Key Quotes from the Retreat Sermons
During our ‘Together 2023’ Retreat, there were many valuable quotes that you may have missed as you were taking notes. I have compiled them below as a reference:
1. A Zealous People - Riley Spring (Romans 12:11) - Apple, Spotify, Website
Jeff Purswell: “Mere passion, or strong feelings, or stubborn dogmatism, or loud personalities is not sacred zeal. Sacred zeal is not only about the heat of our emotions, but the focus of our affections.”
JC Ryle: “A zealous man in religion is preeminently a man of one thing. It's not enough to say that he is earnest, hardy, uncompromising, thorough-going, wholehearted, fervent in spirit. It's not enough. He only sees one thing. He cares for one thing. He lives for one thing. He is swallowed up in one thing, and that one thing is to please God. Whether he lives or whether he dies, whether he is rich or whether he is poor, whether he pleases men or whether he gives offense, whether he is thought wise or whether he is thought foolish, whether he gets honor or whether he gets shame, for all of this, the zealous man cares nothing at all. He burns for one thing, and that one thing is to please God and to advance God's glory.”
Uche Anizor, Overcoming Apathy: “…[Z]eal is not necessarily about becoming a missionary or martyr (at least not literally). Zeal in the day-to-day is about being alive to the important things around us. It is about being awake to God, aware of his presence and calling especially in those hidden moments of our day. Thus, zeal can take many seemingly mundane shapes, such as: going to bed on time, so that we don’t just lapse into our morning; committing to being with God’s people every Sunday; being inclined to say yes when asked to provide meals for church members, be on the clean-up crew after a large event, or give someone a ride to the airport; dedicating ourselves to praying regularly for specific missionaries; or devoting ourselves to understanding cultural issues with care and nuance.
Jeff Purswell: “Tend to zeal. Like a campfire in a barren cold wilderness, you just can't afford for it to die down. You tend it, you stoke it, you feed it. Your life depends on it…”
Jeff Purswell: “[Zeal]…It requires constant attention, which is critical for us to be aware of because zeal doesn't suddenly vanish. The flame of zeal is rarely extinguished by a single gust of wind. Zeal erodes. The erosion happens slowly and gradually, usually imperceptibly.”
Jeff Purswell: “….Zeal is not an accomplishment. Zeal is a miracle.”
2. Zealous For Jesus - Mark Prater (Colossians 1:15-20) - Apple, Spotify, Website
Steve Wellum: “As we walk through the storyline of Scripture, we, who are created after the divine pattern, ultimately are created after the image of the Son, who in his deity is the exact image of the invisible God, and who in his humanity takes on our image, becomes the last Adam, the true man, and the head of a new humanity.”
David Wells: “In Christ, we see all that Adam was intended to be, but never was, all that we are not but which we will become through resurrection.”
Steve Wellum: “As the firstborn, Christ existed before creation, functioned as the agent of creation, and therefore stands supreme over creation.”
Tony Reinke: “Apart from Christ there is no art, no science, no technology, no agriculture, no microprocessor, no iPhone, and no medical innovation... Nothing that now exists, visible or invisible, can exist if it first didn’t exist in the mind of the Creator…Apart from Christ there is nothing. The value of all things is relative to him.”
Tony Reinke: “In any discussion of technology, many Christians get hung up on the most powerful technologists in the world who are inventing the most threating innovations on earth-nuclear power, killing weapons, modified genetics [AI]-and assume that these men and women fall outside God’s governance. They don’t.”
Tony Reinke: "“Autonomous robots chauffeuring us around cities are likely in the near future. Autobots plotting a coup of mankind is more doubtful, but possible in the distant future. But autobots breaking free from God’s sovereign governance will never appear. No maverick machine, bot, or genetic edit can thwart the governance of God. He can allow them to run amuck and do real damage, but he can stop them too. God has set limits. He can, and does, and will continue to intrude upon our tech aspirations at his own will.”
Douglas Moo: “As the metaphor of body and head implies, Christ is in an organic relationship with his people in a way that is not true of the creation in general.”
John Owen: “Only a sight of his glory, and nothing else, will truly satisfy God’s people. The hearts of believers are like a magnetized needle which cannot rest until it is pointing north. So also, a believer, magnetized by the love of Christ, will always be restless until he or she comes to Christ and beholds his glory.”
Third Day, ‘King of Glory’:
Who is this King of glory with strength and majesty
And wisdom beyond measure, the gracious King of kings
The Lord of Earth and Heaven, the Creator of all things
Who is this King of glory, He's everything to me.His name is Jesus, precious Jesus
The Lord Almighty, the King of my heart
The King of glory.
3. Zealous For Home - Brendan Willis (Philippians 3:3 - 4:1) - Apple, Spotify, Website
JI Packer: “When Paul says he counts the things he lost rubbish, or dung (KJV), he means not merely that he does not think of them as having any value, but also that he does not live with them constantly in his mind: what normal person spends his time nostalgically dreaming of manure? Yet this, in effect, is what many of us do. It shows how little we have in the way of true knowledge of God.”
John Piper, A Hunger for God: “The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world.”
George Herbert: “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel makes him a gardener.”
CS Lewis: “These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether but that someday we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting at the King’s stables.”
Tim Keller: “Kathy and I realised that the cancer thing had really shaken us. […] I found I was always resting, frankly, in ministry accomplishments, ministry goals. “Hey we've done this, we got this started, we move to that.” And we realised that in many ways that we were resting our hearts in these things. In other words, we were really trying to turn this world into heaven, we were trying to make a heaven out of out of the earth. And as a result of that, we were always unhappy. […] I was never enjoying my day because I was always thinking about tomorrow and all the stuff I have to get done…
…What's happened with the cancer is suddenly we’ve seen that we can't make this earth heaven because it's going to be taken away from us, and it just jolts you so much. You say, “I've got to make heaven my heaven and God my heaven.” And here's what's really weird, when you actually make heaven, heaven; the joys of the earth are more poignant than they used to be. That's what's so strange, we enjoy our day more than we ever did. We look out on water here - the East River, for example. And there's a whole lot of things that we never really enjoyed that much. The more we make heaven into the real heaven, the more this world becomes something we actually are enjoying for its own sake instead of trying to make it give us more than they really can. So oddly enough […] we've never been happier today, we've never enjoyed our days more, we've never enjoyed hugs more, we've never enjoyed food more. Kathy will always say, “well this would be great to make” we've never enjoyed walks more we've never enjoyed the actual things we see touch taste hear and smell around us more. It's almost like why what was the matter with us and the answer is we got our hearts off of those things so weirdly now we enjoy them more.”