Psalm 27:13 "I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."
"And without discernment, I had little chance of finding the security and happiness that I wanted—that I think we all want."
"New technologies have certainly complicated and altered how we receive and engage with information, but at root, we’re facing the same questions that human beings have faced since the garden of Eden: How can I know who and what to believe? How can I make choices that lead to a successful life? How can I avoid mistakes? How can I know what is good?" (23).
"Manhandled. What a perfect word to describe what has happened to God's good world" (38).
"Discernment does not overlook the brokenness of the world. It does not deny its need of redemption. It does not excuse sinfulness, live in a false reality, or pretend that a damaged statue is just as good as a carefully preserved one. What discernment does is equip us to see the true nature of the world and ourselves--both the good and the bad" (42).
"[Our world] doesn't know the difference between pleasure and goodness...Because in comparison to the brokenness, anything that brings momentary relief feels good even if it doesn't provide lasting goodness" (49).
"In order to find lasting happiness, we must invest in things that last, we must store up 'treasures in heaven.' Because what ultimately makes something good is not whether it brings momentary pleasure but whether it brings us eternal pleasure, whether it satisfies both our bodies and our souls" (52).
"At its essence, worldliness is a disposition of the heart--the belief that goodness comes from the immediate satisfaction of temporal desire" (54).
"You do not develop discernment simply by reading labels, restricting yourself to certain contexts, or following lifestyle rules. You also dn't develop discernment by reacting to evil. As James K. A. Smith describes it, this kind of holistic formation is 'less about erecting an edifice of Christian knowledge than...a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively 'understands' the world in light of the fullness of the gospel.' In other words, you develop discernment by becoming a person who knows how, not simply what, to think" (57).
"Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." --Flannery O'Connor
"While truth is based in facts, it involves more than facts and does not end with them. The detective must root her observations in reality, but solving the case means making sense of reality. As she sorts through the facts, she must know which are important and then coordinate them into a plausible theory. She needs a way of looking at the facts that explains them. She needs a truthful frame.
"This is why pure rationalism and scientism cannot lead us to truth; such approaches cannot tell us how to interpret, arrange, and discern the meaning of what we see, touch, feel, taste, and hear. Nor can they assure that we will be ethical in the process. Pursuing truth requires more than knowing where the facts lead. It requires the honesty to actually follow them, regardles sof who they implicate.
"In this sense, truth is holistic; it relies on both the material and the immaterial" (74).
"Rather than relying on our own wits, Christians believe that the 'eyes of [our] understanding' are enlightened when we submit ourselves to the One who is truth Himself. Humility--not little gray cells--makes us wise" (74).
"Finding the truth relies on the character and integrity of the one handling the facts" (75).
"We must allow truth to make us more honest people" (75).
"When we encounter someone who holds a viewpoint we don't agree with, we can begin to view their whole existence through the lens of our disagreement with them. Instead of getting to know them and engaging their ideas, we assume that we already know them because we know where they stand on a certain political or religious question. And the degree to which we disagree with them on this question becomes the degree to which we will disrespect their hunanity. They become our cultural enemy with whom we can't imagine having anything in common. We can't imagine that they, like us, are people who love their families, walk their dogs, work hard at their jobs, enjoy a good book and might just be working toward the common good (even if we disagree about what 'good' looks like)" (86).
"We can also begin to believe that being on top of the heap somehow means that you inherently deserve to be there. After all, in the natural world, the buck with the largest set of antlers is prized because he's been able to elude hunters and predators for years, long enough to grow his 14-point rack. Translating this to human community, wouldn't that mean that the folks at the top of the economic, social, and political ladder somehow deserve to be there? And correspondingly, that folks at the bottom somehow deserve to be there as well?
"But here is where Scripture adjusts our understanding of what is 'natural.' The Scripture teaches us that God, and not our own merit, ordains the course of our lives. None of us can control the family we are born into, the education we receive as children, the social function of dysfunction that we inherit. WE do not get to pick our IQ, our personalities, or our gifting. We are responsible to steward these gifts, but at the end of the day, God makes some of us mice and some of us lions. And he does this, not as a reward for our ability, but for His own good purposes.
