Woke Church Quotes

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In the 1950s kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term ---the generation gap. In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion....It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future. In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world. In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.
Ravi Zacharias (Recapture the Wonder: Experiencing God's Amazing Promise of Childlike Joy)
Once youths are awakened by Christ, they will be ‘woke’ to the cause of Christ.
Cecilia Chan (How to Grow Your Church Younger and Stronger: The Story of the Kids who Built a World-Class Church)
What can I do? I can only breathe in deeply. I can only bellow in a church that is deep inside of myself. I can only blast a shell-shaped horn that would shake down the oldest buildings. I can only leap for joy in my sacred inner caves and ring out the message: I am alive. I woke up again. I might as well be sprouting leaves, I might as well be covered in little clams.
Jenny Slate (Little Weirds)
It was Sunday morning. I woke very early to a bright and cheery day, anxious to join my fellow Christians in this lovely garden of a land. The clerk in the hotel eyed me a little dubiously when I asked for a church. 'We don't have many of those, you know,' he said. 'Besides, you couldn't understand the language.' 'Didn't you know?' I said, 'Christians speak a kind of universal language.' 'Oh. What's that?' 'It's called "agape".' 'Agape? I never heard of it.' 'Too bad. It's the most beautiful language in the world.
Brother Andrew (God's Smuggler)
Cornel West says: “If your success is defined as being well adjusted to injustice and well adapted to indifference, then we don’t want successful leaders.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
The Woke Church is one that is aware of the urgent needs in its community and does more than just talk about those needs
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
But in the gospel, man is not just reconciled to God by faith. Man is also reconciled to man by faith. (See 2 Cor. 5:18). God has given to us the ministry of reconciliation. He doesn’t give us the luxury of refusing to be reconciled.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
Colorblind theology denies Christ’s power to heal racial divisions, disparities, and injustices by ignoring their ongoing impact. Colorblind theology undermines unity in the church by refusing to acknowledge significant ethnic differences or address significant problems.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
The gospel is supposed to bring people together who wouldn’t naturally be together.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
We are called to follow His example of caring for the physical needs of others in order that the gospel witness of the kingdom might saturate the earth.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
There is a growing body of evidence that “race affects how teachers see and treat their students. Black students taught by white teachers are less likely to be identified for gifted programs than black students taught by black teachers, for example. Other research has shown biases in teachers’ grading of work by students of different genders, races and ethnicities.”5
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn't know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote. Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny — and in less than a week there was an honest to god revolution under way, just as jakes had said. There's the power of the press for you.
Evelyn Waugh (Scoop)
hard for me to hear the constant refrain of “just preach the gospel.” When the topic is abortion, nobody says, “just preach the gospel.” We preach against abortion as if it’s a gospel issue. When the topic is sex trafficking, no one says “just preach the gospel.” We develop a battalion to go and get people out of sex trafficking. And we should because these are crucial issues. But so is racial justice!
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
It is incumbent on leadership to reevaluate areas where women have been relegated to serve that are not based on biblical prohibitions but rather on cultural practices that may be extensions of sexism and misogyny.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
There’s a tendency to want to gloss over injustices for the sake of unity. However, any authentic attempt to pursue unity and reconciliation must start with truth. The journey toward healing begins with an awakening.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
One of the most difficult things for me to deal with is the refusal for many evangelicals to acknowledge the truths about what has happened in our country. Our history has been hard for people of color, and the church must be willing to acknowledge those hard truths if we are to move toward healing. Much of our history is shrouded in darkness because it is hard to talk about and even harder to understand from our vantage point today.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
We are called to advocate for the poor as an outworking of being a wise covenant community. This is the legacy of the church. Defending the cause of the needy and oppressed is a huge role that we are to be known for as the people of God.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
If you woke up this morning with more health than illness—you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week. If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation—you are better off than five hundred million people in the world. If you can attend a church meeting, or not attend one, without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death—you are more blessed than three billion people in the world. If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep—you are richer than 75 percent of this world. If you have money in the bank or in your wallet, or spare change in a dish someplace—you rank among the top 8 percent of the world’s wealthy. If you can read this book—you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all. So count your blessings and remind everyone else how blessed we all are!
