The Grand Weaver Quotes

God the Grand Weaver seeks those with tender hearts so that he can put his imprint on them. Your hurts and your disappointments are part of that design, to shape your heart and the way you feel about reality. The hurts you live through will always shape you. There is no other way.

how much more grand is the work of our Heavenly Father as he pulls together all the varied strands of life to reveal his grand design?

But the greatest dream of all is to know God and to know what he has intended for your life.

So where does one begin? With self-crucifixion. In effect, we go to our own funeral and bury the self-will so that God’s will can reign supremely in our hearts. Our will has no power to do God’s will until it first dies to its own desires and the Holy Spirit brings a fresh power within.

God trained Moses in a palace to use him in a desert. He trained Joseph in a desert to use him in a palace.

Redemption precedes morality, and not the other way around.

So do not fear the struggle; rather, embrace it. Embrace it in the knowledge that the Grand Weaver will take all of your struggles, questions, disappointments, and fears and use them to build your faith and increasingly make you into a man or woman who looks like Jesus Christ.

Only if you are willing to pray sincerely for God’s will to be done and are willing to live the life apportioned to you will you see the breathtaking view of God that he wants you to have, through the windows he has placed in your life. You cannot always live on the mountaintop, but when you walk through the valley, the memory of the view from the mountain will sustain you and give you the strength to carry you through.

Here is life’s essential purpose — to worship God in spirit and in truth (see John 4:24). All other purposes are meant to be secondary. When they become primary, they destroy the individual.

The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; rather, our fundamental problem is spiritual. It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. Herein lies the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus’ offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

Worship very plainly opens up the healing of all of mankind. The struggle of gender, the struggle of race, the struggle of history, the struggle to find political liberation, the struggle of our own contradictions — nothing can be mended until we understand the symbol of Jesus’ breaking of the bread and pouring of the wine.

A calling is simply God’s shaping of your burden and beckoning you to your service to him in the place and pursuit of his choosing.

Thomas Merton once said, “We cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we cannot be at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

Accepting and celebrating the thread of your own personality is the first grasp of the Grand Weaver’s design in your life. You are not a number. He knows you by name.

When God brings us to salvation, the most remarkable thing we see is that he transforms our hungers. He changes not just what we do but what we want to do. This is the work of the Holy Spirit within us — “for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13).

To consume the best for yourself and give the crumbs to God is blasphemy. A heart that truly worships is a heart that gives its best to God in time and substance. A heart that truly worships God gives generously to the causes of God---causes that God cares deeply about. I have to wonder whether someday we may wake up to discover that all our incestous spending on ourselves and our frantic construction of excessively luxurious places of worship---even as we ignore, for the most part, the hurting and the deprived of the world---filled God's heart with pain.

The Bible offers a beautiful passage from the heart of one who knew much, suffered much, endured much, and wrote much: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceivedwhat God has prepared for those who love him.” 1 CORINTHIANS 2:9

The love of God shows us that God alone bridges the distance between him and us, enabling us to see this world through Calvary.

We are all priests before God, there is no such distinction as 'secular or sacred.' In fact, the opposite of sacred is not secular; the opposite of sacred is profane. In short, no follower of Christ does secular work. We all have a sacred calling.

five main components of worship: the Lord’s Supper, teaching, prayer, praise, and giving.

The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; it is spiritual.

sexuality is sacred, and using it for amusement brings diminishing returns.

More than anything else, prayer enables you to see your own heart and brings you into alignment with God’s heart. Prayer is not a monologue in which we imagine ourselves to be communing with God. Rather, it is a dialogue through which God fashions your heart and makes his dream of you a reality. It is truly the treasured gift of the Christian that through direct answers and not-so-direct answers, the follower of Jesus begins to love God for who he is, not for what he may get out of him.

More and more, when something terrible happens, we declare, “That’s life!” — as though disappointment and heartache declare the sum total of this existence. We miss the roses and see only the thorns. We take for granted the warmth of the sun and get depressed by the frequency of the rain or the snow. We ignore the sounds of life in a nursery because we are preoccupied with the sounds of sirens responding to an emergency. We forget the marvel of a marriage that has endured the test of time because we feel discouraged by the heartaches of loved ones whose marriages didn’t make it to the end.

One day, John asked her to define sin. I doubt any theologian could have done better than she did: “Son, whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things; in short, if anything increases the authority and power of the flesh over the Spirit, then that to you becomes sin, however good it is in itself.”1That definition became the guiding beacon for John. He carved it into his consciousness. His mother inbred in him his sensitivity to sin.

Faith is a thing of the mind. If you do not believe that God is in control and has formed you for a purpose, then you will flounder on the high seas of purposelessness, drowning in the currents and drifting further into nothingness.

