Archives by: Gary Hoag

Our Father,

Lord, come I this day to you!

I am not a great gift to offer you, it is my coming that is my gift.

For who among us holds within themselves any worthy offering to the God who owns the universe?

To come to you while the entire world moves away from you, is our only gift of worth.

And so I come this day: ignore me or use me, save me or spend me.

Use me or set me by, I am yours.

Amen.

Calvin Miller, Celtic Devotions: A Guide to Morning and Evening Prayer (Downers Grove: IVP, 2008) 34-35.

God the Father is the shield beneath which we hide our fragile souls.

He comes both generous and large to cover us when troubles rain down upon us.

God the Son made of his own cross a place for our hard times and the wood He chose now serves our wounds.

God the Spirit lives within us like structural steel with welded braces so the pressures from without can never crush us.

We are triple-kept by Triune Love, shielded by the Three in One.

Calvin Miller, Celtic Devotions: A Guide to Morning and Evening Prayer (Downers Grove: IVP, 2008) 27.

“In our current world, a large part of the freedom that comes from frugality is freedom from the spiritual bondage caused by financial debt. This kind of debt is often incurred by buying things that are far from necessary, and its effect, when the amount is substantial, is to diminish our sense of worth, dim our hope for the future, and eliminate our sensitivity to the needs of others. Paul’s admonition, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another” (Rom. 13:8) is therefore good spiritual advice as well as wise financial counsel.”

Dallas Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (New York: HarperCollins, 1988) 169

“The proportion of your income that you give back to God is the one distinct indication of how much you trust Him to provide for your needs. We will give to the extent that we believe God will provide for us. The more we believe God will provide for our needs, the more we are willing to risk giving to Him. And the less we trust God, the less we will give to Him.”

Donald Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (NavPress: Colorado Springs, 1991) 144.

“The church of our day urgently needs to heed the message of this second letter of Paul to Timothy. For all around us we see Christians relaxing their grasp of the gospel, fumbling it, in danger of letting it drop from their hands altogether. We, like Timothy, need to guard the truth of the gospel and proclaim it to the world around us.”

John Stott in 2 Timothy: Standing Firm in the Truth (Downers Grove: IVP, 1998) 6.

“Throughout history the most universally acknowledged program with money is that its pursuit is insatiable…The insatiability touches two areas—getting what we do not have and clutching on what we do [have]…

Insatiability is commonly linked with being consumed…Money almost literally seems to eat people away, drying up the sap of their vitality and withering their spontaneity, generosity, and joy…

Most important, the problem of insatiability provides a boost for the other great problem accompanying money—“commodification.” The rather forbidding word describes the process whereby money assumes such a dominant place in a society that everything (and everyone) is seen and treated as a commodity to be bought and sold…

The overall lesson of insatiability is that money alone cannot buy the deepest things we desire. Money never purchases love, or eternity, or God. It’s the wrong means, the wrong road, the wrong search. That is why the pursuit is vanity. “Nothing gained” is the final lesson of insatiability.” (cf. Mark 8:36).

Os Guinness The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003) 130-132.

“In our prayers and reflections today let us ask ourselves how we are making our love for God and neighbor manifested in our lives and what can we do to love God and neighbor even more. The more we love, the closer to the Kingdom of God we become. Let us draw ever closer to the Kingdom, and let us draw ever closer to Jesus. God give us the grace to love more and more every day.”

Ted Dorcey in The Redemptorists of the Denver Province blogpost for 8 March 2013.

“Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness.” Colossians 1:24-25

“Paul again identifies himself as a “servant” in 1:25). He was a steward commissioned to carry out an assignment for his Master. The stewards of estates in the ancient world were usually slaves. Paul therefore does not view his commission as an appointment to a high office but as the exalted privilege and duty of bringing the gospel to the Gentiles. He does recognize it as a divine gift that brings divine power to fulfill it.”

“The toil is Paul’s but the energy is Christ’s. He is most himself when least reliant on his own resources.”

David Garland, Colossians, Philemon NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998) 123, cf. George Caird, Paul’s Letters from Prison (New Clarendon Bible, 1977) 187.

“Detachment—dying to sin, and to temptations of the false-self—is hard work. It can be painful, and it can feel dangerous. The wilderness is not a safe place. But we don’t go there alone. Jesus, who himself was ministered to by angels during his wilderness encounters with the evil one, walks alongside us, his rod and his staff protecting and comforting us.

It’s helpful to remember the goal of detachment. This is not an eastern religious emptying for the sake of being empty. It is not a hair-shirt ascetic that values pain for pain’s sake. It is the path of life that Jesus modeled for us, a detaching from (sin and false-‐self) to make room for attaching to (God, and true-‐self fullness in him), a dying in order to live.”

Susan P. Currie, Director of Selah and Associate for Spiritual Formation, in Silencio, a resource of Leadership Transformations, Inc., March 2013.

“Giving and contentment are two sides of the same coin. Together they represent the positive alternative to greed. If contentment calls a halt to the grabbing dimension of greed, giving addresses the keeping aspect.”

Brian Rosner in Beyond Greed (Kingsford, Australia: Matthias Media, 2004) 117.