Please pray for me,
that I may have both spiritual and physical strength to perform my duties;
that I may not only speak the truth but become the truth;
that I may not only be called a Christian, but also live like a Christian.
Yet I do not want people to look to me as an example,
for at best I can only be a pale reflection of Christ Jesus;
let people look away from the reflection and turn to the reality.
Christianity is not a matter of persuading people of particular ideas,
but of inviting them to share in the greatness of Christ.
So pray that I may never fall into the trap of impressing people with clever speech,
but instead I may learn to speak with humility,
desiring only to impress people with Christ himself.

- Ignatius of Antioch, 35-108 A. D. 

In Talking the Walk, Marva Dawn recounts an interesting conversation:

Once, a few years ago at a youth convention, a lovely young lady came earnestly to talk with me. She asked me what I thought about a certain matter in sexual ethics. I answered her with the most careful biblical reading and ethical nuancing I had gained in years of training.

She responded, “Well, I just wanted to know your opinion.”

“That wasn’t my opinion,” I replied. “If I had given you my opinion, it would have been the opposite because I really would like to escape these biblical truths and say what pleases everybody. I tried to tell you as faithfully as I could what all my studies have discerned God is saying. That’s much more sound, more reliable, more eternally true than my measly opinion.”

She looked at me in shock. How could anyone question the importance of personal opinion? How could anyone give an answer different from her own private feelings? Is there really such a thing as public truth?

Yes, there is. And truth’s name is God.

From The Meaning of Marriage:

Spiritually discerning spouses can see a bit of what God sees in their partners, and it excites them. The rest of the world sees us wrinkling up, but using marriage’s powers in the grace of Jesus, we see each other become more and more spiritually gorgeous. We are clothing, washing, adorning each other. And someday the whole universe will see what God sees in us. What we should say to each other on our wedding day is, “As great as you look today, someday you will stand with me before God in such beauty that it will make these clothes look like rags.”

We ought not, as men in Christ Jesus, to be carried away by a childish love of novelty, for we worship a God who is ever the same, and of whose years there is no end. In some matters “the old is better.” There are certain things which are already so truly new, that to change them for anything else would be to lose old gold for new dross.

The old, old gospel is the newest thing in the world; in its very essence it is for ever good news. In the things of God the old is ever new, and if any man brings forward that which seems to be new doctrine and new truth, it is soon perceived that the new dogma is only worn-out heresy dexterously repaired, and the discovery in theology is the digging up of a carcase of error which had better have been left to rot in oblivion.

In the great matter of truth and godliness, we may safely say, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

- Charles Spurgeon

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

No priest, no theologian stood at the manger of Bethlehem. And yet all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders: that God became human. Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable.

Without the holy night, there is no theology. “God is revealed in flesh,” the God-human Jesus Christ—that is the holy mystery that theology came into being to protect and preserve.

How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! Its sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God’s mystery precisely as mystery. This and nothing else, therefore, is what the early church meant when, with never flagging zeal, it dealt with the mystery of the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ…

If Christmas time cannot ignite within us again something like a love for holy theology, so that we—captured and compelled by the wonder of the manger of the Son of God—must reverently reflect on the mysteries of God, then it must be that the glow of the divine mysteries has also been extinguished in our heart and has died out.

(HT)

Father Damien was a priest who became famous for his willingness to serve lepers.

He moved to Kalawao – a village on the island of Molokai, in Hawaii, that had been quarantined to serve as a leper colony.

For 16 years, he lived in their midst. He learned to speak their language. He bandaged their wounds, embraced the bodies no one else would touch, preached to hearts that would otherwise have been left alone. He organized schools, bands, and choirs. He built homes so that the lepers could have shelter. He built 2,000 coffins by hand so that, when they died, they could be buried with dignity.

Slowly, it was said, Kalawao became a place to live rather than a place to die, for Father Damien offered hope.

Father Damien was not careful about keeping his distance. He did nothing to separate himself from his people. He dipped his fingers in the poi bowl along with the patients. He shared his pipe. He did not always wash his hands after bandaging open sores. He got close. For this, the people loved him.

Then one day he stood up and began his sermon with two words: “We lepers….”

Now he wasn’t just helping them. Now he was one of them. From this day forward, he wasn’t just on their island; he was in their skin. First he had chosen to live as they lived; now he would die as they died. Now they were in it together.

One day God came to Earth and began his message: “We lepers….” Now he wasn’t just helping us. Now he was one of us. Now he was in our skin. Now we were in it together.

- From John Ortberg’s God Is Closer Than You Think (HT - Darryl Dash)

“Glory to God in the highest!” What is the instructive lesson to be learned from this first syllable of the angels’ song? Why this, that salvation is God’s highest glory!

• He is glorified in every dew drop that twinkles in the morning sun.
• He is magnified in every wood flower that blossoms in the copse, although it live to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness in the forest air.
• God is glorified in every bird that warbles on the spray; in every lamb that skips the mead.
• Do not the fishes in the sea praise him? From the tiny minnow to the huge Leviathan, do not all creatures that swim the water bless and praise his name?
• Do not all created things extol him? Is there aught beneath the sky, save man, that doth not glorify God?
• Do not the stars exalt him, when they write his name upon the azure of heaven in their golden letters?
• Do not the lightnings adore him when they flash his brightness in arrows of light piercing the midnight darkness? Do not thunders extol him when they roll like drums in the march of the God of armies?
• Do not all things exalt him, from the least even to the greatest?