In his play “Long Day’s Journey into Night, ” Eugene O’Neill has one of his characters utter a powerful statement toward the end of her life: “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They are done before you realize it and once they are done, they make you do other things, until at

If you notice, the moral law in the other legal codes separates people (the Laws of Manu, the caste system, the Code of Hammurabi with the slave/owner distinction). In Islam, the violator is inferior to the obedient one. By contrast, in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, the law unifies people. No one is made righteous before God by keeping the law. It is only following redemption that we can truly understand the moral law for what it is---a mirror that indicts and calls the heart to seek God's help. This makes moral reasoning the fruit of spiritual understanding and not the cause of it.

So I ask again — if a man who experiences such limited access to his own mental capacities can do such incredible work, how much more grand is the work of our Heavenly Father as he pulls together all the varied strands of life to reveal his grand design? Sometimes he uses soft and delicate colors; at other times he chooses dramatic and vibrant ones.

God clearly called me into the preaching and teaching ministry, principally in hostile arenas. An odd call for a shy individual, I would think! But God does it his way.

It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God.

Only if you are willing to pray sincerely for God’s will to be done and are willing to live the life apportioned to you will you see the breathtaking view of God that he wants you to have, through the windows he has placed in your life. You cannot always live on the mountaintop, but when you walk through the valley, the memory of the view from the mountain will sustain you and give you the strength to carry you through. Calvin

The question is, How can you see the divine intersection of all that shapes and marks your existence, whether it be the heart-wrenching tragedies that wound you or the ecstasy of a great delight that brings laughter to your soul? How can you meet God in all your appointments and your disappointments? How can you recognize that he has a purpose, even when all around seems senseless, if not hopeless? Will there be a last gasp that whispers in one word a conclusion that redefines everything? If so, is it possible to borrow from that word to enrich the now? Can we really see, even a little, the patterned convergence of everything into some grand design?

Someone once elaborated on each line of the well-known and much-loved Psalm 23: The Lord is my Shepherd — that’s relationship! I shall not be in want — that’s supply! He makes me lie down in green pastures — that’s rest! He leads me beside quiet waters — that’s refreshment! He restores my soul — that’s healing! He guides me in the paths of righteousness — that’s guidance! For His name’s sake — that’s purpose! Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death —that’s testing! I will fear no evil — that’s protection! For you are with me — that’s faithfulness! Your rod and the staff, they comfort me — that’s discipline! You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies —that’s hope! You anoint my head with oil — that’s consecration! My cup overflows — that’s abundance! Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life —that’s blessing! And I will dwell in the house of the Lord — that’s security! Forever — that’s eternity! AUTHOR OF ELABORATED MATERIAL UNKNOWN

The purpose of prayer and of God’s call in your life is not to make you number one in the world’s eyes, but to make him number one in your life. His calling is perfect, and he has a specific place for each one. Every member of the body has a particular role, and we find our fulfillment in filling that role.

Predators like Andrew abound on this beautiful earth like a fucking locust invasion. Sometimes it seems like no place is free of infestation, even fortresses that are meant to be sacred, like Ashborne. Beautiful and grand. Secluded. Safe. Just like in nature, the prettiest things are often the most poisonous.

The hill of Calvary lies at the very center point of the gospel. All the suffering of the world converged there in that single act of sacrifice when the One without sin took the penalty of our sin and accepted the ultimate in suffering — separation from his Father — so that we might be drawn near to him. That was the lowest point of the incarnate Christ — to be separated from the Father while still in the center of the Father’s will. There the threads converged in a pattern that seemed so disparate from the world’s point of view, yet they supplied the crimson threads of our restoration to God.

But the question arises as to what makes the Christian framework unique. Here we see the second cardinal difference between the Judeo-Christian worldview and the others. It is simply this: no amount of moral capacity can get us back into a right relationship with God. The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; rather, our fundamental problem is spiritual. It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. Herein lies the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus’ offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

Music began playing and a woman walked into the room and stood beside a small band. She was dressed in a red Irish costume that hung to her ankles and it was laced at the bodice with a black cord. After giving a nod to the band, she sang a few Irish songs. But one song seemed to stand out to Rick and he stopped eating and listened. Sure a little bit of Heaven fell from out the sky one day and it nestled on the ocean in a spot so far away. When the angels found it, sure it looked so sweet and fair, they said, "Suppose we leave it for it looks so peaceful there." So they sprinkled it with stardust just to make the shamrocks grow. 'Tis the only place you'll find them no matter where you go. Then they dotted it with silver to make its lakes so grand and when they had it finished, sure they called it Ireland.

