Christian Graduation Quotes

Even the best of Christians are troubled by the question, "Why does an almighty God send, or at least allow, suffering?" When you are nagged by thoughts like this, say to yourself, "I am still in elementary school. When I graduate from the university of Christian life, I will understand His ways better and doubts will cease.

I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. . . . Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading TOM JONES as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. . . . My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible.

Character is a course, finish it.

No ancient Jew was ever promised, or expected, a heavenly life. That was a wild and outrageous teaching of Jesus. Holy text never offers a heavenly hope--before Jesus. Think about it: No matter how faithful Adam would have been, he could never graduate to heaven. Going to heaven was a 'Jesus teaching.' It simply does not exist in Torah. pg xxvii

A graduate can be academically excellent but morally and spiritually bankrupt. We need to consider these dimensions in education as well.

Not once after graduating from Bryan was I asked to make a case for the scientific feasibility of miracles, but often I was asked why Christians aren't more like Jesus. I may have met one or two people who rejected Christianity because they had difficulties with the deity of Christ, but most rejected Christianity because they thought it means becoming judgmental, narrow-minded, intolerant, and unkind. People didn't argue with me about the problem of evil; they argued about why Christians aren't doing more to alleviate human suffering, support the poor, and oppose violence and war. Most weren’t looking for a faith that provided all the answers; they were looking for one in which they were free to ask questions.

Let me tell you that in my humble opinion the greater human civilization and the greater understanding is to be found in each member of this community, living simply and naturally; even if it is a community that lacks all the advantages of an industrial civilization. But though they may not have the benefits of progress, they have a much higher notion of Christian charity than all the other so-called civilized nations in the world. I'd rather have a man belonging to this village, unable to read or write, than a Sorbonne graduate, if that meant he would come to have the heart of the lawyer who got me sent down. The first is always a man; the other has forgotten how to be one

I don’t care what college you graduated from, how many degrees you may have, how much money you may be making, how pretty you think you are.  All of that means absolutely nothing if you don’t have God in your life.

Graduation is not the terminus of your experience; it is the terminal of your success.

I used to think that the simple good news of Christianity was just for non-Christians. Jesus came to save sinners, but once someone became saved, I figured they’d move on to the advanced material. I saw the gospel as Christianity 101 and the rest of the Christian life as graduate-level courses. But I’ve come to realize that the gospel isn’t the first step in a stairway of truths but more like the hub in a wheel of truth. Once God rescues sinners, He doesn’t give them something else to think about or do, He simply gives them more gospel, grace upon grace. All good theology is an exposition of the gospel.

So, if he wants to treat me like I’m ten instead of twenty, that’s okay. If he wants to have one of his company cars take me and pick me up from school, that’s okay. And if he insists that I live with him until I graduate college, that’s okay. But I’ll be damned if he’s going to stop me from seeing Christian.

You can take a kid to a thousand lessons and offer them the finest tutors, but that’s not the objective of a parent. Your main task here is not to impart skills. You do not exist to make your kids marketable to the corporate world. You are here to shape character as securely and fully as you can before they leave your home.

How different it could all have been … Taylor Swift was never meant to be a singer-songwriter; she was supposed to become a stockbroker. Her parents even chose her Christian name with a business path in mind. Her mother, Andrea, selected a gender-neutral name for her baby girl so that when she grew up and applied for jobs in the male-dominated finance industry no one would know if she were male or female. It was a plan that came from a loving place, but it was not one that would ever be realised. Instead, millions and millions of fans across the world would know exactly which gender Andrea’s firstborn was, without ever meeting her. In Taylor’s track ‘The Best Day’, which touchingly evokes a childhood full of wonder, she sings of her ‘excellent’ father whose ‘strength is making me stronger’. That excellent father is Scott Kingsley Swift, who studied business at the University of Delaware. He lived in the Brown residence hall. There, he made lots of friends, one of whom, Michael DiMuzio, would later cross paths with Taylor professionally. Scott graduated with a first-class degree and set about building his career in similarly impressive style. Perhaps a knack for business is in the blood: his father and grandfather also worked in finance. Scott set up his own investment-banking firm called the Swift