"Furthermore, Jesus cautions those with positions of earthly authority to use their influence, not for themselves, but for the good of those under their care. 'You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them,' He says in Matthew 20. 'It must not be like that among you. On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many' (vv. 25-28). It's as if Jesus is asking the lion to protect the lamb" (105).
Of the priests in Malachi 2: "The priests' unfaithfulness to both their wives and their work revealed them to be unfaithful men to the core. In this sense, their adultery did not make them impure; they committed adultery because they were already impure. They had divided hearts" (114).
"One mistake that we can make in pursuing purity is to assume that naivete or ignorance is the same as discernment. But having never encountered evil is not the same as knowing the difference between good and evil or knowing what to do when you encounter it. Quite the opposite, the Scripture suggests that naivete can actually lead to impurity because simple people, as Proverbs calls them, are primed to be manipulated" (117).
"The solution to impurity is not simply abstinence or ignorance; it is to pursue what is pure" (119).
"Ultimately, utilitarianism becomes a threat to discernment when it teaches us to evaluate what is good and bad by earthly definitions of value...When we embrace a utilitarian mindset, what Mark Noll describes as 'dominated by the urgencies of the moment,' there is the possibility that we will miss the values of an eternal God" (134).
"Simply because we are drawn to something does not mean that it is worth pursuing. After all, doesn't the search for purity teach us that our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked? How can we trust our own desires?
"In the fourth century, Augustine, a bishop in North Africa, pondered these same questions and suggested that the problem isn't that we love things that we shouldn't, but that we love what we should in the wrong way. Our sense of beauty isn't wrong, but we're not allowing beauty to do what it's supposed to do: draw us to love God more fully and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The fact that we can respond wrongly to beauty helps us to understand the tension between attraction and lust" (134).
"...when the Scripture calls us to whatever is commendable, it is calling us to do something greater than niceness--it's calling us to speak what is right and good. It is calling us to speech that is richer and more robust than platitudes or silence. Remember that discernment is not concerned primarily with our social comfort. It is concerned with goodness" (142).
"Are our words euphemos? Or blasphemous? Do we glorify things that deserve shame? Do we shame things that deserve glory? When Paul writes that it is shameful even to speak of things done in secret, he is not putting a gag order on exposing hidden sins or limiting us to a set of socially acceptable topics. Once again, he's emphasizing that what we choose to speak about and how we speak about it are part of the message we send to each other and the larger culture we create. We must consider and give appropriate weight to each topic" (148).
"Elie Wiesel observes, 'Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.'
"Instead of encouraging silence, Paul calls us to use our words to expose evil, to literally call it out. As much as speaking whatever is commendable compels us to speak appropriately about what is good, it also calls us to speak appropriately about what is bad. And the only appropriate way to speak about evil is to call it by its name" (149).
Footnote on page 159: "The skill of putting a book down is one every reader should master. You do not owe the author a reading. It is the author's job to write in a way that draws you in and keeps you engaged. If this book does not keep your attention, I now extend my unqualified permission to close it and go read something else."
"'Discernment,' C.H. Spurgeon once quipped, 'is not knowing the difference between right and wrong, it is the difference between right and almost right.' Tweaking that ever so slightly, discernment is knowing the difference between what is good and what is better" (167).
"I can trust him enough to walk away from good things because I know that there is no shortage of goodness in His world, and as a good, good Father, He will provide for His children" (168).
"...in his book How to Think, Alan Jacobs notes that none of us can actually think for ourselves" (173). Added to the list.
"Like the human body, the Body of Christ has mechanisms to identify contaminating influences and expel them. But sometimes, the Body can become sensitized and mistake good things as threats and, in an effort to protect itself, will end up attacking itself" (176).
"The terrifying thing about a severe allergic reaction is that, technically the allergen does not harm the body; the reaction does" (176).
"Because discernment sees both the good and the bad, it is neither idealistic nor pessimistic. It affirms the brokenness of this world as well as God's ongoing work of redemption" (190).
"We must seek our value from God, not from what other people think of us. This frees us to make decisions that are truly good rather than pleasing other people" (193).
No comments:
Post a Comment