“Don’t settle for sermons that reduce the Biblical narrative to an Idiots’ Guide to everything. The key theme of the Word is redemption from the guilt and power of sin, through faith in Christ, by grace alone, for the glory of God. Everything else is secondary. Pray for preaching that exalts the grace of Jesus and condemns sin for what it is.” — www.michaelspotts.org
“We love the Word that we understand with our minds. Now of course, we believe on the basis of authority, whatever is trustworthy; but we love on the basis of beauty, whatever is desirable. This is what we begin to discover in the scriptures, that there is this beauty, this harmony; although the light of scripture can blind us, it is the light in which everything begins to cohere and make sense. There is beautiful harmony between the mind of God, the mind of the Word, and the minds of believers. We can not actually grow in love for the Lord without, as it were, growing in an intellectual love, a mental love, an intelligent love, a thinking love for the Lord. Otherwise, our love is pure emotion.” — Sinclair Ferguson, spoken during Message 6, “Losing My Religion,” from the 2011 Ligonier National Conference, The Christian Mind
“To most people music is intrinsically attractive. Moreover, melodies tend to ingrain themselves in the listener’s mind. A tune will haunt the memory during the whole of a lifetime. Here, for example, is a quite uninteresting statement or value judgment. As it stands nobody will pay attention to it. But now set the words to a catchy and easily remembered tune. Immediately they become words of power. Moreover, the words will tend automatically to repeat themselves every time the melody is heard or spontaneously remembered. Orpheus has entered into an alliance with Pavlov—the power of sound with the conditioned reflex. For the commercial propagandist, as for his colleagues in the fields of politics and religion, music possesses yet another advantage. Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisted
“Biologically speaking, man is a moderately gregarious, not a completely social animal—a creature more like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee or an ant. In their original form human societies bore no resemblance to the hive or the ant heap; they were merely packs. Civilization is, among other things, the process by which primitive packs are transformed into an analogue, crude and mechanical, of the social insects’ organic communities. At the present time the pressures of over-population and technological change are accelerating this process. The termitary has come to seem a realizable and even, in some eyes, a desirable ideal. Needless to say, the ideal will never in fact be realized. A great gulf separates the social insect from the not too gregarious, big-brained mammal; and even though the mammal should do his best to imitate the insect, the gulf would remain. However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.”
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Holding.
Birds, you know.
This one.
The lady.
Flowers.