Miller: prayer and preaching

Basically, I am convinced that men who do not make praying their first priority in life and ministry should not preach or pastor.  As preachers they will be confusing models of a Christian man, and as shepherds they will not show the willingness to die for the sheep.  Their spirit will inevitably drift in the wrong direction...

I do not, of course, think of prayer as retirement from the battle to the isolation of a remote study, but the vertical aspect of vigorous shepherding...

Usually when our praying is weak so is our shepherding spirit;  we have more in common with the hireling than the Shepherd who died for His sheep...

Pray confidently without any doubt that the Spirit will empower you.

The Heart of a Servant Leader, p100-102

Welch: mixed allegiances

If you are looking to plumb the depths of worry, you can find it in your mixed allegiances. You trust God for some things and not others.  You trust him for heaven but not earth.  

Running Scared, p.109

Quick Review: The Time Machine

...by HG Wells.

Well....having only ever seen the (Rod Steiger?) movie I wasn't sure how the book would be.

Hmmm....it seems to me to be only sort-of science fiction, and more the case that science fiction is being used to explore social and political ideas from the period.  Most of the science, and story elements depending on it, occur early on; after that it seems to be an outworking of how social strata of the time might affect humanity long-term.  With a bit of the end-of-the-universe tacked on (it did feel like a magazine serialisation, which indeed it was originally).

So, for me, it was OK.

Quick Review: Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering

...by Timothy Keller.

Most Keller books I read are stuffed with my underlining of sentence after sentence, whole paragraphs I want to quote in future.  Not so much this book - at least not til the latter third.  This isn't a criticism, it's simply a different kind of book to his previous works.  It's a book to soak yourself in, not so much when you are in the midst of suffering (though I think it would be helpful to many then) but more to prepare yourself for suffering.

No book can give easy answers to the subject.  But Keller does give us some profound thoughts, whilst laying bear the problems a secular society experience when facing  suffering, and a good deal on what we can do to be ready - ready to trust God, to be built up and improved by suffering, to keep going, to hope.

A great book.