Mark Batterson (If: Trading Your If Only Regrets for God's What If Possibilities)
Poem in October" It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of seagull and rook And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Come in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Wind blow cold In the wood faraway under me. Pale rain over the dwindling harbour And over the sea wet church the size of a snail With its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud. There could I marvel My birthday Away but the weather turned around. It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds. And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart's truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year's turning.
Dylan Thomas (Collected Poems)
[Darkness, trumpets, sea creatures, dragons, angels, horsemen, many-eyed monsters; these would fill his dreams for decades.] He watched his mother's beautiful lips move, her eyes lost in their sockets. He woke in the morning with the conviction that he was being watched, judged at all times. Church all day long. He made innocent faces when he thought bad thoughts. Even when he was alone, he performed.
Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies)
What Paul is saying is that the gospel strengthens us through the Spirit to see things in our society that others do not. We are called, as the people of God, to wake up. To see what others don’t and call it out. The church in America is not awake to the reality of what is happening in communities across this nation, and we are missing out on our calling to shine the light into these places of darkness for Christ’s glory.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
You have to be intrinsically changed by God in order for justice to be done. In other words, justice doesn’t come by legislation, because you can legislate things and nothing changes. We can go to the executive branch. We can go to the legislative branch. We can go to the judicial branch. We can put whatever kind of Supreme Court justices we want to put in place. But at the end of the day legislation doesn’t change hearts … only the gospel does.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
Missy cried during our first week of marriage because I was so sick, and I couldn’t blame her because my illness wrecked our honeymoon. But after we went home to West Monroe, I woke up on the twenty-eight day of our marriage, and she was crying again! I realized then that I had a few things to learn about marriage. You’re living in a different environment, you’re away from your parents for the first time in your life, and you’re sharing a bed and home with someone new. It’s a different life than what you had when you were single, when you could get up and leave if things got tough. More than anything else, women are generally more emotional than men. When I give newlyweds in our church advice, I tell them, “Look, when you wake up on day thirty of your marriage and she’s crying for no reason, don’t panic. It’s normal. It’s going to happen. Most women are going to cry from time to time. It’s the way God made them.
Jase Robertson (Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl)
We desperately need the gospel. I need the gospel. Every day I need Jesus’ gospel to shepherd my heart and mind. When I see all the bad news on my newsfeed on Facebook, if I’m not in my Bible, preaching the gospel to myself, looking at the eschatological hope, I will lose my mind. And so I’m glad that when we see the injustices and the brokenness of our society we have the tool of God’s Word to help us become change agents—to make a difference in our spheres of influence. The gospel is the truth that unites us. It is the common ground that knits our souls together as one.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
In Mrs. Dimble’s hands the task of airing the little house and making the bed for Ivy Maggs and her jailbird husband became something between a game and a ritual. It woke in Jane vague memories of helping at Christmas or Easter decorations in church when she had been a small child. But it also suggested to her literary memory all sorts of things out of sixteenth-century epithalamiums: age-old superstitions, jokes, and sentimentalities about bridal beds and marriage bowers, with omens at the threshold and fairies upon the hearth. It was an atmosphere extraordinarily alien to that in which she had grown up. A few weeks ago she would have disliked it. Was there not something absurd about that stiff, twinkling archaic world—the mixture of prudery and sensuality, the stylised ardours of the groom and the conventional bashfulness of the bride, the religious sanction, the permitted salacities of Fescennine song, and the suggestion that everyone except the principals might be expected to be rather tipsy? How had the human race ever come to imprison in such a ceremony the most unceremonious thing in the world? But she was no longer sure of her reaction.
