We have enough Bibles for every household in America a couple of times over. We have churches galore; religious organizations; educational institutions; religious presses that never stop pouring forth books, Sunday school materials, and religious curricula; and unparalleled financial resources. What don’t we have? All too often we don’t have what the Old Testament people didn’t have. A due and weighty sense of the greatness and holiness of God, a sense that will reach into our lives, wrench them around, life our vision, fill our hearts, make us courageous for what is right, and over time leave behind its beautiful residue of Christlike character.
. . . Let us not mince words. If we could see more clearly God in the full blaze of his burning purity, we would not be on easy terms with all the sins that now infect our souls and breed easy compromises with the spirit of the postmodern age. This is what leads to the casual wasy in which we live our livces with their blatantly wrong priorities. If we could see this more clearly, the church would be filled with much more repentance and, in consequence, much more joy, and much more authenticity (David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant, 132-33).
Dang.