When Paul speaks
[II
Cor. 3] of our being ministers of the New Testament, he does not refer
to books most of which were not yet written, but to the gospel, which he
found in the Scripture he possessed. The Jews could only see "Old Testament"
in Moses and the prophets, because they were blind. To the spiritual all
Scripture is gospel, or New Testament (the Law being the schoolmaster,
bringing us to Christ), but to the natural and self righteous, as we ought
to know from experience and observation, all Scripture (gospels and epistles
included) is Old Testament, or Covenant of Works.
... Adolph
Saphir, Christ and Israel
I am persuaded
that love and humility are the highest attainments in the school of Christ
and the brightest evidences that he is indeed our Master.
... John
Newton
[With thanks to Bill
Blake]
The progress of
mankind has always depended upon those who, seemingly isolated and powerless
in their own day, have seen their vision and remained true to it. In the
darkening corridors of time, they preserved integral their vision of the
daylight at the end. This is a matter not of calculation but of faith.
Our work may be small and its results invisible to us. But we may rest
assured it will come to fruition in God's good time.
... John
Ferguson, The Enthronement of
Love
May the fiery and
sweet strength of Thy love, I pray Thee, O my Lord, absorb my soul, and
make all things under heaven as nothing unto me, that for the love of Thy
love I may die, as Thou didst deign to die for love of mine. Amen.
... St.
Francis of Assisi
The Gospel is not
presented to mankind as an argument about religious principles. Nor is
it offered as a philosophy of life. Christianity is a witness to certain
facts -- to events that have happened, to hopes that have been fulfilled,
to realities that have been experienced, to a Person who has lived and
died and been raised from the dead to reign for ever.
... Massey
H. Shepherd, Jr., Far and Near
God is our true
Friend, who always gives us the counsel and comfort we need. Our danger
lies in resisting Him; so it is essential that we acquire the habit of
hearkening to His voice, or keeping silence within, and listening so as
to lose nothing of what He says to us. We know well enough how to keep
outward silence, and to hush our spoken words, but we know little of interior
silence. It consists in hushing our idle, restless, wandering imagination,
in quieting the promptings of our worldly minds, and in suppressing the
crowd of unprofitable thoughts which excite and disturb the soul.
... François
Fénelon
God has called
us to shine, just as much as Daniel was sent into Babylon to shine. Let
no one say that he cannot shine because he has not so much influence as
some others may have. What God wants you to do is to use the influence
you have. Daniel probably did not have much influence down in Babylon at
first, but God soon gave him more because he was faithful and used what
he had.
... Dwight
L. Moody
PSALM 126The Lord can clear the darkest skies
Can give us day for night.
Make drops of sacred sorrow rise
To rivers of delight.
... Isaac Watts, Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs
The labor of self-love
is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has
not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As along as you set
yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal, how can you hope
to find inward peace?
... A.
W. Tozer
God is especially
present in the hearts of His people, by His Holy Spirit; and indeed the
hearts of holy men are temples in the truth of things, and in type and
shadow they are heaven itself. For God reigns in the hearts of His servants;
there is His Kingdom. The power of grace hath subdued all His enemies;
there is His power. They serve Him night and day, and give Him thanks and
praise; that is His glory. This is the religion and worship of God in the
temple. [Continued tomorrow]
...Jeremy
Taylor, Holy Living
The temple itself
is the heart of man, Christ is the high priest, who from thence sends up
the incense of prayers, and joins them to His own intercession and presents
all together to His Father; and the Holy Ghost by His dwelling there hath
also consecrated it into a temple; and God dwells in our hearts by faith,
and Christ by His Spirit, and the spirit by His purities: so that we are
also cabinets of the mysterious Trinity, and what is this short of heaven
itself, but as infancy is short of manhood?... The same state of life it
is, but not the same age. It is heaven in a looking glass, dark but yet
true, representing the beauties of the soul, and the grace of God, and
the images of His eternal glory, by the reality of a special presence.
...Jeremy
Taylor, Holy Living
If God reveal anything
to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as ever
you were to receive any truth by my ministry: for I am verily persuaded,
the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word.
... John
Robinson to the "Mayflower" emigrants
When night comes, list thy deeds; make plain the way
'Twixt heaven and thee; block it not with delays;
But perfect all before thou sleep'st: then say:
There's one sun more strung on my Bead of days.
What's good, score up for joy; the bad, well scanned.
Wash off with tears, and get thy Master's hand.
... Henry Vaughan
It was not dogma
that moved the world, but life. Frequently, when rival parties and rival
nations fought with one another as to which of two opposed dogmas was the
truth, they had been arrayed against one another by more deep-seated and
vital causes, and merely inscribed at the last the dogmas on their standards
or chose them as watchwords or symbols. We are tired of those elaborate
discussions of the fine, wire-drawn, subtle distinctions between sects,
and those elaborate discussions of the principles involved in heresies,
and we desire to see the real differences in life and conduct receive more
attention.
... W.
M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven
Churches
I don’t ask God to bless what I do. I pray He will help me to do what He blesses.
... Bob Pierce, founder and president, World Vision
By the quality
of our inner lives I do not mean something characterized by ferocious intensity
and strain. I mean rather such a humble and genial devotedness as we find
in the most loving of the saints. I mean the quality which makes contagious
Christians, makes people catch the love of God from you.
... Evelyn
Underhill, Concerning the Inner
Life
Prayer is not so
much the means whereby God's will is bent to man's desires, as it is that
whereby man's will is bent to God's desires. The real end of prayer is
not so much to get this or that single desire granted, as to put human
life into full and joyful conformity with the will of God.
