Rosaria Champagne Butterfield Quotes

When the Lord entered my world, I experienced that gospel-ignited "expulsive power of a new affection" (to quote the title of Thomas Chalmers's famous sermon). That new affection was not heterosexuality, but Jesus, my Jesus, my friend and Savior. I was not converted out of homosexuality. I was converted out of unbelief.

The journey out of lesbianism had many dimensions, and the Lord was gracious in leading me a small step, and then burning the bridge I crossed to keep me safely closer to him. From the first night, there was no going back. Slowly

Temptation yielded to is lust deified (My Utmost for His Highest, September 17 entry). Temptation comes in many forms, but it is always personal, uncannily tailor-made for our individual moral weakness, and it takes aim at God's character, seeking to ransack our faith.

Worship is the launching pad for life.

Here was the shattering of the second wall: I had read the Bible many times through, and I saw for myself that it had a holy Author; I saw for myself that it was a canonized collection of sixty-six books with a unified biblical revelation. I heard for myself that when the words "this is mine" came out of my mouth in congregational singing, I was attesting to this one, simple truth: that the line of communication that God ordained for his people required this wrestling with Scripture, and that I truly wanted both to hear God's voice breathed in my life, and I wanted God to hear my pleas. The fog burned away. The whole Bible, each jot and tittle, was my open highway to a holy God.

Has always seemed to me that without the proper response to failure, we don't grow, we only age.

The university classroom is neither a shopping mall whose existence depends on disseminating the latest, sexiest critical approach, nor a museum, where ideas are valued because of tradition alone and where you can look but never touch. Instead, the classroom is a place of joy fueled by the quest for excellence and the productive fear generated by the awesomeness of our ignorance and our inability to transform human reason into wisdom on its own terms, when it is unhinged from a living God.

The Lost Tools of Learning").

God is calling us to so greatly love others that we do not desire for them anything that might separate them from God. Holy sexuality is a love so big that it treasures the purity of another, exonerating that person's status as an image bearer or a daughter or son of the King, and not dehumanizing him or her through manipulating lust.

A million ways to shatter the image of God, and one way to restore it.

Whether the pain you face now is the consequence of your sin or the sin of others, in God's providence and in saving faith, Romans 8:28 still reigns: "God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." It is not the absence of sin that makes you a believer. It is the presence of Christ in the midst of your struggle that commends the believer and sets you apart in the world.

If the Lord calls us to be a bridge, we have to learn to bear in his strength the weight. And it hurts. And it's good. And the Lord equips.

I believe that there is no greater enemy to vital life-breathing faith than insisting on cultural sameness. When fear rules your theology, God is nowhere to be found in your paradigm, no matter how many Bible verses you tack onto it. I think that as parents we would be more effective in our parenting if we leveled with our children, if we told them that some of our dearly held rules are not morally grounded but are made for our convenience. I know that many times when I insist that my children turn off the video, my "rules" are the result of my own noise-sensitivity, not some moral abhorrence about Pixar or Disney. I never know how to respond to the women who tell me that they need to be in a church made of people with whom they can identify, people who are like them.

The Christian life makes no room for independent agents, onlookers, renters. We who are washed in the blood of Christ are stakeholders.

Sexuality is more a symptom of your life's condition than a cause, more a consequence than an origin.

If this was a book written by men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit, then its admonitions about sin were not applied cultural phobia.

The more God-centered our worship practices, the more mercy-centered our life.

God wants us to hear his voice through the Word of God, the discernment of the Holy Spirit, and the comfort of our redeemed life through the blood of Christ. For example, musical pitch is black and white. It is accurate, sharp, or flat. It cannot be both accurate and flat. It is exclusive in its claims. While a chorus can sing in harmony or cacophony (dissonance), a solo voice can only be accurate, sharp, or flat. So too is Scripture.

Hospitality is not a house inspection, it's friendship.

It is an act of homophobia to believe that people in the LGBT community are either too sinful to respond to God's call on their life, or to believe that people in the LGBT community have a fixed nature that will never, according to the blustering, unfounded, and uncharitable declarations of secular psychology, change by the power of God's command. What does God change? Our heart. That is where it all starts.

John Owen brings helpful detail to our discussion about sin and temptation. According to Owen, temptation is "any thing, state, way, or condition that, upon any account whatsoever, has a force or efficacy to seduce, to draw the mind and heart of a man from its obedience, which God requires of him, into any sin, in any degree of it whatsoever."20 Note that any temptation can lead a person into any sin. It is a force. And forces must be reckoned with, not passively accepted.

The doctrine of Original Sin is the most democratizing idea in all of human history.

Before we come to Christ, we must come to ourselves.