Let me tell you a joke, Rora said. Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself what the meaning of life is. He goes to work, but realizes that is not what life is or should be. He decides to read some philosophy and for years studies everything from the old Greeks onward, but can't find the meaning of life. Maybe it's the family, he thinks, so he spends time with his wife, Fata, and the kids, but finds no meaning in that and so he leaves them. He thinks, Maybe helping others is the meaning of life, so he goes to medical school, graduates with flying colors, goes to Africa to cure malaria and transplants hearts, but cannot discover the meaning of life. He thinks, maybe it's the wealth, so he becomes a businessman, starts making money hand over fist, millions of dollars, buys everything there is to buy, but that is not what life is about. Then he turns to poverty and humility and such, so he gives everything away and begs on the streets, but still he cannot see what life is. He thinks maybe it is literature: he writes novel upon novel, but the more he writes the more obscure the meaning of life becomes. He turns to God, lives the life of a dervish, reads and contemplates the Holy Book of Islam - still, nothing. He studies Christianity, then Judaism, then Buddhism, then everything else - no meaning of life there. Finally, he hears about a guru living high up in the mountains somewhere in the East. The guru, they say, knows what the meaning of life is. So Mujo goes east, travels for years, walks roads, climbs the mountain, finds the stairs that lead up to the guru. He ascends the stairs, tens of thousands of them, nearly dies getting up there. At the top, there are millions of pilgrims, he has to wait for months to get to the guru. Eventually it is his turn, he goes to a place under a big tree, and there sits the naked guru, his legs crossed, his eyes closed, meditating, perfectly peaceful - he surely knows the meaning of life, Mujo says: I have dedicated my life to discovering the meaning of life and I have failed, so I have come to ask you humbly, O Master, to divulge the secret to me. The guru opens his eyes, looks at Mujo, and calmly says, My friend, life is a river. Mujo stares at him for a long time, cannot believe what he heard. What's life again? Mujo asks. Life is a river, the guru says. Mujo nods and says, You turd of turds, you goddamn stupid piece of shit, you motherfucking cocksucking asshole. I have wasted my life and come all this way for you to tell me that life is a fucking river. A river? Are you kidding me? That is the stupidest, emptiest fucking thing I have ever heard. Is that what you spent your life figuring out? And the guru says, What? It is not a river? Are you saying it is not a river?

Remove it, as Pulliam had done, and Christianity was like any and every religion in the world: a population of supplicants begging respite from begrudging authority; harried believers ducking fate or dodging every-day evil; the weak negotiating a doomed trek through the wilderness; the sighted ripped of light and thrown into the perpetual dark of choicelessness. Without this sign, the believer’s life was confined to praising God and taking the hits. The praise was credit; the hits were interest due on a debt that could never be paid. Or, as Pulliam put it, no one knew when he had “graduated.” But with it, in the religion in which this sign was paramount and foundational, well, life was a whole other matter.

Students are welcome at such schools to study historical and contemporary theology, and to relate these to auxiliary disciplines such as philosophy and literary criticism. But they are not taught to seek ways of applying Scripture for the edification of God’s people. Rather, professors encourage each student to be “up to date” with the current academic discussion and to make “original contributions” to that discussion, out of his autonomous reasoning. So when the theologian finishes his graduate work and moves to a teaching position, even if he is personally evangelical in his convictions, he often writes and teaches as he was encouraged to do in graduate school: academic comparisons and contrasts between this thinker and that, minimal interaction with Scripture itself.

At the present time, political power is everywhere constituted on insufficient foundations. On the one hand it emanates from the so-called divine right of kings, which is none other than military force; on the other from universal suffrage, which is merely the instinct of the masses, or mere average intelligence. A nation is not a number of uniform values or ciphers; it is a living being composed of organs. So long as national representation is not the image of this organization, right from its working to its teaching classes, there will be no organic or intelligent national representation. So long as the delegates of all scientific bodies, and the whole of the Christian churches do not sit together in one upper council, our societies will be governed by instinct, by passion, and by might, and there will be no social temple. ...We are beginning to understand that Jesus, at the very height of his consciousness, the transfigured Christ, is opening his loving arms to his brothers, the other Messiahs who preceded him, beams of the Living Word as he was, that he is opening them wide to Science in its entirety, Art in its divinity, and Life in its completeness. But his promise cannot be fulfilled without the help of all the living forces of humanity. Two main things are necessary nowadays for the continuation of the mighty work: on the one hand, the progressive unfolding of experimental science and intuitive philosophy to facts of psychic order, intellectual principles, and spiritual proofs; on the other, the expansion of Christian dogma in the direction of tradition and esoteric science, and subsequently a reorganization of the Church according to a graduated initiation; this by a free and irresistible movement of all Christian churches, which are also equally daughters of the Christ. Science must become religious and religion scientific. This double evolution, already in preparation, would finally and forcibly bring about a reconciliation of Science and Religion on esoteric grounds. The work will not progress without considerable difficulty at first, but the future of European Society depends on it. The transformation of Christianity, in its esoteric sense would bring with it that of Judaism and Islam, as well as a regeneration of Brahmanism and Buddhism in the same fashion, it would accordingly furnish a religious basis for the reconciliation of Asia and Europe.

arrived in Cambridge, and made an appointment to meet the formidable Krister Stendahl, a Swedish scholar of fierce intelligence, now to be my first adviser. We met in his office. I was nervous, but also amused that this tall and severe man, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar, looked to me like an Ingmar Bergman version of God. After preliminary formalities, he abruptly swiveled in his chair and turned sternly to ask, “So really, why did you come here?” I stumbled over the question, then mumbled something about wanting to find the essence of Christianity. Stendahl stared down at me, silent, then asked, “How do you know it has an essence?” In that instant, I thought, That’s exactly why I came here: to be asked a question like that—challenged to rethink everything. Now I knew I had come to the right place. I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma. Yet I still imagined that if we went back to first-century sources, we might hear what Jesus was saying to his followers when they walked by the Sea of Galilee—we might find the “real Christianity,” when the movement was in its golden age. But Harvard quenched these notions; there would be no simple path to what Krister Stendahl ironically called “play Bible land” simply by digging through history. Yet I also saw that this hope of finding “the real Christianity” had driven countless people—including our Harvard professors—to seek its origins. Naive as our questions were, they were driven by a spiritual quest. We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus’s death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn’t exist, is that he did: fictional people don’t have real enemies. What came next was a huge surprise: our professors at Harvard had file cabinets filled with facsimiles of secret gospels I had never heard of—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Truth—and dozens of other writings, transcribed by hand from the original Greek into Coptic, and mimeographed in blue letters on pages stamped TOP SECRET. Discovered in 1945, these texts only recently had become available to scholars. This wasn’t what I’d expected to find in graduate school, or even what I wanted—at least, not so long as I still hoped to find answers instead of more questions

