This is one of MacDonald’s childrens stories, of which his most well known are The Princes and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie. I don’t think this was quite as good as the others, but it did have one quote that I liked a fair bit. A child is speaking to his father:

“But aren’t we to read the Bible, father?

Yes, if it’s in order to obey it. To read the Bible thinking to please God by the mere reading of it, is to think like a heathen.

And aren’t we to say our prayers, father?

We are to ask God for what we want. If we don’t want a thing, we are only acting like pagans to speak as if we did, and call it prayer, and think we are pleasing him.” (p. 230)

I think this fact is part of why I don’t read the Bible as much as I should. To read it just to try and please God is silly, while to read it in order to obey it is quite a scary thing. I might find God asking me to do something I might not like to do!

“But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you…But he [Jesus] did mean that we ought to entertain the poor and disadvantaged ( who cannot reciprocate) at least as often—and perhaps a lot more often—than we entertain friends, relatives, and ‘successful’ folk. Have you ever known a Christian who took Jesus that seriously?” (57)

“Discerning of that one body is totally incompatible with feasting without sharing in costly ways with other members of the body who are hungry” (83)

“And if there is among them a man that is poor and needy, and they have not an abundance of necessaries, they fast two or three days that they may supply the needy with their necessary food.” (85)

”...we have failed to comprehend the concept that the church worldwide is one body…Would we go on building lavishly furnished expensive church buildings if members of our own congregations were starving?” (87)

“The fact that, in accordance with God’s order, the life of every individual, even of the poorest, is of greater value than all material things – this fact represents an insurmountable stumbling block to all economic deveolpments which make profits for the few out of human misery” (93)

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:25, p.93) [Substitute ‘American’ for ‘rich’ and see how the verse feels… :)]

“Not only do possessions tempt us to forsake God, but the pursuit of wealth often results in war and neglect of the poor. ‘What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you?...You sdesire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war’ (James 4:1-2). A quick glance through world history confirms this tragic truth.” (94)

“Christians today are not at all surprised that Paul urged the Corinthians to excommunicate a church member living with his father’s wife (1 Cor. 5:1-5). But we quietly overlook the fact that Paul, in the same paragraph, also urged them not to associate or even eat meals with those who claim to be Christians but are guilty of greed.” (96)

“More biblical texts warn of God’s punishment of those who neglect or oppress the poor than tell us that material abundance results from obedience. The two statements, however, are not contradictory. Both are true. It is the biblical balance that we need.” (99)

“On biblical grounds, therefore, one can be sure that prosperity in the context of injustice results from oppression rather than obedience and that it is not a sign of righteousness.” (99)

“Either Jesus and his kingdom matter so much that we are ready to sacrifice everything else, including our possessions, ore we are not serious about Jesus.” (103)

“If we are members of a priveleged group that profits from structural evil, and if we have at least some understanding of the evil yet fail to do what God wants us to do to change things, we stand guilty before God. Social evil is just as displeasing to God as personal evil. And it is more subtle…Persons sin by participating in evil systems when they understand, at least to some degree, that the system displeases God but fail to act responsibly to change things.” (112)

[referring to the story of the rich young ruler] “Jesus, then, is not commanding us to sell all our possessions; he is only demanding total submission to himself. This interpretation is both unquestionably true and obviously inadequate. To say no more is to miss the fact that possessions are the most common idol for rich Christians today.” (185)

“Probably the single most important decision on family expenses is where you decide to live.” (188)

“Resist buying things just because we can afford them. The amount we earn has nothing to do with what we need.” (192).

“We are not committed to a simple lifestyle. We have only one absolute loyalty, and that is to Jesus and his kindgom. But the head of this kingdom is the God of the poor! And hundreds of millions of his poor are starving. An age of hunger and poverty summons affluent people to a lower standard of living. But vague assent to this truth will not protect us from the daily seductions of Madison Avenue.” (202)

“If we truly believe that all people are created equal, then our foreign policy must be redesigned to promote the interests of all people and not just the wealthy elites in developing countries or our own multinational corporations.” (225)

Quotes I like – will write more later:

“There is a movement bubbling up…a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of” (24)

“It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that scare me, but the parts I do understand” (40, attributed to Mark Twain)

”’We are called not to be successful but to be faithful.’ That sounds good, but it was the beginning of my years of struggling with the tension between efficiency and faithfulness. I remembered Ghandi’s saying that what we are doing may seem insignificant, but it is most important that we do it.” (78)

