We were sharing things from the worship service when we were so rudely interrupted by our churning stomach. So, picking up where we dropped off, we wanted to share some of the quotes the pastor included in his message:

an old Dutch Proverb: “Unknown makes unloved.” That one seemed to us to be rather profound. It immediately made me think of the psychotherapy work we have been doing to process my mother’s death. A key insight that has come out of that has been that my mother died without ever knowing the many of me, so we (especially Plex) feel unloved by her.

Andy Rooney: “A great many people do not have the right to their own opinions because they don’t know what they are talking about.”

Henri Nouwen: “I often wonder if my knowledge about God has not become my greatest stumbling block to my knowledge of God.” To this comment the pastor made the point that it really doesn’t matter how much knowledge we have about God – some of us have more than others – and we often debate issues about God that we really know little or nothing about. But the promise  is that, regardless of how much we know about God, every one of us can know Him, intimately and securely.

John Milton: “When we speak of knowing God, it must be understood with reference to man’s limited powers of comprehension. God, as He really is, is far beyond man’s imagination, let alone his understanding. God has revealed only so much of Himself as our minds can conceive and the weakness of our nature can bear.”

Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf from birth, wrote: “Knowledge is love and light and vision”

the pastor also made this point: “We all are “one of a kind” and God knows each of us as if we were the only one on earth.”

Hudson Taylor: “Oh that Christ may be so known by us as a ‘living, bright reality’ that our one desire, our one absorbing heart-passion, may be that we personally gain Christ.”

The final segment of the sermon focused on the joy of being known

Francis Schaeffer (one of my favorite writers and the man who started L’Abri):  “Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose – to be in relationship with God, who is there. Man forgets his purpose and thus he forgets who he is and what life means.”

The pastor follows that quote with these observations:

-We all have the tendency to forget who we are in God’s eyes. We forget that He knows us like no one else does, and He still loves us. We forget that we have the capacity to be all that we can be as His marvelous creatures. After all, God created us in His “own image” different from all other creatures. We forget that we have all the resources necessary to live life to the fullest and in keeping with God’s purpose and plan.

To you we say thank you for joining in our afterglow. We hope these snippets of our Sabbath worship have been meaningful to you, too.