Weekly Sampler Platter: Friday, December 19, 2014

Here's a sampling of some of the things I've been reading and reviewing this week.  The hope is that these bite-sized sections of books, articles, blog posts, etc will stand on their own and be beneficial (or at least thought-provoking!) in-and-of-themselves.  But I also hope that some of you will like these excerpts enough that they pull you into the larger work from which they've been taken.

Let's start sampling: 

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Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times.  NavPress, 2014.  p. 87:

"We are always more culturally shortsighted than we realize....  Think how easily we take for granted our superiority over previous generations.  What comes to our minds, for example, when we modern people say 'Victorian' or 'Puritan'?  But that sense of superiority is illusory, a kind of generational illusion, for the simple reason that hindsight enables us to see where those previous generations went wrong, but we cannot see ourselves.

"We might be humbler, if not mortified, if we could hear what our grandchildren and their grandchildren will think of us someday - sometimes it is bad enough to know how our children view us now.  For doubtless, we are 'so twenty-first century,' just as the Victorians were children of the nineteenth, and the Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth." 

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Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith.  IVP Academic, 2012.  p. 9:

"...it is only when you grasp what it means for God to be a Trinity that you really sense the beauty, the overflowing kindness, the heart-grabbing loveliness of God.  If the Trinity were something we could shave off God, we would not be relieving him of some irksome weight; we would be shearing him of precisely what is so delightful about him.  For God is triune, and it is as triune that he is so good and desirable."  

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Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God.  Dutton, 2014.  p. 62:

"Edmund P. Clowney wrote, 'The Bible does not present an art of prayer; it presents the God of prayer.'  We should not decide how to pray based on the experiences and feelings we want.  Instead, we should do everything possible to behold our God as he is, and prayer will follow.  The more clearly we grasp who God is, the more our prayer is shaped and determined accordingly."