Musings of a Snickerdoodle

The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and His work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity. That dismisses once and for all every clamorous desire for something more. One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian brotherhood….. Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship in in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it

Human love has little regard for truth.  It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the beloved person.  Human love desires the other person, his company, his answering love, but it does not serve him. On the contrary, it continues to desire even when it seems to be serving.  There are two marks, both of which are one and the same thing, that manifest the difference between spiritual and human love:  Human love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a fellowship that has become false for the sake of genuine fellowship, and human love cannot love an enemy, that is, one who seriously and stubbornly resists it.  Both spring from the same source:  human love is by its very nature desire - desire for human community.  So long as it can satisfy this desire in some way, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of genuine love for others.  But where it can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, there it stops short -

There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting  experience  of genuine Christian community at least once in his life.    But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life.    We have no claim upon such experiences, and we do not live with other Christians for the sake of acquiring them.    It is not the experience of Christian brotherhood, but solid and certain faith in brotherhood that holds us together.    That God has acted and wants to act upon us all, this we see in faith as God's greatest gift, this makes us glad and happy, but it also makes us ready to forego all such experiences when God at times does not grant them.    We are bound together by faith, not by experience. - Dietrich Bonhoffer From his book Life Together See more quotes on my quote collection blog:   https://snickerdoodlesquotes.blogspot.com/

Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or la

When I heard that there was a new biography coming out about Charles Spurgeon's wife, Susannah, I was quite interested, eager for it to come out.  I've read a short biography of Susannah before, but this one, Susie: The life and legacy of Susannah Spurgeon by Ray Rhodes Jr. Is a larger and  I thought it would be  neat to know more about her.   The cover is beautiful looking, is hardcover (which to me is quite a plus), and it feels like very good quality. I read it out loud with my sister, thinking that we would enjoy it together…not so.  It dragged, and the timeline just seemed all over the place.  I was very disappointed with this biography. I am very sorry to have to sound harsh, but this is probably the worst written biography I've ever read. I don't think I've ever read one written like this before.  It just seemed like a book that recycles some facts over, and over, and over and over again.  Past events are repeatedly (not just once or twice) referred to,