Brain food/heart food!

 I took some time amidst the busyness this weekend, to sit on the bench in our bedroom and read.  As an introvert, I desperately needed some down, alone time to re-boot, and re-charge!  I was reading J.I. Packer's book A Quest For Godliness, and I came across a few quotes I thought I would share.  These are men from long ago, I had never read them until this last semester, and yet they were expressing exactly something that I have prayed about and desired all my life.  Here is John Owen, "A man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul."  "And he that doth not feed on and thrive in the digestion of the food which he provides for others will scarce make it savoury unto them; yea, he knows not but that the food he hath provided may be poison, unless he have really tasted of it himself.  If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us." [bold emphasis mine, italics in original]  Perkins has said, "Good words are vain where there is no good life.  Let not Ministers think that their golden words shall do so much good as their leaden lives shall do hurt...As no man is more honourable than a learned and holy minister, so none is more contemptible in this world, none more miserable for that to come than he who by his loose and lewd life doth scandalize his doctrine."  Challenging words that are like arrows to my heart!  and Light to my feet!
This semester I took a class called the History and Traditions of Spirituality and we got to ready many authors from long ago, and not read about them, but read their original writings.  I loved this course.  I had several favorites, but I did come to love the Puritans, and was probably most surprised by how the perspectives and beliefs about them are quite distorted in some cases, from who and what they really were and how they lived.  They have been badly represented in history books.  They were people of God who cared deeply that they lived Spirit fueled lives of obedience to God.  They had such a deep respect for His word, and studied it with a diligence that is helpful to us now if we would be instructed by them.  Just some food for thought!