TEENAGERS from the Institute of Children's Literature. After she graduated college, Lacy got serious about her writing career and joined the American Christian Fiction Writers. When presented with the opportunity to write mainstream

I ended up as much a Maoist failure as I had been a Christian failure. Souls were still unsaved, and the imperialist bourgeoisie was still in power. Before I graduated from high school, I had lost my faith in the fundamentalist God I had been trained to worship and serve.

the lesson that underlies all his work, a lesson, bluntly uttered by a character in one of his early novels, that he passed on to fans who sought his advice: “There’s only one rule I know of—Goddam it, you’ve got to be kind.” Coming from a long line of German Freethinkers, Vonnegut was not a Christian, though he spoke of Jesus as “the greatest and most humane of human beings.” In a talk he gave at St. Clement Episcopal Church in New York City (“Palm Sunday”), he said: “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have had so far. Perhaps we will get another good idea by and by—and then we will have two good ideas.

All our opinions are false and don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. We live ,we die. We as individuals don’t matter in this world ,we will be a memory if anyone does remember us. We will be lucky.But soon , our memory will die with them and maybe someone will utter our name in passing in this age of technology ,as a footnote to something that grabbed more of their attention. Ultimately in this world our lives do not matter. So why do we feel we are in a one man play? Why do we want to accomplish so much just to be bellowed as heroes or heroines, to be adored or thought highly of by other people who do not even have favorable opinions of themselves? You see the truth is that the trace we leave In this world do not matter in this world, the track we leave in this world is what matters in the afterlife and it will be mirror in the memory of your future. Everything we do today is either for our own comforts or to avoid discomfort we are living in a perpetual state of pleasing ourselves , self gratification and being busy bodies for the momentarily exhalation of relief that will almost always follow up with a crisis. No one will have a continuous state of bliss as the pendulum swings up it will eventually come down before it comes back up again, yet we act surprised and devastated. This life is a perpetual test to try to develop and polish your outlook and inner life so you may be the lucky ones to develop the acuteness to see this world for what it is, and not lose that vision. An illusion of forms presenting the beauty and ugliness of our souls to us on a platter and tempting us to forget we are mortal. You don’t finish school when you graduate with that degree. You finish school when you die.

They saw in their hearts a developed South Korea and asked God for a strategy to bring that about. He showed them that if they rallied Westerners to finance one child each through education, then this education would become a foundation for the future greatness of the country. They used this prophetic word to start one of the greatest humanitarian organizations for children in history: Compassion International. (How many readers, I wonder, have supported a child by sending money to a Compassion International child sponsorship project.) The first generation of Compassion International kids that graduated college had a knack for building, and they helped lay Korea’s foundation in government (one was even one of the first Supreme Court justices), education (many became teachers right away), religion (many became Christian pastors and leaders), and industry (many started businesses). It was such a pivotal movement that it is still referred to by many of the South Korean government leaders I have met. South Korea began its greater development into what it is today because God invested a vision of its future to Christians, organizations, and other groups. He gave them the faith to help Korea become what it is today.

parallel to all other ages, not a chronological series of events. Indeed, one of the great marvels of God’s gracious activity toward us is that it occurs in real time without being prejudiced in favor of any particular age. Just because we are the latest does not mean we are the best. The effects of sin prevent any age—including ours—from being “golden,” at least in the spiritual sense. Every Christian generation learns equally the lessons of Revelation—that God is in control, that the powers of the world are minuscule when compared with God, that God is as likely to work through apparent weakness and failure as through strength and success, and that in the end God’s people will prevail. Revelation is the last book of the Bible. It reveals important truths about the end times. But it is also last in another important sense—it calls on all the hermeneutical courage, wisdom, and maturity one can muster in order to be understood properly. In many ways it serves as a graduation exercise for the NIV Application Commentary Series, an opportunity to fully apply the many lessons we have learned in the Bridging Contexts sections of previous volumes. God’s time is his, not ours. The story of God’s gracious activity on our behalf will be fulfilled in a great and glorious conclusion. But all Christians, everywhere and at all times, have equal access to the time. That access has been and is made possible by God’s message in the book of Revelation. Terry C. Muck Author’s Preface AS A NEW CHRISTIAN recently converted from atheism, I eagerly hurried through Paul’s letters, reaching Revelation as soon as possible. Once I reached it, however, I could hardly understand a word of it. I listened attentively to the first few “prophecy teachers” I heard, but even if they had not contradicted one another, over the years I watched as most of their detailed predictions failed to materialize. Perhaps six years after my conversion, as I began to read Revelation in Greek for the first time, the book came alive to me. Because I was now moving through the text more carefully, I noticed the transitions and the structure, and I realized it was probably addressing something much different from what I had first supposed. At the same time, I catalogued parallels I found between Revelation and biblical prophets like Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. I also began reading an apocalypse contemporary with Revelation, 4 Ezra (2 Esdras in the Apocrypha), to learn more about the way Revelation’s original, first-century audience may have heard its claims. Yet even in my first two years as a Christian, Revelation and other end-time passages proved a turning point for me. As a young Christian, I was immediately schooled in a particular, popular end-time view, which I respectfully swallowed (the

A very wise counselor friend of mine put it another way. After observing his own kids and the young people he works with in his practice, he said the correct answer to the question, “When should I get my child a smartphone?” is “Whenever you want their childhood to end.” Your kid gets just one childhood, and they get just one you to protect it.

