He looks today,
as He has ever looked, not for crowds drifting aimlessly in His track,
but for individual men and women whose undying allegiance will spring from
their having recognized that He wants those who are prepared to follow
the path of self-renunciation which He trod before them.
... H.
A. Evan Hopkin
Whence comes this
idea that if what we are doing is fun, it can't be God's will? The God
who made giraffes, a baby's fingernails, a puppy's tail, a crooknecked
squash, the bobwhite's call, and a young girl's giggle, has a sense of
humor. Make no mistake about that.
... Catherine
Marshall
We can have no
power from Christ unless we live in a persuasion that we have none of our
own.
... John
Owen
If our faith is
not relevant to our daily life in the world and in the parish, then it
is no use; and if we cannot be Christians in our work, in the neighborhood,
in our political decisions, then we had better stop being Christians. A
piety reserved for Sundays is no message for this age.
... Douglas
Rhymes
It seems to be
very hard and -- if that would do any good -- might be a just matter of
complaint, that we are fallen into so profane and skeptical an age, which
takes a pleasure and a pride in unraveling almost all the received principles
both of religion and reason, so that we are put many times to prove those
things which can hardly be made plainer than they are of themselves.
... John
Tillotson
Who is it that
has helped you most? Has it not been those who believed in you? Perhaps
there may be few such left. The light of expectation may have died out
of the most friendly and hopeful eyes; and you yourself may have lost heart.
Ah! but there is still One whose faith in you has never wavered. And how
wonderful it is that that one should be Jesus Christ!... It was a wonderful
dream God dreamed, Christ says, when He created you; it was a stately being
that was in His mind when you were fashioned; and I can make you all He
meant that you should be.
... A.
J. Gossip, The Galilean Accent
Above all, desire
to please Christ; dread his disapproval above everything else.
... Rowland
Croucher, Sunrise Sunset
He may effect us
directly by His Spirit, with the force of a thunderbolt, or He may choose
to woo us gently by stirring up our conscience. But, in addition, God affects
us by determining that in the universe certain causes shall bring about
certain effects. Cause and effect is, therefore, the operation of God through
normal channels rather than through special channels. We have our normal
way of acting when we drive a car. We can more or less put it in "automatic
pilot" while we carry on a conversation, but when an emergency arises,
we take conscious personal control. I have a hunch that God has something
for which this automatic pilot will serve as an illustration. That is,
His routine way of operating is cause and effect, and He is in control
of it, so that when cause and effect affects us, then God is affecting
us. That is what the Apostle Paul means in Galatians when he says, "Do
not kid yourself -- God is not blind. What you do, you will get paid for."
The causes which we have set in operation by our own personal choices will
inevitably bring about certain results. But God is involved because God
makes cause and effect to work. [Continued tomorrow]
... Kenneth
L. Pike, With Heart and Mind
But since cause
and effect is under the personal control of God, He can introduce into
the situation other causes than the ones which we ourselves can control.
When in faith we come to God for cleansing from the mess we have made of
things, and when we ask for power to reverse causes we have set in motion,
God sends in other causes by His Holy Spirit. It may be by direct intervention,
or by a combination of circumstances which He controls. We can, therefore,
be delivered from the wrath to come, because God will add other causes
than those that we have initiated.
... Kenneth
L. Pike, With Heart and Mind
Not pleading with
the Father, but expressing the Father's good pleasure is the key-note of
true intercession. Forgiveness is God's idea, God's desire; and it is He
who appoints both the Judge and the Counsel for the Defense. It was He
who inaugurated the priestly work, that men might receive His cleansing
and turn to the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world. God
has provided for himself a Lamb. It is He who sends His Son to be our Elder
Brother, and to incorporate us as adopted sons into the circle of His Fatherly
love. So then it is the voice of His beloved Son which is most clearly
heard by the Father in heaven. In that voice of intercession, all the voices
of intercession are contained and heard. The Son is talking to the Father
about us, and what He says is not Please but Yes.
... David
Head, Shout for Joy
He had no qualms;
"for", said he, "when I fail in my duty, I readily acknowledge it, saying,
'I am used to do so; I shall never do otherwise if I am left to myself'.
If I fail not, then I give God thanks, acknowledging that the strength
comes from Him."
... Brother
Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence
of God
What I am concerned
with here is not to write a new life of Jesus, but to set down my witness
to the continued shocks which his words and deeds gave me as I approached
the Gospels uninsulated by the familiar cover of beautiful language. The
figure who emerged is quite unlike the Jesus of conventional piety, and
even more unlike that imagined hero whom members of various causes claim
as their champion. What we are so often confronted with today is a "processed"
Jesus. Every element that we feel is not consonant with our "image" of
him is removed, and the result is more insipid and unsatisfying than the
worst of processed food.
... J.
B. Phillips, Ring of Truth
You must not lose
confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence
in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would
be on shifting sand.
... Francis
Schaeffer
[With thanks to Bill
Blake]
If I am afraid
to speak the truth lest I lose affection, or lest the one concerned should
say, "You do not understand", or because I fear to lose my reputation for
kindness; if I put my own good name before the other's highest good, then
I know nothing of Calvary love. If I am content to heal a hurt slightly,
saying peace, peace, where there is no peace; if I forget the poignant
words, "Let love be without dissimulation" and blunt the edge of truth,
speaking not right things but smooth things, then I know nothing of Calvary
love.