The Lord is my Shepherd — that’s relationship! I shall not be in want — that’s supply! He makes me lie down in green pastures — that’s rest! He leads me beside quiet waters — that’s refreshment! He restores my soul — that’s healing! He guides me in the paths of righteousness — that’s guidance! For His name’s sake — that’s purpose! Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death —that’s testing! I will fear no evil — that’s protection! For you are with me — that’s faithfulness! Your rod and the staff, they comfort me — that’s discipline! You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies —that’s hope! You anoint my head with oil — that’s consecration! My cup overflows — that’s abundance! Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life —that’s blessing! And I will dwell in the house of the Lord — that’s security! Forever — that’s eternity!

Do you remember the old story of the house with the golden windows? It tells of a little boy who would look across the sprawling meadows outside his house every morning and see in the distance a house with golden windows. He would stare and revel in the radiant beams streaming his way from far away. He asked his father one day if they could visit the house with the golden windows. The father obliged, and they started to walk. They walked and walked until they approached the house. The young lad stood perplexed. He saw no windows of gold. But a little girl inside saw them staring at her home and came out to ask if they were looking for something. “Yes, ” replied the boy, “I wanted to see the house with the golden windows that I see every morning.” “Oh, you’ve come to the wrong place, ” she quickly said. “If you wait here a little while until sunset, I will show you the house with the golden windows that I see every evening.” She then pointed to a house in the distance — the home of the little boy.

Morality was never a means of salvation for anyone. The moral threads of a life were intended to reflect and honor the God we serve; they are not a means of entering Heaven.

To the Cedar Falls legalists, if God’s word could come that way 10,000 years ago, there was no reason to believe it couldn’t come that way now. So when Vicki decided her family would follow Old Testament law and stop eating unclean meat like pork and oysters (“The Lord says, ‘Don’t eat it’—He knows it’s got trichonomas and isn’t good for your body,” Vicki wrote to a friend), no one in the group thought she’d come about the decision from anywhere but Scripture and His divine will. There would be anywhere from four to ten people at the Weavers’ house, sometimes as often as four nights a week. Randy led the Bible study most of the time, but everyone read chapters and commented on what they might mean. Vicki was clearly the scripturalist and scholar of the group. It was as if she had memorized the whole thing, from Genesis to Revelation, Acts to Zechariah. They read only the King James Version of the Bible, because Vicki said other translations weren’t divinely inspired and were pagan-influenced. By 1981, the Old Testament books were opening up for Randy and Vicki, not as outdated stories, but as the never-ending law of the Maker. He was opening their eyes to what was happening now, in the United States, just as Hal Lindsey had foretold. The forces of evil (the Soviet Union, the U.S. government, Jewish bankers) were ready to strike at any time against American people. From Ezekiel, they read: “Son of man [Christian Americans], set thy face against Gog [the grand conspiracy] … “Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company [their Bible study group] that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them. After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword [somewhere in the American West], and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains [the Rockies] of Israel [the United States], which have been always waste [the desolate mountains of Montana? Colorado?

Let us see how the threads of your hopes, your dreams, and your calling come into place spiritually, practically, and intellectually.

Johann Sebastian Bach once said that the only purpose for music should be the glory of God and the re-creation of the human spirit.

The Expositor’s Bible Commentary. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976.   Bruce, F. F. The Epistle to the Galatians. Grand

we are called to see the gracious hand of a designing God in our lives.

Teaching must become the center of worship again, and the ideas that shape our expressions must be biblically induced and shaped.

More than anything else, prayer enables you to see your own heart and brings you into alignment with God’s heart.

But it was not to be.

Whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things; in short, if anything increases the authority and power of the flesh over the Spirit, then that to you becomes sin, however good it is in itself.

from the extensive emphasis on ceremony to a focus on teaching.

last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

Submit to God’s design, and be number one in his eyes. Know that you are God’s temple. Bathe your life in prayer. Live out your life in humility of spirit that serves for the right reasons. Seek the counsel and example of godly men and women. Finally, exhibit a commitment to the preeminence of Christ in all things. These are the components of a call. Self-glory, power, sensuality, and the seduction of material gain impede such a call. God is the author of my call. He has the plan in mind, and I must respond to his nod. Take the thread of wanting to serve wherever he wants you and add it to the mix. The design will thrill you one day.

As much as that retrospective look troubles us, however, it makes for a fascinating confirmation that without God, the thing never would have happened.

I do not believe that one can earnestly seek and find the priceless treasure of God’s call without a devout prayer life. Each of us is the temple of the Lord, and it was the Lord who said, “My house will be called a house of prayer” (Isaiah 56:7). That is where God speaks. The purpose of prayer and of God’s call in your life is not to make you number one in the world’s eyes, but to make him number one in your life. His calling is perfect, and he has a specific place for each one.