Our default setting is to stay comfortable, to stay clean from the mess. That means sticking to our own areas of expertise and excusing ourselves from the parts of life that make us say, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” But that’s not what men are called to do. We’re called to take part in God’s “family business” of entering into chaos and bringing order.

In our affluent Western culture, growing up for many of us is weirdly optional. Historically, men have had no choice but to grow up. They had to work to eat. They had to defend themselves, their families, and their communities. But most of us here and now can choose the life of an entertainment consumer, just moving from one experience to the next.

President John F. Kennedy explained to Yale’s graduating class of 1962 that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears…. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”89 Powerful historical falsehoods are particularly harmful in constitutional republics such as the United States.

My life was about me, ever since I was a little kid growing up, everything was about me, what could I get, what could I do, who could I become, and it just centered around myself. But at some point I began drinking, as I graduated college I was already an alcoholic. I was married at the time, I had two children, I had a decent job, but everything was about me, and everything was about my next drink. My wife got tired of it and she divorced me. I went home and there she was in our living room, with two plastic trash bags, and basically all my worldly belongings were in those bags. The day I got kicked out, that was the last day I ever drank. After the divorce went through I took a new job, we became wildly successful in that business. At this point in my life I am single, I am making more money than I ever thought I will make in my life, and everything was going well, but at night when you are by yourself, as much as I thought I hated my wife, I knew inside I loved her. One day I decided to see where my kids where going to church, and I thought it was going to be a cult. (He thought that if he could prove to the judge that his ex-wife had his kids in a cult, he will get full custody.) Again the thought was: “I am getting my kids, for me”. It wasn’t about what was best for them, it’s about what I want. That morning I had an encounter with God, I heard the Gospel like I never heard it before, and ended up giving my life to Jesus. And when I did that it was like my whole life, my view was just central, it was all about me, but when I gave my life to Christ that lens got pulled away and all of a sudden there’s a range of beautiful mountains, which represented the best of my life and the rest of my life. And everything started to change immediately then, and I started to think about my children, and my ex-wife, what would be good for my ex-wife? Isn’t that strange? So kind of a long story short, we ended up getting remarried 6 months later, and we haven’t looked back since. Now our hearts are about serving other people, it’s about serving God, it’s about serving Jesus, it’s about helping others. (At that time he had no idea how God was about to transform his life or the adventure on which he was about to take him, his own escape from selfishness.) And I believe with all my heart, that the Christian life should be the greatest adventure on the planet and if we as Christians do not live it that way, and do not experience that, then I am gonna challenge you and say: Who’s your mind on?

When I think of overcoming obstacles, I’m reminded of one our West Coast Baptist College graduates, Nathan Kinoshita, missionary to Tokyo, Japan. When Nathan and his wife, Ruth, went to Tokyo to begin church planting, the city was credited as the most expensive city in the world in which to live. It bumps up and down on the list (as of this writing, it is the sixth most expensive city), but it remains high. The expense not only impacted their personal living needs (for $2,500 per month, they rent a five hundred-square-foot apartment for their family of five), but it impacted their ministry needs as well. To rent even a small building in which to hold services for three hours each Sunday costs them $7,000 per month. On top of that, Japan is not known as a mission field that is particularly responsive to the gospel. So the Kinoshitas were looking at months, possibly years, before a self-supporting church would be established. Many people would have said, “It can’t be done. It’s too expensive. There are too many obstacles. The people don’t want to hear anyway.” I’m thankful Nathan Kinoshita didn’t say that. He found an apartment for his family and rolled up his sleeves and went to work sharing the gospel. Today, a mere five and a half years later, the City Baptist Church of Tokyo is strong, healthy, and growing. Obstacles are what we see when we take our eyes off the goal. Passion is what we need to overcome the obstacles.

When I became a Christian, I had to change everything—my life, my friends, my writing, my teaching, my advising, my clothes, my speech, my thoughts. I was tenured to a field that I could no longer work in. I was the faculty advisor to all of the gay and lesbian and feminist groups on campus. I was writing a book that I no longer believed in. And, I was scheduled in a few months to give the incoming address to all of Syracuse University’s graduate students. What in the world would I say to them? The lecture that I had written and planned to deliver—on Queer Theory—I threw in the trash. Thousands of new students would hear my first, fledgling attempts to speak about Christian hermeneutics at a postmodern university. I was flooded with doubt about my new life in Christ. Was I willing to suffer like Christ? Was I willing to be considered stupid by those who didn’t know Jesus? The world’s eyes register what a life in Christ takes away, but how do I communicate all that it gives? Do I really believe, in Charles Bridges’s words, “The very chains of Christ are glorious” (p. 33)?1 Peter, after being beaten for preaching the gospel, rejoiced that he was “counted worthy to suffer shame for [Christ’s] name” (Acts 5:41). I pondered this. To the world, this is masochism. To the Christian, this is freedom. Did I really believe this? Do I really believe this today?