We have decided that we are not inconvenienced by inconvenience. The needs of children come up unexpectedly. We are sure that the Good Samaritan had other plans that fateful day.

We have, by God's grace, been given another day to serve and love, laugh and learn, pray and ponder. Spring is ready to burst into the open air, and we are ready to embrace it.

The Bible makes it clear that reason is not the front door of faith. It takes spiritual eyes to discern spiritual matters. But how do we develop spiritual eyes unless Christians engage the culture with those questions and paradigms of mindfulness out of which spiritual logic flows?

Russell Moore puts it best: "None of us likes to think we were adopted. We assume we're natural-born children, with a right to all of this grace, to all of this glory."1 But

The Prodigal Son didn't repent of his sin because he got tired of living like and with the pigs. He repented because God gave him eyes to see.

Christian fruit is known by its root (Christ), not by the contribution it makes to a better world.

When we are too functional, we forget the point of hospitality in the home: fellowship, not entertainment. Don't let pride stop you from opening your home. Ignore the cat hair on the couch (or in the mac and cheese). It likely won't kill anyone as decisively as loneliness will. Add as much water to the pot to stretch the soup. If you run out of food, make pancakes, and put the kids in charge of making that meal. See how much fun that is.

And know that someone is spared from another humiliating fall into internet pornography because he is instead walking with you and your kids and dogs, as you share the Lord's Day, one model of how the Lord gives you daily grace and a way of escape. Know that someone is spared the fear and darkness of depression because she is needed at your house, always on the Lord's Day, the day she is never alone, but instead safely in community, where her place at the table is needed and necessary and relied upon. Know that someone is drawn into Christ's love because the Bible reading and psalm singing that come at the close of the meal include everyone, and that it reminds us that no one is scapegoated in this Christ-bearing community. Know that host and guest are equally precious and fragile, and that you will play both roles throughout the course of this life. The doors here open wide. They must.

Sin is not a mistake. A mistake is taking the wrong exit on the highway. A sin is treason against a Holy God. A mistake is a logical misstep. Sin lurks in our heart and grabs us by the throat to do its bidding. Remember what God said to Cain about his sin? It's true for us too. In the fourth chapter of Genesis, God warns Cain like this: 'Sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it' (Gen. 4:6). In accepting misrepresentations of the gospel that render sin anything less than this, you will never learn of the fruit of repentance.

I think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Christ if people stopped lying about what we need, what we fear, where we fail, and how we sin.

Slowly, but steadily, my feelings did start to change- feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't. I -like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian -felt very comfortable, very at home in mu body in my lesbianism. One doesn't repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of my sin. I don't mean different incidents or examples of the same sin, but different facets of sin -how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness. I have walked this journey with help. There is no other way to do it I still walk this journey with help.

Is God giving you victory this day, if not this whole day, how about this very minute?

The work of a believer is responsive, not initiative. We respond to God's love because we must. Like Peter, when called to do the impossible, we do not look to our limitations, but we ponder this: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life" (John 6:68). Owen says this: "Mortification of any sin must be by a supply of grace. Of ourselves, we cannot do it."31 The gospel does not take us halfway there. God takes us all the way home. But if what you seek is grace apart from Christ's blood, you will never get home.

My friends knew that I was reading the Bible. First, the dean of the chapel took me out to lunch and shared his belief that the Old Testament was dispensable and, with it, any prohibition about sexuality and immorality. But I had been reading and studying the three different narratives of the Old Testament, and it seemed to me that you couldn't dispense with it in its entirety without violating a foundational rule about canonicity: no creating canons within canons. In fact, I had just gone over this in my graduate seminar in Queer Theory and it made me wonder if the chapel dean ought not sit in on my class. His position seemed like a hermeneutic of convenience, tailoring the text to fit my experience, and not a hermeneutic of integrity, where the text gets the chance to fulfill its internal mission.

[W]hen you make your mistakes in public you will learn that they are mistakes and in being corrected you will grow. It also reminded me that being wrong and responding to correction with resilience was a higher virtue than covering up your mistakes so your students and the watching world assumed that success meant never being wrong. Working from your strengths and cultivating resilience in all matters of life have always been guiding principles for me.

We see this as an investment in community. Anything worth doing will take time and cost you something. We noticed, as our attention focused more on families and children, that many people in our community protect themselves from inconvenience as though inconvenience is deadly. We have decided that we are not inconvenienced by inconvenience.

I felt and feel no solidarity with people who think their salvation makes them more worthy than others.