... Amy
Carmichael
There are, I should
say, four elements in a redemptive community. It is personal, with things
happening between people as well as to and in them individually; it is
compassionate, always eager to help, observant but non judgmental toward
others, breathing out hope and concern; it is creative, with imagination
about each one in the group and its work as a whole, watching for authentic
new vision coming from any of them; and it is expectant, always seeking
to offer to God open and believing hearts and minds through which He can
work out His will, either in the sometimes startling miracles He gives
or in steady purpose through long stretches where there is no special "opening".
It may fairly be said that unless one enmeshes himself in this "redemptive
fellowship" of the church, he lessens his chances of steady growth and
effectiveness, in his Christian life and experience.
... Samuel
M. Shoemaker, The Experiment
of Faith
If the heart is
devoted to the mirage of the world, to the creature instead of the Creator,
the disciple is lost... However urgently Jesus may call us, His call fails
to find access to our hearts. Our hearts are closed, for they have already
been given to another.
... Dietrich
Bonhoeffer
What we need, and
what is given us, is not how to educate ourselves for this life; we have
abundant natural gifts for human society, and for the advantage which it
secures: but our great want is how to demean ourselves... toward our Maker,
and how to gain reliable information on this supreme necessity.
... John
Henry Cardinal Newman
In judging others
a man laboureth in vain; he often erreth, and easily falleth into sin;
but in judging and examining himself he always laboureth to good purpose.
... Thomas
à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ
If I lay waste and wither up with doubt
The blessed fields of heaven where once my
Faith possessed itself serenely safe from death;
If I deny things past finding out;
Or if I orphan my own soul from One
That seemed a Father, and make void the place
Within me where He dwelt in Power and Grace,
What do I gain by what I have undone?
... William Dean Howells
The world would
use us just as it did the martyrs, if we loved God as they did.
... Bp.
Thomas Wilson
True progress is
not found in breaking away from the old ways, but in abiding in the teaching
of Christ and His Spirit in the Church. There is an apparent contradiction
here, for how can we abide, and yet advance? It is a paradox, like much
else in scripture; but Christian experience proves it true. Those make
the best progress in religion who hold fast by the faith once for all delivered
to the saints, and not those who drift away from their moorings, rudderless
upon a sea of doubt.
... Henry
Barclay Swete
In arriving at
a decision in a question of doubt, the apostles in the Acts were guided
solely by their sense of the Spirit behind the action, not by any speculations
as to consequences which might ensue. And so they found the truth. Gradually
the results of the action manifested themselves, and, seeing them, they
perceived what they had really done, and learnt the meaning of the truth
revealed in the action. But if, from fear of the consequences, they had
checked or forbidden the action, they would have lost this revelation.
They would have missed the way to truth.
... Roland
Allen, Pentecost and the World
... Also see comments
on this book in Bookworms
He is no fool who
gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
... Jim
Elliot, missionary, martyr
The evil of riches,
then, for institutions, for nations, for individuals, is that those who
possess or seek to possess almost invariably overvalue possessions and
so cease to live creatively. They stop loving God with all the heart and
all the soul and all the strength and all the mind. They stop loving their
neighbors, too. When you find a person of means who is not either a self-centered
bore or a low person, you may know that God has worked a miracle.
... Bernard
Iddings Bell, God is Not Dead
Why all this strife
and zeal about opinions? Death and life go on their own way, carry on their
own work, and stay for no opinions... What a delusion it is therefore to
grow gray-headed in balancing ancient and modern opinions; to waste the
precious uncertain fire of life in critical zeal and verbal animosities;
when nothing but the kindling of our working will into a faith that overcometh
the world, into a steadfast hope, and ever-burning love and desire of the
divine life, can hinder us from falling into eternal death.
... William
Law, The Way to Divine Knowledge
Few have defined
what free will is, although it repeatedly occurs in the writings of all.
Origen seems to have put forward a definition generally agreed upon among
ecclesiastical writers when he said that it is a faculty of the reason
to distinguish between good and evil, a faculty of the will to choose one
or the other. Augustine does not disagree with this when he teaches that
it is a faculty of the reason and the will to choose good with the assistance
of grace; evil, when grace is absent.
... John
Calvin, The Institutes of the
Christian Religion
Words are merely
carriers of the secret, supernatural communications, the light and call
of God. That is why spiritual books bear such different meanings for different
types and qualities of soul, why each time we read them they give us something
fresh, as we can bear it.
... Evelyn
Underhill, Light of Christ
Many ordinary treasures
may be denied the man who has God, or if he is allowed to have them, the
enjoyment of them will be so tempered that they will never be necessary
to his happiness. Or if he must see them go, one after one, he will scarcely
feel a sense of loss.
... A.
W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
None but the Lord
himself can afford us any help from the awful workings of unbelief, doubtings,
carnal fears, murmurings. Thank God one day we will be done forever with
"unbelief."
... Arthur
W. Pink
[With thanks to Bill
Blake]
God sometimes marvelously
raiseth the souls of his saints with some close and near approaches unto
them -- gives them a sense of His eternal love, a taste of the embraces
of His Son and the inhabitation of the Spirit, without the least intervening
disturbance; and then this is their assurance. But this life is not a season
to be always taking wages in; our work is not yet done; we are not always
to abide in this mount; we must down again into the battle -- fight again,
cry again, complain again. Shall the soul be thought now to have lost its
assurance? Not at all. It had before assurance with joy, triumph, and exultation;
it hath it now, or may have, with wrestling, cries, tears, and supplications.
And a man's assurance may be as good, as true, when he lies on the earth
with a sense of sin, as when he is carried up to the third heaven with
a sense of love and foretaste of glory.
... John
Owen
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2008, by Robert McAnally Adams,