The church has lost its ability to lament!” This heartfelt cry came from a seminary student as she prayed with other graduate students, faculty and staff who gathered together to seek God for racial justice and reconciliation throughout our nation. As we cried and prayed together we realized that our theology and spiritual formation hadn’t given us sufficient permission, language or tools to adequately sit with the despair and sadness of recent racial injustices, senseless acts of gun violence and social unrest taking place in the world around us. We even saw this on social media where people also seemed paralyzed and helpless to know what to do and how to respond. Sincere, well-meaning Christian people asked, “What should we do?” while people who were fed up with the seeming indifference of those around them expressed their outrage through a hashtag that proclaimed “Silence is Violence!

High school dropouts earn about $10,000 less each year than high school graduates and $35,000 less each year than college graduates. Over the course of a lifetime, a college graduate will earn, on average, $1 million more than a high school dropout.[63]

The Christian life is a school of love and nobody graduates from it before the end of his life.

Niebuhr [Oden's Doctoral adviser at Yale and leading 20th century Christian theological ethicist] wanted all of his graduate students to have some serious interdisciplinary competence beyond theology, so I chose to be responsible for the area of psychology of religion. I hoped to correlate aspects of contemporary psychotherapies with a philosophy of universal history. The psychology that prevailed in my college years was predominately Freudian psychoanalysis, but my clinical beginning point in the late 1950's had turned to Rogerian client-centered therapy. The psychology that prevailed in my Yale years was predominantly the empirical social psychologists like Kurt Lewin and Musafer Sherif. I gradually assimilated those views in order to work on a critique of therapies and assess them all in relation to my major interest in the meaning of history.

After graduating high school and leaving my faith-reinforcing circle of Christian classmates, my religious fervor cooled somewhat, but I was still firm in my convictions. During my first semester in college, I took a religion course as an elective. Even though my major was Physics, I would not pass up an opportunity to learn as much as I could about God.

The importance of reading on the part of freedom loving people cannot be underestimated. Well-read people are able to think through issues better than non-readers are. Those who are well read will be able to become leaders in society. Non-readers are often doomed to be nothing more than followers. The dumbed-down graduates of the government schools are unable to think through the issues of day let alone even know what the issues are. They fall prey to specious arguments and deceptive manipulative politicians who promise anything to achieve an agenda or to stay in power.

After Gary’s graduation with the Bachelor’s degree, Professor Nixon advised Gary about what he would do next as a graduate student. Gary would be a student teacher and would be teaching Constitutional Law. Nixon asked, “Do you know anything about the United States Constitution, Gary?” “No, does it matter?” “Honestly, it depends on who’s teaching it. There are some, who say it’s a living document, and can be interpreted to suit the times, without the need for amendments. While others say it isn’t, and has to be followed exactly how the Founders wrote it. The people who follow the Constitution, word for word, are like those Christians who think the Bible should be interpreted in a complete, literal sense. Actually, I think both literalists are one in the same, but I don’t know for sure. Anyway, I think you should teach it as a living, breathing document, which is open to interpretation.

Where I live, on the West Coast, most churches tend to be small and to have little influence in the culture. Stark and Finke explain, “A major reason for the lack of church membership in the West is high rates of mobility, which decrease the ability of all voluntary organizations, not just churches, to maintain membership. That is, people move so often that they lack the social ties needed to affiliate with churches.”25 To address this problem, one of the most effective church-planting networks in the United States began in Tacoma, Washington, by using a method of developing intensive community in neighborhoods. Soma Communities fosters deep and intense relationships by teaching church planters to get closely involved in their neighborhoods, opening their homes to neighbors, gathering friends together on a regular basis, and forming “missional communities” focused on discovering and meeting the needs of neighbors and the community. It is these relational bonds that make someone unfamiliar with Christianity want to try it out. Rick Richardson, who directs the evangelism and leadership program at Wheaton College Graduate School, argues that “belonging comes before believing.” He contrasts older methods of evangelism that focused on asking individuals to make a set of commitments. Today, asserts Richardson, presenting four spiritual laws and inviting people to make decisions for Christ is less effective. “Evangelism is about helping people belong so that they can come to believe. So our communities need to be places where people can connect before they have to commit.”26 The idea is held up by social science research showing that converts tend to sign on to a new faith only after their social ties become stronger to those in the new faith than to others outside it. “This often occurs before a convert knows much about what the group believes.

I have graduated to the extent of not asking what is happening in my life because I trust the maker(God).

Thank God #EVEN# #THOUGH# in bad times not only in your good; this is a graduated form of gratitude.

