“We must direct our prayer, as we direct our speech to the person we have business with. The Bible is a letter God hath sent to us; prayer is a letter we send to him” (Matthew Henry, Directions for Daily Communion with God).

“The Classic American Date: go see a movie together. Our culture is so film-saturated that this invitation is the easiest and most natural one to make” (Grant Horner, Meaning at the Movies: Becoming a Discerning Viewer, 145).

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Ain’t that the truth. My wife and I went on our “first date” on December 12, 2004–we watched Ocean’s Twelve.

“This [Sunset Boulevard] is one of the darkest films ever produced in Hollywood, undoubtedly because Hollywood is the subject, and Hollywood is people. Self-portraits are always the strangest form of art. They always tell the truth even while they lie. The title of the film comes from the famous street winding through the northern Los Angeles hills and down to the Pacific Ocean. The road is curvy, hilly, and very heavily used–in other words, it is dangerous. . . . This story about the film industry and what it can do to the human soul is absolutely blistering, even six decades after its release. It deals with the arts of screenwriting, directing, and acting; shows the costs and temptations of becoming famous and rich; delineates the manipulation by others and self so endemic to the artistic and business world that is Hollywood; brutally snickers at Hollywood wackiness; and calculates the cost of selling the soul for an image. Fame is shown for what it really is: the temporary acclamation of people who eventually turn on you and then laugh at you, pity you–or both. The message is simple: Hollywood kills” (Grant Horner, Meaning at the Movies: Becoming a Discerning Viewer, 184-185).

“The Word [God’s word of salvation], all-powerful in its effect and salvific in its benefit, creates the faith that receives it” (Thomas J. Davis, This Is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought, 58).

“The curse of the law. “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). The curse of the law is its penal sanction. This is essentially the wrath or curse of God, the displeasure which rests upon every infraction of the law’s demand. “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things written in the book of the law to do them” (Gal. 3:10). Without deliverance from this curse there could be no salvation. It is from this curse that Christ has purchased his people and the price of the purchase was that he himself became a curse. He became so identified with the curse resting on his people that the whole of it in all its unrelieved intensity became his. That curse he bore and that curse he exhausted. That was the price paid for this redemption and the liberty secured for the beneficiaries is that there is no more curse” (John Murray, Redemption – Accomplished and Applied, 44).

Christians are called to mediate on Scripture (see Psalm 1), but we don’t mediate on Scripture the way Winnie the Pooh tries to conjure up ideas for how to find honey: “Think, think, think.” Rather, we mediate on Scripture with the Holy Spirit. We don’t say, “Think, think, think.” We say, “Teach me, teach me, teach me.”

As Donald S. Whitney notes, “Meditation must always involve two people — the Christian and the Holy Spirit. Praying over a text is the invitation for the Holy Spirit to hold His divine light over the words of Scripture to show you what you cannot see without Him” (Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, 55).

What to pray while reading Scripture: “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Psalm 119:18).

“He [Professor Weston, i.e. the antagonist] was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of “scientifiction,” in little Interplanetary Societies and rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite — the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species — a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary” (C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, 81-82).

“[A]t the heart of all theology for Luther is God and how one knows God; or perhaps better said, one must start all theology with understanding how it is that God reveals Godself” (Thomas J. Davis, This Is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought, 58).

“Luther did not do away with the notion of good works, works of love; he repositioned good works so that they follow necessarily from the working of the Word. Good works do not effect salvation; they are its flowering. The communio sanctorum, the community of love, is thus a necessary result of the Word” (Thomas J. Davis, This Is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought, 58).