Sermon Quotes: "What To Do When The Pandemic Turns Divisive"

“Few passages have as much theology and ethics in them as Philippians 2.” D.A. Carson

“Paul emphasizes that Jesus did not take advantage of or exploit the equality with God that he already possessed. In other words, the grasping or advantage-taking does not move toward equality with God as its goal but begins with God-equality and moves towards others. The text, then, emphasizes the selfless attitude of the preincarnational Christ: he regarded his equality with God not as excusing him from but as uniquely qualifying him for the task of redemptive suffering and death as a man.” Stephen Wellum

“The conclusion to which this leads us is that the impulse to serve lies at the very heart of deity. God is not self-centered or self-absorbed. As love, he is pure altruism, looking not on (or at) his own things, but at the things of others.” Donald Macleod

“It wasn’t all romance and righteousness.” John Stott

“Paul doesn’t outline a course of action but a kind of action.” Alec Motyer

“The heavenly light of the small community of believers in Philippi shines far beyond their own city to illuminate the way home for a warped and crooked generation lost in the darkness of this world.” Walter Hansen

“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in the atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors-anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things-praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts-not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.” C.S. Lewis

“As long as a man is alive, and out of hell, he cannot have any cause to complain.” Charles Spurgeon