Godliness

I know of no part of the Holy Scriptures where the nature and evidence of true and sincere godliness are so fully and largely insisted on and delineated, as in the 119th Psalm. The Psalmist declares his design in the first verses of the psalm, keeps his eye on it all along, and pursues it to the end. The excellency of holiness is represented as the immediate object of a spiritual taste and delight. God's law, that grand expression and emanation of the holiness of God's nature, and prescription of holiness to the creature, is all along represented as the great object of the love, the complacence, and rejoicing of the gracious nature, which prizes God's commandments above gold, yea, the finest gold, and to which they are sweeter than honey, and the honeycomb; and that upon account of their holiness. 

Jonathan Edwards, quoted in Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David, on Psalm 119, verse 103. 

Wisdom and folly

Thou through thy commandments hast made me wiser than mine enemies.

But how can this be, seeing that our Saviour saith that the men of this world are wiser in their own generation than the children of God? The answer is, our Saviour doth not call worldlings wise men simply; but wiser in their own generation; that is, wise in things pertaining to this life. Or as Jeremiah calls them, "wise to do evil"; and when they have so done, wise to conceal and cloak it. All which in very deed is but folly; and therefore David, who by the light of God's word saw that it was so, could not be moved to follow their course. Well; there is a great controversy between the godly and the wicked: either of them in their judgment accounts the other to be fools; but it is the light of God's word which must decide it.

William Cowper, quoted in Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David, on Psalm 119, verse 98

Suffering as the teacher

I think what [George] Herbert is getting at (Hopkins* is marvellous at this, too) is that our suffering is the terrible and only teacher—Kierkegaard said famously suffering is the characteristic of God’s love—and I think everyone senses that failure and brokenness and loneliness cause us to perceive us as God might, as naked and ignorant and blind. Our suffering may be the real form love takes, but we also know that at the end of it waits infinite peace and radiance, that has been my experience anyway. Why things are arranged this way, who knows—pretty soon we are all going to find out.

Poet Franz Wright in an interview with Ernest Hilbert entitled, The Secret Glory.

*Gerard Manley Hopkins

If there is no God

If there is no God,

Not everything is permitted to man.

He is still his brother’s keeper

And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,

By saying that there is no God.


Czeslaw Milosz, from the poem, If there is no God, in his collection, Second Space