E.C. Hoskyns put it forthrightly: ‘When a Christian man declares that the four times repeated response in the Litany of the English Church – “Have mercy upon us miserable sinners” – has no meaning for him, he proclaims that he has as yet no understanding of the Christian religion or that he has apostasized from it.’ (Q in A Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, 308)
Confession of sin may be general. Examples are found extensively in the Bible, and also in most liturgies.…
I read somewhere of a man who was working in the garden of his new home, when his lawnmower had broken down. He tried fruitlessly for two hours trying to get it going again. Suddenly, one of his neighbours appeared with a handful of tools. “Can I help?” he asked. In twenty minutes he had the mower working beautifully. “Thanks a lot,” the newcomer said. “And may I ask you, what do you make with such a fine set of tools?”…
‘Honesty’ covers a family of virtues of truthfulness. These include:-…
A bit of light relief. Here are a few of my favourites from Children’s Letters to God:-
Dear God…
‘I would like all the bad things to stop.’
‘My father is mean. Please get him not to be. But don’t hurt him.’
‘Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones why don’t you just keep the ones you’ve got now?’
‘Please send me a pony. I never asked for anything before. You can look it up.’…
‘Prayer is the conversation of friends. It is not a mere convenience for letting God know what we are thinking or what we want.’ So writes Tim Chester, in The Message of Prayer. The development of this ‘conversation’ may be traced from Genesis to Revelation:-
Genesis 1:26-27. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” …
According to J.I. Packer, in an essay entitled Leisure and Lifestyle: Leisure, Pleasure and Treasure, evangelicals have paid relatively little attention to thinking about leisure, emphasizing ‘work rather than leisure, activity rather than rest, and life commitments rather than life-style choices.’ This is as it should be, since pre-occupation with leisure is unhealthy, a symptom of the deadly decadence that has already set in in the Western world. See 1 Jn 2:15f. ‘All around the world, as capitalist consumerism and the market economy grind on, carrying all before them, leisure and life-style are becoming areas of entrapment for Christian people. …
