“And He said to them, ‘Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave town.  Any place that does not receive you or listen to you, as you go out from there, shake the dust off the soles of your feet for a testimony against them.'”   Mark 6:10-11

“The suggestion is simple and clear.  Where the gospel is received and embraced, disciples are to remain; where it is rejected, they are to move on.  This severs evangelism from any practice of domination or conquest.  How different the history of the world would have been had Christian missionaries heeded these directives!”

–Ched Myers, et al, ​Say to this Mountain,​ p72

I used to wish that I could see pictures with my hands as I do statues, but now I do not often think about it because my dear Father has filled my mind with beautiful pictures, even of things I cannot see. If the light were not in your eyes, dear Mr. Brooks, you would understand better how happy your little Helen was when her teacher explained to her that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart. Every day I find out something which makes me glad.

–Helen Keller,
in a letter to the Reverend Phillips Brooks, June 8, 1891

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

–Jacob Augustus Riis

If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character.
If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home.
If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nations.
When there is order in the nations, there will peace in the world.

–Attributed to Confucius

The Perfect Church

September 23, 2021

If you should find the perfect church
Without one fault or smear,
For goodness sake! Don’t join that church;
You’d spoil the atmosphere.

If you should find the perfect church
Where all anxieties cease
Then pass it by, lest joining it
You’d mar the masterpiece.

If you should find the perfect church
Then don’t you ever dare,
To tread upon such holy ground;
You’d be a misfit there.

But since no perfect church exists
Made of imperfect men,
Then let’s cease looking for that church
And love the church we’re in.

Of course, it’s not a perfect church,
That’s simple to discern
But you and I and all of us
Could cause the tide to turn.

What fools we are to flee our post
In that unfruitful search
To find at last where problems loom
God proudly builds His church.

So let’s keep working in our church
Until the resurrection.
And then we each will join that Church
Without an imperfection.

–attributed to Mavis Williams

A Rule for Living, Amplified

September 23, 2021

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

But employ whatever God has intrusted you with, in doing good, all possible good, in every possible kind and degree, to the household of faith, to all men.

–from “Sermons on Several Occasions” by Reverend John Wesley, 1799

The Golden Rule Restated

September 23, 2021

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

    • Treat others as you would like others to treat you
    • Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated
    • What you wish upon others, you wish upon yourself

 

In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Matthew 7:12

New American Standard Bible 1995

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  Neither is love content with barely working no evil to your neighbour.  It continually incites us to do good: as we have time, and opportunity to do good in every possible kind, and in every possible degree to all men.

–from “Sermons on Several Occasions” by Reverend John Wesley, 1799

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