They want God.

 It is God with whom we have to do. People go for long stretches of time without being aware of that, thinking that it is money, or sex, or work, or children, or parents, or a political cause, or an athletic competition, or learning with which they must deal. Any one or a combination of these subjects can absorb them and for a time give them the meaning and purpose that human beings seem to require. But then there is a slow stretch of boredom. Or a disaster. Or a sudden collapse of meaning. They want more. They want God. When a person searches for meaning and direction, asking questions and testing our statements, we must not be diverted into anything other or less.

Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles.

Who Stands Fast?

From Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas:

"Who stands fast?" he asked. "Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God–the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God."

This was how Bonhoeffer saw what he was doing. He had theologically redefined the Christian life as something active, not reactive. It had nothing to do with avoiding sin or with merely talking or teaching or believing theological notions or principles or rules or tenets. It had everything to do with living one's whole life in obedience to God's call through action. It did not merely require a mind, but a body too. It was God's call to be fully human, to live as human beings obedient to the one who had made us, which was the fulfillment of our destiny. It was not a cramped, comprised, circupsect life, but as life lived in a kind of wild, joyful, full-throated freedom–that was what it was to obey God.

...one must be more zealous to please God that to avoid sin.  (p. 446)

Destroyed

I was reading Tim Keller's newest book King's Cross and came across this following passage that completely undid me:

Follow the thread. You say, "That sounds pretty hard," and you're right. How can we possibly follow the thread? It's simple but profound. Jesus himself does absolutely everything he's calling us to do. When he called James and John to leave their father in the boat, he had already left his Father's throne. "He left his Father's throne above, so free, so infinite his grace." And later he's going to be ripped from his Father's presence, on the cross. It's going to look as if your thread is taking you into dead ends, places where you'll get bloody, where the only way to follw the thread looks like it could crush you. But don't try to go backward. Don't turn to the left; don't turn to the right. Jesus Christ's kingship will not crush you. He was crushed for you. He followed the thread to the cross as you can follow yours into his arms. (p. 25)

Get this book and read it.

Introduction to Books & Resources by Timothy Keller from Redeemer City to City on Vimeo.

Real Sex

In a Christian landscape, what's important about sex is nurtured when we allow sex to be ordinary. This does not mean that sex will not be meaningful. Its meaning, instead, will partake in the variety ofmeanings that ordinary life offers. Sex needs to be clumsy. It should at times feel awkward. It should be an act we engage in for comfort.
...
Our task is not to cultivate moments when eros can whisk us away from our ordinary routines, but rather to love each other as eros becomes imbedded in, and transformed by, the daily warp and woof of married life. For in household sexuality, we see the ways our daily human stuggles offer the only language we have to call ourselves to God's grace.

Lauren Winner, Real Sex, p. 81, 83.

Freedom

But these choices do not make matters whole-- the gospel does. Otherwise put, freedom is not an interior human capacity which needs but a homilectical push from time to time in order to function. Freedom is a consequence of the grace of God. Human freedom is therefore not a reservoir of capacity the preacher seeks to shape into a "decision for Christ" by means of a sermon. Human freedom is the capacity for choice that is generated by the gospel of Jesus Christ as proclaimed.

Eugene L. Lowry, The Homiletical Plot, p. 83.