#chris

You're gonna have to serve somebody; well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody... ↗

— Bob Dylan

#faith #god #faith

What a terrible thing it is for children to see death, you say. We have it all wrong. If you make a child terrified of death, he won't embrace it so easily. And death must be embraced if you wish to follow Christ. Listen to His teaching. 'Unless you become like a child...and unless you take up your cross daily, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.' One is not valuable without the other. Janjic Jovic, The Dance of the Dead, 1959 ↗

— Ted Dekker

#death #following-christ #death

He recounted how, after the last of Charlemagne's forty-seven victorious campaigns, when he was returning from Saxony, a comet flashed across the sky and the Emperor's horse shied and threw him to the ground. The great Frankish Emperor had fallen so violently that his sword belt had been torn off him and the Spear, which he was clasping in his left hand, had been hurled some twenty feet away from him. At the same time there were earth tremors in the Royal Palace at Aachen, and the word "Princeps" had mysteriously faded from the red ochre inscription high up on a central beam in the Cathedral, which had formerly read 'Karolus Princeps.' Charlemagne himself had taken little notice of these portents, which his courtiers had taken to be a prophecy of his imminent death. In Einhard's own words: 'He refused to admit that any of these events could have any connection ith his own personal affairs.' Yet the 70-year-old Emperor drew up his last will and testament just in case these portents were correct. And they were! ↗

— Trevor Ravenscroft

#jesus-christ #nazism #the-occult #death

There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#christianity #judaism #scripture #faith

From matters as crucial as the death of Jesus, to those as mundane as eating and drinking, the Bible presents the glo ry of God as the ultimate priority and the definitive criterion by which we should evaluate everything. ↗

— Donald S. Whitney

#spiritual-disciplines #death

The law of God was more vindicated by the death of Christ than it would have been had all transgressors been sent to Hell. For the Son of God to suffer for sin was a more glorious establishment of the government of God, than for the whole race to suffer. ↗

— Charles Spurgeon

#christianity #gospel #death

For this great sickness that is upon us no one person is responsible, and no Christian is wholly free from blame. We have all contributed, directly or indirectly, to this sad state of affairs. We have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear satisfied. ↗

— A.W. Tozer

#christianity #diet

We are settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves. ↗

— David Platt

#dreams

There can only be two basic loves... the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God. ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#faith #god #love #self #faith

All I want is to sleep--to dream. Life is better in dreams. ↗

— Christina Westover

#dreams #literary-fiction #literary-quotes #poisoning-sylvie #san-francisco