C.S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy #3))
A visiting pastor at our church in Plains once told a story about a priest from New Orleans. Father Flanagan’s parish lay in the central part of the city, close to many taverns. One night he was walking down the street and saw a drunk thrown out of a pub. The man landed in the gutter, and Father Flanagan quickly recognized him as one of his parishioners, a fellow named Mike. Father Flanagan shook the dazed man and said, “Mike!” Mike opened his eyes and Father Flanagan said, “You’re in trouble. If there is anything I can do for you, please tell me what it is.ℍ “Well, Father,” Mike replied, “I hope you’ll pray for me.” “Yes,” the priest answered, “I’ll pray for you right now.” He knelt down in the gutter and prayed, “Father, please have mercy on this drunken man.ℍ At this, a startled Mike woke up fully and said, “Father, please don’t tell God I’m drunk.ℍ Sometimes we don’t feel much of a personal relationship between God and ourselves, as though we have a secret life full of failures and sins that God knows nothing about. We want to involve God only when we plan to give thanks or when we’re in trouble and need help. But the rest of our lives, we’d rather keep to ourselves.
Jimmy Carter (Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President)
In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term—the generation gap. In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protest—church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting.Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it. In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self. Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion . . . It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority, and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future. To bring it up to date, I have added two more paragraphs: In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world. In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.
Ravi Zacharias (Recapture the Wonder)
Is it Weird I Want to Mail You a Lock of my Hair?   Well? Would you find it weird if I mailed you a lock of my hair? I have really nice hair.   What if I placed a birch tree decorated with crepe paper in your front yard? Would that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? Or might you find both of these a little strange? Either, nowadays, might warrant a call to the police ;-)   Do you realize in other cultures these are very passionate ways of stating your love for someone? Some women would cry tears of joy to receive these gifts from the boy of their desires.   I know a dad who is workaholic. It is the only way he knows to show his family he loves them by providing for them and buying them stuff. They aren't getting the message. They want to hear it. They want to feel it. They want time with him.   You probably wouldn't get the message either if you woke up to some hair in your mailbox or a tree on the lawn. So the point is, maybe it's not enough to just "love" someone. Maybe it's not enough to show them we love them our way. Maybe, just maybe, we need to express our love for them in ways they understand.   So as a Christian, a church, a minister, a representative of God in your community, you might be voicing" God loves you" to the world at large, but is it in a way they can understand it and receive it?   I've been reviewing a lot of things I have done in ministry over the last 20 plus years in ministry. I've been contemplating what the core message unbelievers would have received from our actions. I have to admit these are some of the messages that I participated in communicating to the world:   God does not approve of you God will judge and punish you If you become like us, God will love you If you do not conform to our moral standards we will boycott you We are better than you If you attend our meetings we can help meet some of your needs Our church has the only truth God is American God is political   Is there a way we can do ministry better? Is there a way we can demonstrate to the
Scott Blair (Wrestling with God)
A preaching bush woke up Aloysius. It was a bush that claimed to have taken a correspondence course from an American seminary, that sat in a dirty gully and did nothing but rant and rave all day except during the fiercest heat of the sun when it had to content itself with muttering like an old man. Once or twice before, this same bush had awoken Aloysius from a sound sleep with its preaching until he had threatened to chop it up with his machete the next time. Now the bush was waxing full force as though it were in a church being listened to attentively by fifty toothless old women.
Anthony C. Winkler (The Lunatic)
At our core, without being conscious in Christ, our souls are still in bondage and can only see things from the natural, fleshly appearance. Our Christ Consciousness gives the double consciousness depth and character. Our Christ Consciousness elevates our awareness to our responsibility to care for and love our brothers—even those who don’t look like us.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
However, if one is regenerated by the gospel, yet unaware of the double consciousness of African Americans and other ethnic minorities in America, one’s clarity on justice and race issues will be clouded and even absent. Therefore, to be fully woke, one needs to have all three aspects of consciousness.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
The words of Martin Luther King Jr. help to inspire us and give us much needed hope when we want to quit loving those who wrong us: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
She woke me up in the middle of the night and told me that at church you told them that you are gay, and then had a menacing Arab man pick you up and beat up the priest. She thought you’d come to your senses and come back in the evening, but when that didn’t happen, she decided her best bet was to wake me up and tell me that I made you like this... somehow. I don’t even want to know what she thinks our home life looks like if that’s her idea.
