Why I like not so new books

Tonight I finished reading J.B. Phillips classic work Your God is Too Small. I really enjoyed the book.  Glad I read it.  I wish I had read it earlier in my ministry, but at least I have read it once.  I just want to share a few quotes from the later chapters of the book.

Pardon the masculine exclusive language.  This book was written before inclusive language become common.

From Christ and the Question of Sin

"If God Himself is both Truth and Love it would be logical to suppose that a deliberate refusal to recognize or harbour truth and love would result in an attitude that makes reconciliation with God impossible." p 105.

From Statisfactory Reconciliation

"To assent mentally to the suggestion that "Jesus died for me" is unhappily only too easy for certain types of mind.  But really to believe that God Himself cut the know of man's entanglement by a personal and unbelievably costly act is a much deeper affair.  The bigger the concept of God the more the mind staggers at the thought, but once it is accepted as true it is not too much to say that the whole personality is reorientated." p 107.

From The Abolition of Death

""Heaven" is not, so to speak, the reward for "being a good boy" (though many people seem to think so), but it is the continuation and expansion of a quality of life which begins when a man's central confidence is transerred from himself to God-become-man." p 115. 

"Whosover liveth and believeth on Me shall never die" (John 11:26).  It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the meaning that Christ intended to convey was that death was a completely neglibgle experience to the man who had already begun to live life of the eternal quality. p 115.

From the final chapter

Those who respond to the Truth have always been a minority, and when God visited the earth in Person the response, even to Him, was not very large. p 122.

But if real Christianity fails, it fails for the same reasons the Christ failed--and any condemnation rightly falls on the world which rejects both Him and it." p 124.

 

In a few days I will finish Bishop Arthur J. Moore's book Bishop To All Peoples.  I will have several good quotes from the Bishop.