The oneness of the Trinity and the oneness of our communion with the triune God is the only hope for our fractured lives to be mended and for our fractured societies and fractured races to come together. Teaching

A heart that truly worships is a heart that gives its best to God in time and substance.

Without truth, spirituality is nothing more than a hopeless confession that sheer matter alone does not answer life’s deepest hungers. Truth is the thread that separates true spirituality from false spirituality. Spirituality does not give relevance to life; rather, truth gives relevance to spirituality.

Morality can build pride as well as philanthropy; true spirituality will never submit to pride.

Even though we did not author creation, we wish to author morality and take the reins of life.

The moral law will always stand over and above and against a heart that seeks to be its own guide. One

Worship is ultimately “seeing life God’s way.

Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive. Worldviews

The redeemed heart says, “The reason by which we live is the heart of mercy that does not keep a ledger.

Truth is the thread that separates true spirituality from false spirituality.

Worship is exclusionary. You cannot compromise on worship. Worship

A moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. This is the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus’ offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

Pure morality points you to the purest One of all; and the purer your habits, the closer to God you will come.

So let all goodness draw you nearer and let all goodness flow from you to point others to the Source of all goodness. 13.

Without truth, spirituality is nothing more than a hopeless confession that sheer matter alone does not answer life’s deepest hungers.

Once humanity violated that single rule and took charge, however, hundreds of laws had to be passed, because each injunction could die the death of a thousand qualifications through constant exceptions to the rule.

The problem of pain has remained the single greatest question, not only for the skeptic who uses it as an excuse to doubt God’s existence, but also for the believer who questions God’s purpose.

much more can the God of all creation accomplish? By his sovereign will, we have come into being with an expressed and designed purpose. To

I left the altar rail and went back to the pew where the others were kneeling like four shadows, four unrealities, and I hid my face in my hands. In the temple of God that I had just become, the once eternal and pure sacrifice was offered up to the God dwelling in me. The sacrifice of God to God. Now, Christ born in me, a new Bethlehem, and sacrificed in me his new Calvary, and risen in me: offering me to the Father, in himself, asking the Father, my Father and his, to receive me into his infinite and special love — not the love he has for all things that exist, for mere existence is a token of God’s love, but the love of those creatures who are drawn to him in and with the power of his own love for himself.3

We have lost the shared meanings of pain, and so the shared meanings of victory become occasions for jealousy.

The day that each person willingly accepts himself or herself for who he or she is and acknowledges the uniqueness of God's framing process marks the beginning of a journey to seeing the handiwork of God in each life.

Perfection, then, is not a change in the essential character but the completion of a course. This is precisely what Jesus must have meant when he admonished his disciples and us to 'be perfect,' as our Heavenly Father is perfect.

To be able to accept the wonder and the marvel of one's own personality, however flawed or 'accidental,' and place it in and trust it to the hands of the One who made it, is one of the greatest achievements in life.

suffering” (Hebrews 2:10). I have often pondered this text. How is One who is already

true spirituality will never submit to pride.

Take a text out of context, and you make it a pretext.

Spirituality does not give relevance to life; rather, truth gives relevance to spirituality.

Ask without pettiness Being before doing Convictions without compromise Discipline without dreariness Ask

Only if you are willing to pray sincerely for God’s will to be done and are willing to live the life apportioned to you will you see the breathtaking view of God that he wants you to have, through the windows he has placed in your life.

Canadian atheist Kai Nielson said it well: We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that really rational persons unhood-winked by myth or ideology need not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me. . . . Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.

Every molecule of water has two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. The formula H2 O remains true, no matter what race of people or what gender analyzes it. Can one really say, “It’s not fair to oxygen that there are two atoms of hydrogen in water; so to be fair, there should be two atoms of oxygen as well”? You can give two atoms of oxygen, if you want to — but if you drink it, it will bleach your insides (if not worse), because that would make it hydrogen peroxide and not water. Naming and actual reality have a direct connection in physics, even as they do in morality and in metaphysics.

is it not possible that the Grand Weaver has a design in mind for you, a design that will adorn you as he

What is essential is the sense of God’s presence during dark seasons of questioning. . . . Our need for specific answers is dissolved in the greater issue of the lordship of Christ over all questions —those that have answers and those that don’t.2 A heart

uses your life to fashion you for his purpose, using all the threads within his reach?

Making it to number one really means knowing where God wants you to be and serving him there with your best efforts. The goal, then, is to find the threads God has in place for you and to follow his plan for you with excellence.