Quotes of Note

Each Monday, we share quotes we found encouraging, convicting, thought-provoking, or all of the above.

Persis:

This is a quote on love for our neighbor in Body Broken by Charles Drew:

Zeal for the coming Christ and love for people go together. Our practice of public goodness aims not to put people down but to win people to him before it is too late. What our culture needs these days is a vibrant, plausible, winsome Christianity. Intellectual and philosophical arguments are important and good, but they cannot stand alone. They must come from lives of people who have evidently been changed for the better by the God they profess. Do we love people enough, we must ask, to showcase - by how we talk, how we do business, how we do politics, how we treat people, and how we as Christians get along with each other - something of the goodness, justice, loyalty, beauty, and love of our true home?

Rebecca:

If we know anything about God, it is because he has chosen to make it known; revelation is a gift. In that light, our task cannot be speculation. Our response to his revelation concerning himself is not to demand knowledge of that which he has chosen to conceal. 

Instead, Christian humility requires us to receive with gratitude what he has spoken and to limit ourselves to what he has said and done, rather than pine after what he has not said and those works he has left unperformed.

 [Matthew Barrett in None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God]

Kim:

From Herman Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation.  Bavinck has spent time discussing the arguments for the existence of God:

Faith attempts to give an account of the religious impressions and feelings that we humans receive and carry with us in our soul. That faith also exerts its influence on the intellect, which in turn seeks little by little to introduce some order in that chaos of impressions and notions. It classifies them and reduces them to a few categories. Impressions come to us from the world of ideas (the ontological argument); from the world of finite contingent, and mutable things (the cosmological arguments); from the world of beauty and harmonious design (the teleological argument); from that of moral order (the moral argument); from the speech of history of all humankind (the universal consent and the historical argument). However, although these impressions may be so classified, no one should ever think that these six proofs are the sole, isolated testimonies God sends us. On the contrary; to the believer all things speak of god; the whole universe is the mirror of his perfections. There is not an atom of the universe in which his everlasting power and deity are not clearly seen.