Well, it's Tuesday...

...and I'm just finishing *last* week's book. I'm hoping my average over the course of the year will even all of this out, but this was too deep and rich a book to fly through the last hundred pages.

Calvin Miller's INTO THE DEPTHS OF GOD is a good book. It looks like some of his interns helped him out, much like Len Sweet's writing, in finding every little obscure quote from history to go with the topic at hand. Anyway, Miller's search is for the "inward life": one where the relationship and inner holiness of the believer reigns on the outside into our fallen and needy culture. The four sections - discipline, listening, informed, and confessional - speak to the need we have to drop alot of the outer excesses and retreat into the inner working of our relationship with God and with others.

"Deep is the dwelling place of God. Deep is the character of the ocean. Hold the metaphor for a moment and savor its lesson ahead of time. For deep is where the noisy, trashy surface of the ocean gets quiet and serene... Deep is the gift of discipline." - p. 15

"But it is those who read and pray, not those who philosophize and chatter, who arrive at lives of real power.... Real spiritual divers are so in love with the depths that they don't spend much of their lives trying to make oceanography real in a world where birdbaths define the smaller passions." - p. 16-17

"Jesus' counsel to be in the world must mean that we walk through sinful, fallen culture, giving it hope only because we remain in conversation with God as we walk through it." - p. 116

"The best thing of all is to surrender to God's will, and bear affliction with confidence in God. The Lord seeing out affliction will never give us too much to bear. If we seem to ourselves to be greatly afflicted, it means that we have not surrendered to the will of God." - p. 182, quoting St. Silouan

Good book... now on to something shorter... like Dr. Seuss 8^)
- posted by Rick @ 22:36