Intro

• —at once seeking a touch yet holding back, yearning for consolation but silencing anyone who sought to help, shoving at people in her way to get to God

• Not every cry is ridden by anguish, but every life has its own cry or has heard the cry of another who is struggling with emotions or passions in need of explanation. Not every struggle is vented with such force, but many a life is governed by much inner conflict.

• If the cries of the heart in any community were to be cumulatively sounded, the noise would indeed be deafening

• That intimacy with God is a knowledge that has bridged what one knows with what one feels. Such knowledge takes what we know and what we feel seriously. It is not a fatalistic posture that says “so be it” and is resigned to accept what flies in the face of reason. When we learn God’s profound answers to every sentiment we feel, we find contentment and courage and live a life of hope and confidence. We then make every day count with significance while treasuring His thoughts and harnessing our feelings.

• Cries are born out of real feelings. So also must joy betoken a real confidence and repose.

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The Cry to Know God​

• “Who are You, God?” begets contradictory answers when left at the mercy of individual whim. This is not to minimize individual perceptions; it is only to establish that perceptions differ from person to person, and when they are in contradiction to other perceptions there is no point of reference for knowing which perception is correct. 

• This is the danger to which much debate and religion based only upon experience can lead people. We are left with an artist’s version of how God looks, conditioned principally by the artist’s own prejudice or perception of God

• four are principal. The first is that of God’s sovereignty. The second is His holiness. The third is His omniscience, and the fourth His immutability

• God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God’s power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine

• When two corrupt people expose each other, there is a universal tendency to point the finger. Though we ourselves are decidedly unholy, we invoke a holy standard over someone else. What will we do when we stand before a holy God and our wretchedness is disclosed in all its stark horror? Will we blame God?

• When every thought, every deed, and every intent are known, one can easily begin to feel very threatened and even invaded. Omniscience brings scrutiny to a painful level.

• When God is our Holy Father, sovereignty, holiness, omniscience, and immutability do not terrify us; they leave us full of awe and gratitude.

• Sovereignty is only tyrannical if it is unbounded by goodness; holiness is only terrifying if it is untempered by grace; omniscience is only taunting if it is unaccompanied by mercy; and immutability is only torturous if there is no guarantee of goodwill.  

• The bird is singing its song. But the melody must first be sung in each of our hearts. The philosopher may debate. The skeptic may scoff. Experience may be deceptive. But the Word of God abides forever, and that Word has shone upon the face of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is the need for constant vigilance, for the tides of history will turn, and anytime we think we can change the course by compromise we fail not only our Lord but ourselves.

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The Cry to Feel my Faith

• Story of how a group of Navy Seals charged into a house to find hostages nestled in a corner, shocked. They shouted at them to tell them they were Americans and here to rescue them but the hostages would not move. One of the Seals took a risk, put down his gun and took of his helmet. Squatted down and slowly inched close to the hostages until his body was touching some of theirs. He slowly told them they were Americans and here to rescue them. Slowly one hostage stood up to follow him and one after the other they all went out. s God. 

• It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality, that it would contradict reason But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality, or it would not be reasonable. 

• Here is what I've started thinking: All the wonder of God happens right above our arithmetic and formula. The more I clumb outside my pat answers, the more invigorating the view, the more my heart enters into worship.  

• I think we have two choices in the face of such big beauty: terror or awe. And this is precisely why we attempt to chart God, because we want to be able to predict Him, to dissect Him, to carry Him around in our dog and pony show. We are too proud to feel awe and too fearful to feel terror. We reduce Him to math so we don't have to fear Him, and yet the Bible tells us fear is the appropriate response, that it is the beginning of wisdom. Does this mean God is going to hurt us? No. But I stood on the edge of the grand canyon once, behind a railing, and though I was never going to fall off the edge, I feared the thought of it. It is that big of a place, the wonderful of a landscape. 

• Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder. 

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The Cry of a Lonely Heart

• loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary people, is the central and inevitable feature of human existence.

• All this hideous doubt, despair and dark confusion of the soul a lonely man must know, for he is united to no image save that which he creates himself. He is bolstered by no other knowledge save that which he can gather for himself with the vision of his own eyes and brain. He is sustained and cheered and aided by no party. He is given comfort by no creed. He has no faith in him except his own, and often that faith deserts him, leaving him shaken and filled with impotence. Then it seems to him that his life has come to nothing. That he is ruined, lost, and broken, past redemption, and that morning, that bright and shining morning with its promise of new beginnings, will never come upon the earth again as it did once.

• Our experience of loneliness is universal, and love alone is not the answer. There is a “beyond” in all of us that love does not satisfy. As wonderful a privilege as love is, I strongly suspect that even in its best form we have made of it something it was never meant to be. While the pervert chases after the physical only to come away ever unsatiated, the purist exalts love to emotional expectations that it could never deliver on a sustained basis.

• Now we are talking about the right to die when we are mature and hurting without having been given the right to live when we are fragile and needy. Every value is now redefined

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