It is the popular misconception of marriage as a mere social convention or quaint tradition invented by the brain of man which has led to the denigrating of this holy relation, the multiplication of unspeakable immorality, the common unrest between husbands and wives, and the gradual disintegration of society and civilization. For if marriage exists merely by human authority then men and women may do with it or conduct themselves in it as they please. They may redefine it, or they may abandon it altogether. But if marriage is a divine institution, then it is governed by a higher authority. It becomes, then, a matter of obedience, and the conduct of husbands and wives within marriage is a conduct for which they must give their account to God. The original institution of marriage is therefore basic to our understanding of marriage, our estimation of marriage, and our right behavior in marriage.

It is not the absence of sin that makes you a believer.

Are we to treat the visibly saved with greater honor than all of humanity, made as it is in God's image?

Many people in our community protect themselves from inconvenience as though inconvenience is deadly. We have decided that we are not inconvenienced by inconvenience. The needs of children come up unexpectedly. We are sure that the Good Samaritan had other plans that fateful day. Our plans are not sacred (p. 126).

May my words give grace to those who hear, my words are not pep talks. I hope, indeed, that my words are not even my own, but Christ's working through me.

We violate those we love when we try to supplant Christ by trying to fill his role, or by removing ourselves from this lavish outpouring of love by refusing to take God's point of view on the matter of sin - its nature, origin, and consequences. Christ loves his people best. We cannot love as he did. We cannot suffer as he did. We cannot redeem our lives, our worlds, or our relationships.

When we confess a sin, we are not asking that God or others see it from our point of view, from the vantage point of our intentions or our motives. Instead, we use God's point of view. We submit to the righteous hand of God. We consent that the Bible is true and that the law of God condemns us. And this either drives us into mad depression or into the open arms of our Savior, Jesus Christ. The implications are far-reaching. Confession of sin is meant to drive us to Christ, for our good and for his glory.

At the time that I was struggling with these questions, I was reading and teaching from Is There a Meaning in this Text?

We may never know the treacherous journey people have taken to land in the pew next to us.

Healing comes through God's work, and God deals differently with us when we deal differently with him.

is, in the words of The Westminster Shorter Catechism, "any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God" (Q. 14).6 Sin is mutiny, either by its omission ("want of conformity to") or its commission ("transgression of the law of God").

Pride puffs one up with a false sense of independence. Proud people always feel that they can live independently from God and from other people. Proud people feel entitled to do what they want when they want to.

There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted.

I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different. At this time, though, obeying in faith, to me, felt like throwing myself off a cliff. Faith that endures is heroic, not sentimental. And

A sin is treason against a Holy God. A mistake is a logical misstep. Sin lurks in our heart and grabs us by the throat to do its bidding.

God is not crushing the dreams of parenthood when he deals the card of infertility. God is asking you to crush the idolatry of pregnancy, to be sure. And, he is saying: Dream My dreams, not yours!

Worship is our rehearsal for how to live today and how to glorify God in heaven. It is not merely a Sunday morning exercise meant to make us feel good.

Just like a dancer's body finds its points and an equestrian incorporates her body weight into the movement of the horse, the Christian learns how to melt her will into God's.

They said I was splitting hairs and losing my objectivity. I reminded them that I was a postmodernist who didn't believe in objectivity.

A family that never embraces life's risks never really lives.

Repentance is the threshold to God. When heat meets ice, the solid substance liquefies completely. Repentance liquefies the will of the flesh. Repentance is our daily fruit, our hourly washing, our minute- by-minute wakeup call, our reminder of God's creation, Jesus' blood, and the Holy Spirit's comfort. Repentance is the only no-shame solution to a renewed Christian conscience because it proves the obvious: that God was right all along. To the sexual sinner, repentance feels like death - because it is. The "you" who once was is no longer, even if your old feelings remain.

Christians who indulge the habit of admitting rather than confessing sin over time tend not to see their sin as sin at all. It just seems like life. At first, they may hate the sin. They may truly wish to be free of it. These brothers and sisters may be forgetting or not knowing that even in our battle with sin God gives us an opportunity to glorify him. Indeed, I believe that the job of a Christian is to glorify God in all situations, including in the repentance of sin.

The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education.

Union with Christ is part of the saints' armor.

Christ redeems. Even our struggles, our failures, and our suffering are redemptive in Christ. But there is blood involved. There is a cutting off and a cutting away that redemption demands. Stepping into God's story means abandoning a deeply held desire to make meaning of our own lives on our own terms based on the preciousness of our own feelings. We leave and we cleave. Or we never really understand what it means that Christ died in our place.

Mercy ministry always comes down to this: you can help, but only Jesus can heal.

We are only righteous in Christ and in him alone. But that's a hard pill to swallow, especially if you give yourself kudos for good choices.