Walker had traveled to London on a mission to promote Wisconsin for trade purposes, and an interviewer had asked him the tiresome and irrelevant question whether he believes in evolution. Walker refused to answer the question. “That’s a question politicians shouldn’t be involved in one way or another,” he said. “I am going to leave that up to you. I’m here to talk about trade, not to pontificate about evolution.” Asking a Scott Walker whether he believes in evolution when only 19 percent of the American populace believes it to be the only explanation for why we are here is a device for measuring his membership in the smart set. After all, Walker isn’t the only prominent American without a college degree. Take NBC News, for example. Its outgoing serial fabulist anchor Brian Williams never graduated from college, and neither did Williams’ replacement Lester Holt. But both Williams and Holt would dutifully parrot the “pro-science” viewpoint that yes, yes, evolution explains the origins of mankind. It’s only those knuckle-dragging white Christian rednecks from flyover territory who believe otherwise. And since Walker lacks an Ivy League pedigree or in fact even a degree at all, if he can be engaged to spout bible-beating hokum on foreign shores that surely would be the end of him.

You know, I come out of the church. I not only grew up in the church but graduated from seminary, and I look at this as a mass movement. I give it very little religious legitimacy, especially the extreme wing of it.

George Matheson was only a teenager when he learned that his poor eyesight was deteriorating further. Not to be denied, he continued straightaway with his plans to enroll in Glasgow University, and his determination led to his graduating at age nineteen. But as he pursued graduate studies for Christian ministry he became totally blind. His sisters joined ranks beside him, learning Greek and Hebrew to assist him in his studies, and he pressed faithfully on. But his spirit collapsed when his fiance´e, unwilling to be married to a blind man, broke their engagement and returned his ring. George never married, and the pain of that rejection never totally left him. Years later, his sister came to him, announcing her engagement. He rejoiced with her, but his mind went back to his own heartache.He consoled himself in thinking of God’s love which is never limited, never conditional, never withdrawn, and never uncertain. Out of this experience it is said he wrote the hymn, O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go, on June 6, 1882.

we don’t need Dolce & Gabbana Belt Buckle Preacher Guy. In a subscribe-to-my-YouTube-channel world, we don’t need men of God who still need our constant admiration and approval. But a man who is able to sit and listen, to root for others, to be a voice of affirmation and guidance with no significant payoff in mind? Yeah, that guy is refreshing. There aren’t many of that type. We need more. We need you to become that guy. And this isn’t about taking on a tough, I-don’t-need-anybody persona. That’s immaturity too, because you’re still trying to prove something. The point is to recognize this desperate, yawning gap in our lives, this drive for significance, and find satisfaction for it in our relationship with God instead of in one more promotion or compliment or whatever.

The university was to become a hallmark of Christian civilisation. In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation - that violent shaking-up of the Catholic Church - was to be initiated by graduates of the universities, but in the most recent century perhaps no institution has done more to promote an alternative or secular view of the world.

I've been in this class for a while now. I'm doing the best that I can. It takes dedication, hard work and study to be a Godly man. I've taken a lot of tests. I've gone through many trials. I've experienced hardships down many exciting miles. The narrow road gets tough at times. The battles get harder to win. But the Lord is right here with me, and to that I say, "Amen." I'm still going forward, a steady progression. Class has not been dismissed. It's still in session. Soon the bell will ring, and then I can leave. I'll graduate to Heaven with all who believe.

Jesus proclaimed the same gospel to the crowds that he taught to the disciples. He did not have the twelve on a special, gospel-plus track to study advanced subject matter. The good news is for everyone because nobody ever graduates from the gospel. Jesus taught the same gospel of the kingdom to sinners and to saints. Why? Because his agenda of grace is the only solution to our common predicament of sin, Christian or non-Christian. Both desperately need the forgiving, reconciling, and restoring power of the gospel to know and enjoy God, not just once but for a lifetime.

The telling truth about many Christian seminaries and graduate schools is that when you dig below the surface, you will find a wide range of deep personal issues that are not being addressed as part of preparation for pastoral ministry. The problem is not that these issues exist but that we are doing so little to address them. We offer men’s groups and counseling services, but only as voluntary add-ons rather than as core institutional priorities. Success is ultimately judged by academic precision rather than progress toward Christlikeness, even when we are careful to couch success in terms of the latter.

Christopher Herrington, the visionary from Abilene, TX, is a father, a Voice Over Actor, a business owner of a company called "Candy Quarter Vending", and Interior Designer. A skilled graduate from Abilene Christian University, he navigates roles as an Interior Designer and Business Owner with commitment. His Continuing Education strategies highlight Christopher's commitment to safety and excellence. An outdoor sports enthusiast participating in activities like golf and rock climbing, a volunteer coach at the YMCA for my kid’s sports teams, he finds joy in a well-rounded lifestyle.

Choose the people around you, the people closest to you, wisely. You’ll become like them. Their thinking will shape yours. They will help you order—or disorder—your values and desires. They will affect your attitude toward life itself. Do not underestimate this. They will change who you become.

So you’re a sinner? Yes. So am I. But we can’t let our guilt push us away from God instead of toward him. We have to keep interacting in spite of ourselves. Real, raw prayer—the kind where you’re thinking about what you’re saying—forces honesty.

If I know how something ends, and that it ends well, I have a totally different experience watching it or living it. There’s no reason to be anxious. The ref makes a terrible call? That’s frustrating, but not really, because I know how it ends. And Jesus’ words assure us that he knows how it ends. Death is the ultimate weapon of our spiritual enemy, but two thousand years ago, it was disarmed. God is ultimately going to take care of us. Plus, he said, worries don’t help, so what’s the point? Worrying about tomorrow just makes today miserable.

