It’s a good thing I stumbled across that beautiful big purse at Macy’s this past fall, because when you throw a few seminary courses into your already busy life, you’re throwing a few books into your purse. Running to and fro this past semester, I’ve stuffed a good many books into my purse for reading in airports, cafes, car rides, and parking lots. In between my lipstick, cellphone, and sunglasses slips Augustine’s Confessions and Hagglund’s History of Theology and Van Til’s Defense of the Faith. Preferably not all at the same time. 
It’s been busy, but it’s been good. It is too easy to stop reading. To get caught up in the busy activities of life and neglect the strengthening of our minds. To be distracted by details and forget to feed our souls. But the Lord uses His people to encourage His people. And when we take the time to quietly listen, we are strengthened.
Here are a few of my favorite strengthening quotes from the books I’ve been studying:
“Our Life himself came down into this world and took away our death.” ~Augustine, Confessions p. 82
“Why do you mean so much to me? Help me find words to explain. Why do I mean so much to you, that you should command me to love you? And if I fail to love you, you are angry and threaten me with great sorrow, as if not to love you were not sorrow enough in itself. Have pity on me and help me, O Lord my God. Tell me why you mean so much to me. Whisper in my heart, I am here to save you. Speak so that I may hear your words. My heart has ears ready to listen to you, Lord. Open them wide and whisper in my heart, I am here to save you. I shall hear your voice and make haste to clasp you to myself.” ~Augustine, Confessions, p. 24
“Never was a natural man engaged earnestly to seek his salvation: never were any such brought to cry after wisdom, and lift up their voice for understanding, and to wrestle with God in prayer for mercy; and never was one humbled, and brought to the foot of God, from anything that ever he heard or imagined of his own unworthiness and deservings of God’s displeasure; nor was ever one induced to fly for refuge unto Christ, while his heart remained unaffected.” ~Edwards, Religious Affections, p. 146
“For, quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves; indeed, our very being is nothing but subsistence in the one God. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself.” ~Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 37
“There is nothing less in accord with God’s nature than for him to cast off the government of the universe and abandon it to fortune.” ~Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 48
“Light may seem at times to be an impertinent intruder, but it is always beneficial in the end.” ~J.G. Machen, Christianity & Liberalism, p. 1
“I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else.” ~Cornelius Van Til, Why I Believe in God
“The Bible is thought of as authoritative on everything of which it speaks. Moreover, it speaks of everything. We do not mean that it speaks of football games, of atoms, etc., directly, but we do mean that it speaks of everything either directly or by implication. It tells us not only of the Christ and his work, but it also tells us who God is and where the universe about us has come from. It tells us about theism as well as about Christianity. It gives us a philosophy of history as well as history. Moreover, the information on these subjects is woven into an inextricable whole. It is only if you reject the Bible as the word of God that you can separate the so-called religious and moral instructions of the Bible from what it says, e.g., about the physical universe.” ~ Van Til, Christian Apologetics
“[M]an’s actions have their place… But they are not ultimately determinative; they are subordinately and derivatively important. Hence the idea of human autonomy can find no place in the truly Christian system any more than can the idea of chance. The human being is analogical rather than original in all the aspects of its activity. And as such its activity is truly significant.” ~Van Til, Defense of the Faith
“O, mercy for evermore, that there should be such a one as Christ Jesus – so boundless, so bottomless, so incomparable in infinite excellency and sweetness, and yet so few to take him! O, you poor dry and dead souls, why will you not come here with your vessels and your empty souls to this huge well of life and fill all your vessels? O, that Christ should be so large in sweetness and worth and we so narrow and void of happiness, and yet men will not take him! They lose their love miserably who will not bestow it upon this lovely One.”