... Charles
Brent
Study universal
holiness of life. Your whole usefulness depends on this, for your sermons
last but an hour or two: your life preaches all week. If Satan can only
make a covetous minister a lover of praise, of pleasure, of good eating,
he has ruined your ministry. Give yourself to prayer, and get your texts,
your thoughts, your words, from God.
... Robert
Murray M'Cheyne
The faith of Abraham is reckoned to him for righteousness.
To call the faith of a man his righteousness is simply to speak
the truth. Was it not righteous in Abraham to obey God? The Jews
placed righteousness in keeping all the particulars of the law of
Moses: Paul says faith in God was counted righteousness before
Moses was born. You may answer, Abraham was unjust in many things,
and by no means a righteous man. True; he was not a righteous man
in any complete sense; his righteousness would never have satisfied
Paul; neither, you may be sure, did it satisfy Abraham; but his
faith was nevertheless righteousness, and if it had not been
counted to him for righteousness, there would have been falsehood
somewhere, for such faith as Abraham's is righteousness. It was
no mere intellectual recognition of the existence of a God, which
is consistent with the deepest atheism; it was that faith which is
one with action: 'He went out, not knowing whither he went.' The
very act of believing in God after such fashion that, when the
time of action comes, the man will obey God, is the highest act,
the deepest, loftiest righteousness of which man is capable, is at
the root of all other righteousness, and the spirit of it will work
till the man is perfect.
... George Macdonald, "Righteousness"
from Unspoken Sermons
With Thee, 'tis
one to behold and to pity. Accordingly, Thy mercy followeth every man so
long as he liveth, whithersoever he goeth, even as Thy glance never quitteth
any.
... Nicolas
of Cusa
Thou hast made
us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their
rest in thee.
... St.
Augustine, Confessions
When we propose
to ignore in a great man's teaching those doctrines which it has in common
with the thought of his age, we seem to be assuming that the thought of
his age was erroneous. When we select for serious consideration those doctrines
which "transcend" the thought of his own age and are "for all time", we
are assuming that the thought of our age is correct: for of course by thoughts
which transcend the great man's age we really mean thoughts that agree
with ours. Thus I value Shakespeare's picture of the transformation in
old Lear more than I value his views about the divine right of kings, because
I agree with Shakespeare that a man can be purified by suffering like Lear,
but do not believe that kings (or any other rulers) have divine right in
the sense required. When the great man's views do not seem to us erroneous
we do not value them the less for having been shared with his contemporaries.
Shakespeare's disdain for treachery and Christ's blessing on the poor were
not alien to the outlook of their respective periods; but no one wishes
to discredit them on that account.
... C.
S. Lewis, The World's Last Night
How did Jesus show
his authority? Not by making vast claims for himself, though such claims
were implicit. His authority seemed to reside in what he was and what he
did rather than in what he specifically claimed to be. Especially in Mark's
Gospel there is an elusive quality about his authority, the mystery of
the hidden Messiah. His authority was at the same time most deeply hidden
and most clearly expressed by his servanthood... The more the Church in
its life shows forth the character of the Servant, the more will its teaching
bear the marks of the authority of the Servant.
... Anthony
T. Hanson, The Church of the Servant
Browning ... tells
us that what won him for Christ was this, that while others tried to soothe
his angry conscience, and kept urging that, really, things were not nearly
so bad as he was making out, Christ looked him in the eyes and told him
bluntly that he was a desperate sinner, worse, much worse, even than he
realized. And that, queerly enough as you might think, the man was not
discomfited but heartened. Here at last, he felt, is one who understands
and knows the facts. And since His desperate diagnosis is so accurate,
may not His optimism also justify itself even in me. Well does He know
what is in human nature, and yet, knowing the worst, He still has confident
hope.
... A.
J. Gossip, The Galilean Accent
If some Christians
that have been complaining of their ministers had said and acted less before
men and had applied themselves with all their might to cry to God for their
ministers -- had, as it were, risen and stormed heaven with their humble,
fervent, and incessant prayers for them -- they would have been much more
in the way of success.
... Jonathan
Edwards
A man may be haunted
with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers
of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of
things that are not yet, but have to be, understood... Doubt must precede
every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we
look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.
... George
Macdonald, "The Voice of Job"
There is no need
for peculiar conditions in order to grow in the spiritual life, for the
pressure of God's Spirit is present everywhere and at all times. Our environment
itself -- our home and our job -- is the medium through which we experience
His moulding action and His besetting love. It is not Christian to try
to get out of our frame, or to separate our outward life from our life
of prayer, since both are the creation of one Charity. The third-rate little
town in the hills, with its limited social contacts and monotonous manual
work, reproves us when we begin to fuss about our opportunities and our
score. And this quality of quietness, ordinariness, simplicity, with which
the saving action of God enters history, endures from the beginning to
the end.
... Evelyn
Underhill, The School of Charity
Remember, a small
light will do a great deal when it is in a very dark place. Put one little
tallow candle in the middle of a large hall, and it will give a good deal
of light.
... D.
L. Moody
Give me a stout
heart to bear my own burdens. Give me a willing heart to bear the burdens
of others. Give me a believing heart to cast all burdens upon Thee, O Lord.
... John
Baillie
Here is the truly
Christian life, here is faith really working by love: when a man applies
himself with joy and love to the works of that freest servitude, in which
he serves others voluntarily and for naught; himself abundantly satisfied
in the fulness and richness of his own faith.
... Martin
Luther
We never become
truly spiritual by sitting down and wishing to become so. You must undertake
something so great that you cannot accomplish it unaided.
... Phillips
Brooks
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2008, by Robert McAnally Adams,
Report problems to curator@cqod.com.