“We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.” (113)

“If you ask most people what Christians believe, they can tell you, ‘Christians believe that Jesus is God’s Son and that Jesus rose from the dead.’ But if you ask the average person how Christians live, they are struck silent. We have not shown the world another way of doing life. Christians pretty much live like everybody else; they just sprinkle a little Jesus in along the way. And doctrine is not very attractive, even if it’s true. Few people are interested in a religion that has nothing to say to the world and offers them only life after death, when what people are really wondering is whether there is life before death.
As my teacher Tony Campolo used to ask, ‘Even if there were no heaven and there were no hell, would you still follow Jesus? Would you follow him for the life, joy, and fulfillment he gives you right now?’” (117)

“We have narrowed our vision to this: love God, love people, and follow Jesus” (121)

“Simplicity is meaningful ony inasmuch as it is grounded in love, authentic relationships, and interdependence.” (143)

“The tragedy of the church’s reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus’s vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives lost on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.” (203-204)

“Sometimes people ask me if I am scared, living in the inner city. I usually reply, ‘I’m more scared of the suburbs.’ The Scriptures say that we should not fear those things which can destroy the body, but we are to fear that which can destroy the soul (Matt. 10:28). While the ghettos may have their share of violence and crime, the suburbs are the home of the more subtle demonic forces – numbness, complacency, comfort – and it is these that can eat away at our souls.” (227)

“The person who loves their dream of community wil destroy community [even if their intentions are ever so earnest], but the person who loves those around them will create community.” (320, attributed to Dietrick Bonhoeffer)

Speaking on the verse “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14-15)

”...even were it possible with God to forgive an unforgiving man, the man himself would not be able to believe for a moment that God did forgive him, and therefore could get no comfort or help or joy of any kind from the forgiveness” (304)

This explanation makes tons of sense to me. The verse is still uncompromising, but somehow it makes it less of a legality issue to me. The more I actively try to live, love, and forgive like Jesus did, the deeper I can understand the absurdly grand love that Jesus has for me and everyone.

George MacDonald’s books have a recurring theme in them that is less than subtle. “Obedience is the key to every door” (253) He is of the mind that the only way to test the truth of what Jesus says is to walk it, to obey him, and see what follows. You cannot dissect the words of the bible, evaluate their truth from afar, put someone on a lie detector and ask them if God really exists. The only way to know if God is true is to act as if he is, and see what follows. Obey him, seek him, love him. Put God to the test.

As a seeking woman asked of a teacher, “But tell me then, Mr Graham, how is it that you know there is a God, and one—one—fit to be trusted as you trust him?” (254). Is this not the question that the world asks of those who believe in Jesus? How can you know? Why do you believe? It is also the thing we sadly try to convince people of. We try to prove, to demonstrate, that God is. The teacher responds, “In no way that I can bring to bear on the reason of another so as to produce conviction.” To moderate the language a bit, one cannot convince another that God exists and is worth loving. “I can do for you what is far better. I can persuade you to look and see whether before your own door stands not a gate—lies not a path to walk in. Entering by that gate, walking in that path, you shall yourself arrive at the conviction, which no man can give you, that there is a living Love and Truth at the heart of your being, and pervading all that surrounds you. The man who seeks the truth in any other manner will never find it.” And again, ”...if I find that his word, and the result of action founded upon that word, correspond and agree, opening a heaven within and beyond me, in which I see myself delivered from all that now in myself is to myself despicable and unlovely; if I can reasonably—reasonably to myself, not to another—cherish hopes of a glory of conscious being, divinely better than all my imagination when most daring could invent—a glory springing from absolute unity with my creator, and therefore with my neighbor; if the Lord of the ancient tale, I say, has thus held word with me, am I likely to doubt much or long whether there be such a lord or no?”

Put God to the test. Seek him out, do what he tells you to do. You will quickly find whether “there be such a lord or no”.

...but he believed that when the Human is still, the Divine speaks to it, because it is its own. (67)

A quote:

Andrew is the one who taught me that what I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do. (110)

“Therefore I shall try to do what is right, and to speak what is true. I do this not because I am courageous and honest, but because it is the only way to end the conflict of my deepest soul. I do it because I am not longer able to aspire to the highest with one part of myself and to deny it with another. I do not wish to live like that, I would rather die than live like that. I understand better those who have died for their convictions, and have not thought it was wonderful or brave or noble to die. They died rather than live, that was all.” (162)