K.A. Merikan (Heart Ripper: Coffin Nails MC (Sex & Mayhem, #9))
Everywhere we turn we are told we are wrong, that we must act the "right" way, that our own dreams and desires are either selfish or unattainable while the hopes and nightmares of the Spectral Cage must exist, even at the cost of our very lives. The tyrannical gods that would rob us of this freedom to freely give our care, love, and even fervour are the grand enemy of Egoism, wherever they might be found. They pervert the true feelings within us and make them empty rituals: instead of caring for those around me, I throw money at a church which quickly loses it, I stay home and meme for disaster relief instead of actually doing anything, I "adopt" a baby tiger or African child to "feed" instead of tearing down the very structures that cause them pain in the first place. We symbolically attack other symbols, our feelings perverted and funneled into empty vessels. The same rage that can rob a bank or burn down a building dissipates in a sea of metal masturbation and contests to determine who is the most "woke".
Dr. Bones (Curse Your Boss, Hex the State, Take Back the World)
They’re all in church,” he said and saw the flush of guilt, or of wind, on her broad cheeks. The wind lifted his own thinning hair—those long strands he combed back over his crown—made it stand, briefly, on end. Something done right—at least so far—this suggestion of his, whispered to the ceiling this morning, his hand on her thigh. That they skip Mass just this once and head to the beach. Some weeks ago, a tropical wave had slipped off the African coast, as if (he’d thought, reading the account) the continent itself had shuddered, and moved into the waters of the south seas, stirring the ocean and the air and the various inhabitants of small islands and southern shorelines, until finally it woke him this morning at dawn with the sound of the wind in the eaves, with some memory or dream of the Ardennes, and a hankering to see what the shudder of a continent did to the waters off Jones Beach.
Alice McDermott (After This)
I WOKE IN A BED. In a room. In an inn. More than that was not immediately clear to me. It felt exactly like someone had hit me in the head with a church.
Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1))
Ella woke again as they entered the picturesque village of Bibury. A stone bridge arched over the placid River Coln, and Ella craned her neck to watch a swan and its fuzzy, brown cygnets floating alongside beds of watercress and the boggy watermeadow called Rack Isle. Ella lifted her phone and snapped a picture. "It's like someone cued them." "I called ahead." They drove past a row of sandstone cottages with colorful gardens, and in the center of town, Heather pointed out the ancient Saxon church. "St. Mary's was on a Christmas stamp a few decades back." Ella rolled down her window to take another picture. "It's all so- so perfect.
Melanie Dobson (Shadows of Ladenbrooke Manor)
Yet much as the state supplies all we need, so too does wokeness/UJP have a mystical and therapeutic streak in it. All things must be ordered according to man-centered social justice, necessitating government control. But at the same time, people (at least some people) must be free to find and publicly celebrate their true selves. When this union of statism and selfism breaks free of the traditional constraints of Judeo-Christian religion, fundamentalist creationism, free markets, democratic government, personal responsibility, and strong local church presence in communities, then the earth will be made right, rescued from global warming, intolerant dogmatism, political liberty, and communalism. We will not live forever in a world made right by God, what Christians call “escalated re-creation.” Instead, we will live in a world governed by science, technology, and justice. Wokeness does not do away with eschatology; it immanentizes it in a distinctly humanist form, but not live-and-let-live humanism—hard-edged judicial and statist humanism.