When we’re hit with a temptation that could destroy everything, we rarely think, This will destroy everything. It will cost me dearly, possibly for the rest of my life. I will live with regret about the ongoing devastation I’ve caused. But I’m going to do it. No, we usually narrow our focus to avoid thinking about what we’re really doing, which is misusing our freedom to hurt and destroy all that we’ve worked for and all those around us.

Women don’t want to be around angry guys. They want to be around clearheaded men who manage to get things done without the rage. Angry guys aren’t attractive. Men of action are.

There's plenty of advice we can give to our youth, but to me the most important is to start now to live a healthy lifestyle. As you age, it won't matter how important, wealthy or powerful you are; you will not enjoy life unless you have your health.

If I want to shape who I’m becoming, I’ve got to put my mind on other things, better things, and I actually can do that. I am responsible for what I do with my thoughts. I can take them captive, Scripture says, and break them like an experienced rider can break a wild horse.

If I want to shape who I’m becoming, I’ve got to put my mind on other things, better things, and I actually can do that. I am responsible for what I do with my thoughts. I can take them captive, Scripture says, and break them like an experienced rider can break a wild horse. “We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ,” Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 10:5.

Ask God for wisdom. It’s the most important thing you can request, and he promises he’ll give it to you. Wisdom will spare you and others around you immense pain. That’s the thing about foolishness: It always, always, always brings pain. As I mentioned, wisdom is knowing what matters. Wisdom is understanding the true value of things.

The great news is that God specializes in changing people. That is, when they’re humble. So you can become less needy. It’ll happen when you actively turn your attention to God more often, spend time praying and communicating with him, and ask him to grow your desire for him. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit. It’s something that comes from changing the inputs in our lives, altering our schedules, reshaping our habits, and putting our minds repeatedly on the right things. You can be the guy who’s a source of significance and blessing for others. You’ll still struggle with yourself, but you’ll become more and more like Jesus. The enemy tempted him with everything the world had to offer. Power! Significance! Prestige! And Jesus said no. He didn’t need it. He knew who he was. I hope you do too.

What we pay attention to is everything. We should note just how the word “pay” fits. Our attention is a limited thing, and we have to manage it like finances. When I’m “paying” attention to something, I’m buying a ticket so my brain can attend.

Do evil or foolish thoughts, or just plain dumb thoughts, pop into my head? Oh, heck yes, they do. But I can catch on. I can recognize what they are. I can replace those thoughts with better ones. I can get busy doing something else. I don’t have to beat myself up for stuff that pops into my head. When that does happen, I can move on. I have to move on, or I will never be the man I need to be, and could have been, for others. I can’t mess this one up. Everyone around me is depending on it. It’s the same with you. What you pay attention to will affect the people around you, for good or ill. If the keeper’s heart is lost, the garden is lost too.

We create ourselves over time. We are becoming something, and that something is more and more pronounced. People don’t suddenly become angry, bitter caricatures at age seventy. No, they were working on it a long time ago, step-by-step, decision by decision, attitude by attitude, reaction by reaction.

I’m a history nerd who’s been to Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Roman Colosseum, and Windsor Castle, and I’ve never heard any tourists talking about the amazing foundations. I never even thought about their foundations until now, actually, and that’s just the point. Men who are honorable serve as foundations for their families and communities, but they may never be fully appreciated.

Loyalty means not letting our sinfulness keep us from God. Focusing on our sin can push us away. Trust me, he is not shocked by our sin. He paid a steep price because of it. He knows we’re sinners. But as we continue to focus on living a loyal life, turning our attention repeatedly to him and interacting with him, we will change and grow. I’ve seen it happen in my own life.

A good father provides shelter—physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. If you’re a wise father who loves your children, you will shelter them. You will protect them. You will shield them. You will filter the world for them. You will do your best to know what and who is influencing them, even if it means inconvenience to you or feeling like you’re the only parent on the block who might care.

This is the part about ambition with regard to relationships, which, naturally, brings us to FAQ #1,214: “Brant, would you kindly illustrate what you’re saying by using a proverb about oxen?

The book, The Holy Longing, resulted from that conversation. And Eric Major’s instincts were correct; there was a crying niche for that kind of book. The book found a huge audience, inside of all Christian denominations. But while The Holy Longing is a solid book, one that offers a certain basic foundation in Christian spirituality, it remains precisely that, a foundational book, a needed Spirituality 101 course, but not a graduate or final course. The Holy Longing is a book that is intended to help us “get our lives together,” to help us achieve an essential discipleship. But where do we go from there? What lies beyond the essentials, the basics? Where do we go once some of the basic questions in our lives have been answered, or at least brought to enough peace that our focus can shift away from ourselves to others? Where do we go once the basic questions in our lives are no longer the restless questions of youthful insecurity and loneliness? “Who am I?” “Who loves me?” “How will my life turn out?” Where do we go once the basic questions in life become: “How can I give my life away more purely, and more meaningfully?” “How do I live beyond my own heartaches, headaches, and obsessions so as to help make other peoples’ lives more meaningful?” The intent of this book is to try to address exactly those questions: How can we live less self-centered, more mature lives? What constitutes deep maturity and how do we reach that place? And, not unimportantly, what constitutes a more adult, Christian discipleship? What constitutes a truly mature following of Jesus? This book will try to answer those questions. It will try to be true to what its subtitle promises: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity.

