“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.
Read more“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.
Read more“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.
Read more“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.
Read more“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.
Read more“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.
Read more“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.
Read more“Contentment does not mean grudgingly tolerating a second-best existence. It means being completely satisfied because we truly have enough. [In Phil 4:11-13 we find that] Paul has learned the secret of contentment, because he truly has everything he needs. His desire is satisfied, because he knows the surpassing worth of Christ, compared to which everything else is nothing…
Precisely because of the inestimable worth of knowing Christ and being known by him, Paul’s desire for earthly improvement has been relegated to the status of indifference. He can put up with poverty, and put up with abundance. Either way is fine by him, because he already has everything he needs.
The obvious question is: Why then are we Christians so often just as discontent as our pagan neighbors? …
The simple answer is that we forget the secret. Having sold everything to buy the most precious pearl in the world, we pop it in a drawer and forget about it. We take our eyes off Christ, and become preoccupied instead with our earthly circumstances…
Christ is the most important thing, and we shouldn’t be too worried about our earthly ups and downs. We know that. But keeping that knowledge clear in our minds and hearts, where there is so much to distract us from it—that’s the challenge.
Interestingly, and I think not accidentally, Paul’s closing exhortations to the Philippians 4…keep us strongly focused on what we possess in Christ and his heavenly kingdom, and thus more content in any an every circumstance…
Paul exhorts [us]: to rejoice in the Lord always (4:4); … to not be anxious but to pray (4:5-7); … to focus our thoughts on what is just, pure, and excellent (4:8); and … to put into practice the apostolic teaching they have seen in Paul’s life (4:9).
All these have the effect of focusing our hearts and minds on Christ Jesus, and increasing our knowledge of him. They lift our eyes to him, and to our citizenship in heaven, from where we await the Savior’s return. That, or rather he, is the secret of contentment.”
Tony Payne in “The Secret of Contentment” in Beyond Greed by Brian Rosner (Kingsford, Australia: Matthias Media, 2004) 101-106.
Read more“I was extremely pleased to have come yesterday to visit your hospital for the destitute and dying people. I do not hide that I was deeply impressed and moved as the sight of so much misery but also of so much generosity on the part of your little band of religious ladies. Almighty God must look on them with love and pleasure. Great, exceedingly great will be the reward of the good nuns in heaven. Our Lord inspired you when asking for this hospital and your nuns have been inspired when accepting it so generously. Let us hope this is a standing lesson of charity for all to see. The lay people who help you are so admirable. God bless them abundantly! That’s all I can say, for no reward on earth will repay them.”
Archbishop Ferdinand Périer, S.J. Letter to Mother Teresa on October 1, 1952 in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk (New York: Doubleday, 2007) 145.
Read more“Fasting helps us keep our balance in life. How easily we begin to allow nonessentials to take precedence in our lives. How quickly we crave things we do not need until we are enslaved by them.
Paul writes, “All things are lawful for me, but I will not be enslaved by anything” (1 Cor 6:12).
Our human cravings and desires are like rivers that tend to overflow their banks; fasting helps keep them in their proper channels.
“I pommel my body and subdue it,” says Paul. (1 Cor 9:27). Likewise, David writes, “I afflicted myself with fasting” (Ps 35:13).
This is not excessive asceticism; it is discipline and discipline brings freedom…In this, as in all matters, we can expect God to reward those who diligently seek him.”
Richard Foster in Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (New York: HarperCollins, 1988) 56.
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