Luke 14:1-24; Isaiah 55:1-8

The future is given to those who are experienced in groaning. The future is denied to those who have been cynical and calloused and self-deceiving enough to rejoice in the present ordering and are unable to grieve about the ruin toward which the royal community is headed.... The staggering works of Jesus - feeding, healing, casting out, forgiving - happened not to those who held to the old order but to those who yearned because the old order had failed them or squeezed them out. - Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

Luke 13:18-35

When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves. - Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book

Luke 13:1-17

There is mystery in God. If God could be fit into our puny human minds, or limited to our experience of him, or contained in our theological description of his ways, he would be too small a God to worship. - R. Paul Stevens and Michael Green, Living the Story: Biblical Spirituality for Everyday Christians

Luke 12:35-56

What about those who have strayed from God's path, those whose eyes have veered in idolatrous directions? Are such people simply to die of spiritual thirst in the desert? No, the opposite is true. God uses the wilderness to win many back when they stray. With God, streams of living water appear in the desert. - Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence

Luke 12:13-34

Fear is not a Christian habit of mind. - Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things

Luke 12:1-12

The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work that you most need to do and the world most needs to have done.... Thus, the place God calls you is the place your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. - Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

Luke 11:33-54

“We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on...that’s who we really are.” - J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Luke 11:14-32

The church has always been under call to live differently…. You are not just out there. You have been addressed, claimed, named, commissioned. You have been addressed in your baptism. Every time you take communion, you are called to the extravagant goodness of God, called to put your life down in the power and wonder of the creator God, called to remember that you are God’s, that you belong to him and exist for him. - Walter Brueggemann, A Way Other Than Our Own

Luke 11:1-13

Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need; prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer. Our wants are for the sake of our coming into communion with God, our eternal need. - George MacDonald, "The Words of Jesus on Prayer," in Unspoken Sermons

Luke 10:38-42

Stillness before God transforms us into unhurried love. It is in the stillness of silent prayer that God turns over the soil of our hearts, revealing our desires to us and the source of their fullest satisfaction. - Tyler Staton, Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools