Every weekend I post a quote from a book I’ve read. These are culled from my pencil-scrawled marginalia: underlines, vertical lines, stars, and circles. Occasionally a book comes along that is so jam-packed with profound quotable material, it would overrun my Weekend Wisdom category for months! Victor Shepherd’s short devotional, Ponder and Pray is one of those books.

Instead of making you wait and read these over the months to come, I’ve decided to collect all the best below. Enjoy!

Meditations

Surely there are as many ways of encountering Jesus Christ as there are ways of falling in love (11).

Faith is neither wistfulness nor wishful thinking, nor hoping for the best. Faith is a peculiar knowing which arises from our Lord’s having met us and seized us and put his mark upon us (19).

Without the Spirit we merely “say prayers”; with the Spirit we pray. Without the Spirit we move mechanically through religious exercises; with the Spirit we worship. Without the Spirit a congregation knows only middle-class manners. With the Spirit it is bathed in love. Without the Spirit there is a weekly religious address; with the Spirit there is a witness manifestly inflamed and empowered (60).

Sin is telling God to “buzz off”. The telling may be explicit and fully conscious. But most often it is implicit and disguised. In any case the bottom line is the same. God is told to get lost (62).

Our grip on God, however weak in itself, will ever be strengthened. The one who wearies not seizes us so as never to let us go (73).

Speaking even the truth will edify only as we speak it in love. Our truth-telling must intend the well-being of another (80).

Temptation sticks and penetrates precisely when pleasure is waning and joy has not yet taken hold. Joy, life-contentment, sheds temptation (86).

Prayers

Free us from our possessions, lest we become possessed by them as surely as evil spirits possessed others (29).

Illuminate your kingdom so brightly for us, we ask, that repentance will appear the only sensible course for us to follow (69).

Just as your kingly nearness formed and informed the ministry of our Lord in his days upon earth, so may your kingdom loom so large before us, so attractive, so necessary that we shall gladly leave our lesser loves and loyalties to become citizens of a new city and dwellers in a promised land (72).

—Victor A. Shepherd, Ponder and Pray: Seven Weeks of Meditations and Prayers for Personal Enrichment During Any Season of the Year (Mississauga, ON: Light and Life Press, 1993).