Owen Strachan (Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It)
In much of the “convinced and committed” literature cited, the formal term “Critical Race Theory” does not appear—in most volumes, not even once. However, our brief summaries have demonstrated that these works are soaked in a worldly ideology of wokeness. The enemy does not always appear in robes of darkness. He often masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). It is past time for Christians to wake up—not to the so-called “truths” of CRT, but to the deception that is creeping into our churches.
Owen Strachan (Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It)
The founding of the first black denomination came from a refusal to accept black people in the church as equal in every respect. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, former slaves, were attendees at the St. George’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1787.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
In our own city, we do an analysis every year. We ask our community: What are the top three needs in the community? What are the three greatest influences? And what are the churches in this community doing to put a dent in those three needs
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
we know how much we are allowing ourselves to experience the hesed of God based on how much we give it out to others.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
When you actually see the suffering, you must lament. And what have we seen in our cities? Many of us have made the choice to get as far from the inner city as possible—to remove ourselves from the pain and suffering.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
They forgot about all of their differences and all of their frustrations, because the ones who had won the game represented all of the people of Philly.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
But she woke up Leonard late one Saturday night and announced, “I’m going to church tomorrow,” and then squeezed into a world too small for him to enter.
Jacob M. Appel (The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street)
None of this, we note, is according to human wisdom. None of it is according to human design. None of it is dependent on human effort. All of it is dependent on and driven by God. All of it is intensely countercultural, then and now. To a watching world that asks us what our answer is for alienation and hostility, we say two things: (1) the cross, and (2) the Church. The cross alone has the power to create a new humanity, a new people, a new race birthed by God.
Owen Strachan (Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It)
So we conclude, in joy and in hope: For the Church, the scattering has ended. God is gathering His people to Himself. Sin’s power has been broken by the cross of Christ, the most powerful event in history. The work of salvific recreation is more powerful even than the original creation, majestic as that was. God is making a way out of this depraved world. His people have suffered many things and committed many sins. They have walked, and are even now walking, through a fallen order that hates God, denies human image-bearing, ignores divine grace, focuses its attention on man-made justice and man-driven eschatology, pays no mind to the cross as the power of God to cleanse and unify His people, and ultimately shakes its fist at God all the way unto destruction.
Owen Strachan (Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It)
Stiff as the competition is, the Church has the truth of God. It knows the beauty of biblical manhood, biblical womanhood, biblical marriage, biblical sexuality, and biblical creation order. We are not playing from behind or with a weak hand. We have the very mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16). Furthermore, as our culture and society grow increasingly evil, God will use that encroaching darkness to draw people to the light. He is a saving God, and He loves to turn evil purposes to divine ends.
Owen Strachan (Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way to Stop It)
If you think four little alphabets, w-o-k-e, can define civilized human life, you are as dumb as those you consider un-woke. It is another way to codify righteousness, just like the church does with the term "born again". Be human my friend - beyond wokeness - beyond religiousness - beyond intellectualism and all forms of binarism and sectarianism.
Abhijit Naskar (Solo Standing on Guard: Life Before Law)
The American vision of separating church from state, and democracy from capitalism, has been supplanted by this new global vision of mixing them all with one another—leaving us with none of them in the end.
Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
My dear Marwan, in the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfathers’ farmhouse outside of Hom. We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east. We took you there when you were a toddler. I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip. I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square. But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright. You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark. Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.' In the glow of this three-quarter moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. I said to you, ‘Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.' These are only words. A father's tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how powerless I am to protect you from it. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshallah. How I pray the sea knows this.
Khaled Hosseini (Sea Prayer)
I went to this meeting with pastors of large churches in the EPC. And everyone’s telling the same story. Everyone’s got some of their members saying: ‘He’s woke. He’s teaching Critical Race Theory. He’s a liberal, a socialist, a Marxist,’” Torres said. “It was actually pretty funny. Because we’re all realizing, these words don’t mean anything anymore. They’re just smears.
