Alex’s Reviews > Good News for Anxious Christians, expanded ed.: 10 Practical Things You Don't Have to Do > Status Update

“Unless a church teaches doctrines like the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ, their children’s religious experience is formed in a way that is less and less distinctively Christian.”

“Since the focus is on a person, not a way of life or an experience, the crucial thing to say is not how to live or what the rules are, as in other religions, but rather what the story is about this one person, Jesus Christ.”

“The preacher’s job is not making Christ relevant to us but helping us to see his beauty—so that we may know what is glorious, wonderful, and joyous about our Beloved.”

“For we belong to our Beloved, and we will not find who we really are by looking at our lives first and then trying to fit Christ into them. That gets things backward.”

“You have to keep giving people Christ every time you preach, for he is the bread of life, and we don’t cease hungering for the nourishment of his presence just because we decided to believe him once a long time ago.”

“Unfortunately, in a great many sermons nowadays the “application” part expands until it crowds out everything else, and you hardly hear about Christ at all.”

“To wait for Christ to make all things new is to wait in hope that all the redeemed will praise God for the lives he has given them and for the meaning of their suffering, which will be made known to them in the end.”

“Sometimes the most we can do to relieve their suffering is just hear their awful words and bear with them patiently. This is the cross of listening, a cross Job’s friends were unwilling to bear.”

“For the point is not that you’re supposed to feel glad all the time, but that something good has happened that’s really worth celebrating.“

“Consumerism wants to convince us that the kind of thing Christ has to give us—the same person, himself, forever—is the last thing in the world we could possibly want. And anything that reminds us of such constancy, the same old songs and the same old words, the same ordinary lives—well, if consumerism is right, there must be something wrong with people who live like that.”