To my great relief, I have realized over time that God really wants one thing from us, and here it is, so gird yourself: Loyalty. A believing, trusting loyalty. And it’s loyalty to him specifically. Loyalty through everything. No matter what.

The way Jesus explains the kingdom of God (and he talks about it more than anything else in the Gospels), it works very differently from the rest of the world. The weak are made strong. The last are first. The humble are exalted. The proud are brought low. The widow, the alien, and the orphan are valued highly. The unfairly treated are defended. The seemingly insignificant go to the head of the class. The lost are found. And the broken are healed. Imagine men like you and me taking whatever strength we are given to defend and expand that kingdom rather than our own temporary, throwaway, little ones that will never last.

As for American Jews—do I even need to stipulate how religiously reasonable they are? How little they fuss over the question of Heaven (although the fraction who believe in an afterlife has doubled since the 1970s), how few of them think a messiah is coming (although the small number who do has grown)? American Jews’ great exception to assimilation, bless them, has been the national weakness for the supernatural. It’s not only a matter of more education tending to make Jews more rational, although that correlation is striking: only one or two in ten Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists, and charismatics graduated college, versus six in ten Jews. An overwhelming majority of Protestants are fundamentalist, evangelical, or charismatic; maybe a sixth of Jews are Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, or associated with the little New Age-y branch called Renewalist. American Judaism has not gone nuts.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break! Only kidding, but seriously: there is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: only nutcases want to be president.

I became aware of a faint, slippery shape between us, the ghost of the woman I could have been. She looked like me—messy ponytail at a precarious angle—but she had a fat blond baby on her lap and a toddler leaning against her thigh. She was a stranger to the world of graduate school, of copy machines and laser printers, of meetings and deadlines. She and my mother were natural confidantes. The woman's toddler was up late with an earache, but my mother's suggestion about a hot bath worked wonders. They traded stories about the day, made plans for a birthday party. Their houses were close enough that they could drop off things from the grocery store that had been purchased two for one, on sale. But instead my mother was stuck with me, nodding at my stories in a distracted way and not asking questions.

President John F. Kennedy explained to Yale’s graduating class of 1962 that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears…. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

came across this comment by Christian Saint-Étienne, an economics professor at Paris-Dauphine, which was published in an interview in Le Figaro Magazine (28 February 1998), on the subject of the departure of young French college graduates: ‘The phenomenon is extremely alarming in terms of the demographic balance sheet. We are witnessing simultaneously the emigration of 40,000 to 50,000 highly skilled persons a year, while France attracts to her territory each year 100,000 foreigners, of whom 80 per cent to 90 per cent are absolutely unskilled.’ What do they want? ‘To take advantage of our social security system and not to produce in an efficient manner.’ More precisely, ‘If the phenomenon continues, in ten years, our country will have accepted a million unskilled immigrants while a half-million educated French will have left!

Why couldn’t we celebrate Mother’s Day, Graduation Sunday, and Memorial Day in the same seasons as Ascension Day and Pentecost? Without ignoring one or the other, it is possible to converge holidays significant to our civic and denominational calendars with those Christian holidays significant to the kingdom.

Human beings are susceptible to pride, especially if they have college educations and are part of a strong organization. This is what any Bible-college graduate is up against, especially if he is ordained by a denomination to be a pastor, or if they are ordained as any form of spiritual leader in the church. Mix this with the pride that goes on with the teachers of a business-run Bible college in a big denomination, and you have the recipe for disastrous Christian leaders who think more highly of the denomination and the leaders within it than they think of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Mark DeVries observed that the church had become the place where teenagers “are most segregated from the world of adults.”2 Churches had unwittingly cultivated an environment where teenagers were being cut off from the very adult relationships that would sustain them through the turbulence of the adolescent years and by which they could learn about mature Christian faith. We were, in effect, nurturing in teenagers an appetite for a youth group from which they would soon graduate, while weaning them from involvement in the broader church life that would sustain their spiritual growth as adults.

The united men at the bottom of San Juan Heights now represented all of America: “Aristocrats from the east, cowboys from the west, millionaires, paupers, shyster lawyers, quack doctors, farmers, college professors, miners, adventurers, preachers, prospectors, socialists, journalists, clerks, Mormons, musicians, publicists, Jews, politicians, Gentiles, Mexicans, professed Christians, Indians, West Point graduates, wild men, Ivy League athletes, and thinkers.”12 They were from the North and they were from the South. They were from every part of the Union. They had one leader, Theodore Roosevelt.

The small clinic Ida had opened after her father’s death had grown into a 544-bed hospital staffed by 108 nurses and 174 nursing students. Two hundred doctors had graduated from the medical college, and two hundred seventy-five nurses from the nurses’ training school. Now they were spread all over India and beyond. Ida thought of the times she had wanted to give up, but the recollection of those three dead women and their babies had spurred her on. Yes, God is good, Ida thought. He has done more than I could ever have hoped or dreamed.