Tim Alberta (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism)
Afriend who belonged to my prayer group for Israel and the Jewish people told me how she came to believe that such prayer was important. Some years ago she was what she called “a baby Christian”; she had only been a believer in Jesus for a few months. One night she had a dream about a Father with two sons, one adopted and one biological. The biological son was in intensive care in a coma and every day the Father would visit his son. He just knew that one day this son would come out of his coma. When he tried to raise the subject with his much-loved adopted son, this son did not show any interest. This greatly upset the Father as he loved both very much and could not understand the adopted son’s lack of interest for his brother. When my friend woke up she sensed that the Lord was showing her something close to Father God’s heart and this eventually led her to read Romans Chapter 11. From then on she understood the importance of the Jewish people in God’s eyes and that he wanted her to care about them too, she herself being part of the adopted son – a saved Gentile Christian. For me this story captures exactly the reason why we should pray for Israel and the Jewish people.
Mark Dunman (Has God really finished with Israel?: God's Covenants with Abraham, Israel and the Church)
I focused on staying positive every day, despite the money issues, health challenges, and constant reminders of the fire. It took every bit of focus I possessed. Six months after the fire, in the middle of the financial crisis, after one morning’s meditation, I wrote these words in my journal: I woke up this morning feeling like I’m being cradled in the arms of God. The energy of Spirit fills every part of me with blessing. The universe radiates perfection all around me. I am cradled in this field of blessing. It holds us always in love and joy. It nudges us daily to experience the light and beauty at the core of our being. I realize that I’m 100% spiritually successful. I enjoy a life of attunement to the universe. Daily, I celebrate oneness between my human consciousness and the greater consciousness of which I am a part. That’s the ultimate goal of every life, and I’ve lived it from the beginning. I choose to remind myself of this when I’m mesmerized by the things that haven’t materialized in my material world after so many years of visioning and hard work. As I tune in to the universe’s energy, I feel mine change in response. My thoughts become ordered and inspired. I start the day feeling optimistic, positive, enthusiastic, and creative. I embody prosperity. I attune daily to the energy of prosperity, as I have been doing for so many years. I know that material reality arranges itself around the signal that my consciousness produces. The truth is that I am abundant in every possible way, including money. I choose to maintain the joy of that vibration. I celebrate every manifestation of success in my world, no matter how small. I am grateful for my life just the way it is. I remain positive no matter what. I have the most important thing attainable in any life: Oneness with the universe! I attune to its music every morning in meditation. My mind, cells, and energy field come into resonance with its song. I then move into my day inspired and aligned. What a wonderful life. After writing those words, I decided to bask in the experience. I lay down in bed and visualized the experience turning from a delicious but intangible feeling into a hardwired neural fact in my body.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
I close my eyes, wishing there was some kind of nap you could take where you fell asleep and then your problems were all solved when you woke up. Murdered moms. The men you love hating each other. Getting fingered by a priest in the village church.
Sierra Simone (Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel, #2))
in a country where the far-left and far-right wings usually do all the talking and shouting. Every so often in our history, that giant stirs. Watergate stirred the giant, and a president resigned. A decade before that, the murder of little girls in Sunday school at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 woke that giant, which gave us the life-changing Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
James Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
His global takeover was initiated with just a handful of apprentices, and we’re here today because of a chain of grace that began with people who learned to live—not a program or a religious life, but an intuitive life. They woke in the morning expecting that God had prepared a fruitful day for them; they reorganized their lives, resources, and relationships so that they could respond to the Spirit’s leading; their passion was contagious, transforming, and easily transferred to others who would follow the ways of Jesus.
Hugh Halter (AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church)
When the realities of a fallen world hit us, we need room to worship the Lord in honest expressions of unedited grief.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
We must address the things that happen in our culture exegetically, expositionally, theologically, historically, critically, lovingly, passionately, humbly, and with Jesus at the center.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
Preaching is spiritual warfare! Ephesians 3:10 tells us that when we preach, something supernatural happens.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
You can speak on justice and race with rhetorical excellence, but if the gospel isn’t presented, heart change won’t happen.
