into shape, it is from a tender Father, for our healing. “You lie too near his heart for him to hurt you,” wrote the Puritan John Flavel.”

“Refusing to be honest with another [Christian] is works righteousness in disguise; we are believing that we need to save face, to retain uprightness of appearance…The gospel says we have nothing within us to commend us to God; why would we leave that theology in Christian fellowship and pretend that we do have virtue within to commend us.”

Speaking of Martin Luther’s life: “He came to see with particular insight that all people are spring-loaded to seek to strengthen God’s favor through their performance, and that therefore it is not only our badness that needs repenting of but also our goodness.”

Ephesians 3:19, “and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” “Paul prays that the Ephesians would be given supernatural power…to know how much Jesus loves them. Not just to have the love of Christ. To know the love of Christ…Paul is praying that they would know what cannot be known.”

“We were secured in Christ before we had ever heard of Christ.” See 2 Timothy 1:8-9

Discussing the pattern of healthy self-despair and then not staying there but looking to Jesus: “Ponder, unhurriedly, how vile, left to yourself, you are.”

“Jesus is fully engaged on our behalf, as engaged as ever he was on earth. He is interceding for us…He is more committed to your growth in him than you are.”

“The meaning of “[God will] give us all things” can be put thus: one day we shall see that nothing—literally nothing—which could have increased our eternal happiness has been denied us, and that nothing—literally nothing—that could have reduced that happiness has been left with us.“

“And the stress of the New Testament is not on the difficulty and danger of drawing near to the holy God, but on the boldness and confidence with which believers may approach him: a boldness that springs directly from faith in Christ and from the knowledge of his saving work.”

“By sin, the New Testament means not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, defiance of, retreat from, and consequent guilt before God the Creator; and sin, says the New Testament, is the basic evil from which we need deliverance and from which Christ died to save us.

“Faithfulness is only possible from us when Christ is everything to us… Faithfulness: the resolute commitment to honor the Lord in the the nitty-gritty details of everyday life.”

So often we disqualify ourselves from Christ’s presence, and we think he cannot be with us because we presume his love for us is based on us, on what we are like, on what we have done or not done; but it is not.

“A renewal of the soul takes place in seeing afresh who I am in the world —not master and commander but a frail and prone-to-wander sheep with a good shepherd—and that my experience of soul rest will always be dependent on my proximity to him.”