Quotes about Renewal

Each day was called a generation, because that in it God generated, or produced, some new portion of his work.

The fire that consumes the wicked purifies the earth. Every trace of the curse is swept away. No eternally burning hell will keep before the ransomed the fearful consequences of sin. One reminder alone remains: our Redeemer will ever bear the marks of His crucifixion….

I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there were no formulas, no set phrases that promised us safe passage across the abyss. There was only our tattered trust that the Spirit who had given us life would not leave us in the wilderness without offering us life again.

I always wondered why it took "three days" for significant things to happen in the Bible--Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale, Jesus spent three days in the tomb, Paul spent three days blind in Damascus--and now I know. From earliest times, people learned that was how long they had to wait in the dark before the sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky. For three days every month they practiced resurrection.

The faith that had sustained them through their middle years had gotten as tight as their old clothes. Their views of God, scripture, the church, and the world were all under renovation.

Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom. The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.

All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it.

It is a great thing to see something familiar from an unfamiliar angle for the first time, even if it is because you have been worried and lost for longer than you would have liked.

if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always got. Extreme measures are sometimes called for, and these measures sometimes even produce results.

With so many cesspools to fall into in life, we need a spring we can go to for splashes of joy — a spring full of living water that only Jesus provides. The foundation of all joy for Christians is that we can live as though Christ died yesterday, rose today, and is coming tomorrow.

Sanctification consists of the daily realization that in Christ we have died, and in Christ we have been raised.

That's one thing I love about Raven, is that she's always rebuilding herself to be better and stronger.