Eric Mason (Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice)
However, in the Renaissance there was a brilliant, uncanny reawakening of the classical ideal, of the noble method of valuing every- thing: Rome itself woke up, as though from suspended animation, under the pressure of the new, Judaic Rome built over it, which looked like an ecumenical synagogue and was called ‘Church’: but Judea triumphed again at once, thanks to that basically proletarian (German and English) ressentiment-movement which people called the Reformation, including its inevitable consequence, the restoration of the church, – as well as the restoration of the ancient, tomb-like silence of classical Rome. In an even more decisive and profound sense than then, Judea once again triumphed over the classical ideal with the French Revolution: the last political nobil- ity in Europe, that of the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, col- lapsed under the ressentiment-instincts of the rabble, – the world had never heard greater rejoicing and more uproarious enthusiasm!
nietschze
His thumb was delicately brushing over my bottom lip as if he were asking for admittance and I was lost. We were standing right outside the church where anyone could walk out and catch us, but all I could think about was pressing my lips against his. Beau was becoming a necessity, and nothing about such a revelation could be considered positive. “Beau, what are you doing?” I croaked out. “Yeah, Beau, I’d like to know the same thing,” said a voice that didn’t belong to Beau. Several things happened at once. Beau’s thumb stopped its caressing, but he didn’t drop his hand. I could feel his body tense at the sound of Sawyer’s voice. What I should have done and what I did do were in two different stratospheres. Stepping back and putting distance between Beau and me would have been the logical, intelligent thing to do. Reaching out and grabbing his arm and squeezing it was my immediate reaction. “Are either of you gonna speak or are you just gonna continue gawking at each other?” The hard edge to Sawyer’s voice woke me up out of the trance I’d been in, and I dropped my hand from Beau and took several steps back. If Sawyer was expected to keep his cool, then we needed to put some space between the two of us. Beau’s eyes bore into me. He was silently pleading with me. I could almost hear his thoughts. Then he turned to face his cousin. This was the confrontation I’d hoped would never happen. “What exactly are you insinuating, Sawyer?” Beau asked in a deadly calm tone I knew he’d never used with Sawyer. “Oh, I don’t know, cuz, maybe the fact I came out here to look for my girlfriend, and I found her being mauled by you.” Beau took a step forward and a low growl rumbled in his chest. I ran up and grabbed his arm with both my hands. This probably didn’t help Sawyer’s temper any, but it kept Beau from pummeling his face. Both boys were in shape, but Beau had the market on badass. I couldn’t let him do something he’d never forgive himself for. Sawyer stared fixedly at me. I could only imagine what was going through his head. The sad thing was that I knew he wouldn’t even get close to the truth. Sawyer would never imagine I’d lost my virginity to Beau in the bed of a truck. “Want to tell me what’s going on, Ash?” There was hurt in his voice. I hated knowing that the words I had to say to him wouldn’t erase this but would only make it worse. I pushed Beau behind me as I stepped in front of him. “Go on home, Beau. Sawyer and I need to talk, and I don’t want you here.” Turning back to see Beau’s reaction was tempting, but I didn’t do it. I kept my eyes on Sawyer, praying silently that Beau heeded my orders and left. It was time I finished this and saved their friendship before it was too late. “I don’t want to leave you alone,” he replied, steel lacing his words. “Beau, please. You aren’t helping matters. Just go.” Sawyer never took his eyes off me. He was trying so hard to read between the lines. I would have to tell him some truths--just enough to keep from destroying his relationship with Beau. The crunch of the dry grass under Beau’s boots told me he’d granted my wish and was heading for his truck. I’d won that battle. Now the biggest one was staring me in the face, and I had no idea what I was going to say.
Abbi Glines (The Vincent Boys (The Vincent Boys, #1))