But sing, sing, oh universe, till thou hast exhausted thyself, thou canst not afford a song so sweet as the song of Incarnation.

Though creation may be a majestic organ of praise, it cannot reach the compass of the golden canticle—Incarnation! There is more in that than in creation, more melody in Jesus in the manger, than there is in worlds on worlds rolling their grandeur round the throne of the Most High.

Pause Christian, and consider this a minute. See how every attribute is here magnified.

• Lo! what wisdom is here. God becomes man that God may be just, and the justifier of the ungodly.
• Lo! what power, for where is power so great as when it concealeth power? What power, that Godhead should unrobe itself and become man!
• Behold, what love is thus revealed to us when Jesus becomes a man.
• Behold ye, what faithfulness! How many promises are this day kept? How many solemn obligations are this hour discharged?

Tell me one attribute of God that is not manifest in Jesus; and your ignorance shall be the reason why you have not seen it so. The whole of God is glorified in Christ; and though some part of the name of God is written in the universe, it is here best read—in Him who was the Son of Man, and, yet, the Son of God.

- Charles Spurgeon, Christmas Day, 1857

Yea, for it was removal of punishment,
and remission of sins,
and “righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption,”
and adoption, and an inheritance of Heaven,
and a relationship unto the Son of God,
which he came declaring unto all;
to enemies, to the perverse,
to them that were sitting in darkness.

What then could ever be equal to these good tidings?

God on earth, man in Heaven;
and all became mingled together,
angels joined the choirs of men,
men had fellowship with the angels, and with the other powers above:
and one might see the long war brought to an end,
and reconciliation made between God and our nature,
the devil brought to shame, demons in flight,
death destroyed, Paradise opened,
the curse blotted out, sin put out of the way,
error driven off, truth returning,
the word of godliness everywhere sown, and flourishing in its growth,
the polity of those above planted on the earth,
those powers in secure intercourse with us,
and on earth angels continually haunting,
and hope abundant touching things to come.

Therefore he hath called the history good tidings,
forasmuch as all other things surely are words only without substance;
as, for instance, plenty of wealth, greatness of power, kingdoms,
and glories, and honors, and whatever other things among men are accounted to be good:
but those which are published by the fishermen would be legitimately and properly called good tidings:
not only as being sure and immoveable blessings, and beyond our deserts,
but also as being given to us with all facility.

For not by laboring and sweating,
not by fatigue and suffering,
but merely as being beloved of God,
we received what we have received.

- Chrysostom, from his homilies on Matthew

An interesting description of a conversation between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates about the different approaches of Microsoft and Apple:

Mossberg wanted the evening joint appearance to be a cordial discussion, not a debate, but that seemed less likely when Jobs unleashed a swipe at Microsoft during a solo interview earlier that day. Asked about the fact that Apple’s iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.” So when it was time for Gates and Jobs to meet in the green room before their joint session that evening, Mossberg was worried.

Gates got there first, with his aide Larry Cohen, who had briefed him about Jobs’s remark earlier that day. When Jobs ambled in a few minutes later, he grabbed a bottle of water from the ice bucket and sat down. After a moment or two of silence, Gates said, “So I guess I’m the representative from hell.” He wasn’t smiling. Jobs paused, gave him one of his impish grins, and handed him the ice water. Gates relaxed, and the tension dissipated.

The result was a fascinating duet, in which each wunderkind of the digital age spoke warily, and then warmly, about the other. Most memorably they gave candid answers when the technology strategist Lise Buyer, who was in the audience, asked what each had learned from observing the other.

“Well, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste,” Gates answered. There was a bit of nervous laughter; Jobs had famously said, ten years earlier, that his problem with Microsoft was that it had absolutely no taste. But Gates insisted he was serious. Jobs was a “natural in terms of intuitive taste.” He recalled how he and Jobs used to sit together reviewing the software that Microsoft was making for the Macintosh. “I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that, you know, is hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different and I think it’s magical. And in that case, wow.” Jobs stared at the floor. Later he told me that he was blown away by how honest and gracious Gates had just been.

Jobs was equally honest, though not quite as gracious, when his turn came. He described the great divide between the Apple theology of building end-to-end integrated products and Microsoft’s openness to licensing its software to competing hardware makers. In the music market, the integrated approach, as manifested in his iTunes-iPod package, was proving to be the better, he noted, but Microsoft’s decoupled approach was faring better in the personal computer market.

One question he raised in an offhand way was: Which approach might work better for mobile phones? Then he went on to make an insightful point: This difference in design philosophy, he said, led him and Apple to be less good at collaborating with other companies. “Because Woz and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren’t so good at partnering with people,” he said. “And I think if Apple could have had a little more of that in its DNA, it would have served it extremely well.”

from Walter Isaacson’s biography - Steve Jobs

Some thought-provoking quotes from Chesterton on dogma:

The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas.

Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.

No man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error.

It is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. It is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.

Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas.

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas.

- G. K. Chesterton, Heretics