We should not draw
too sharp a distinction between this "barren land" or "wilderness" of our
pilgrimage, and the sweet home that God has prepared. We all know the changes
and chances of this troublous life; but we can also know in this vale of
tears the healthful spirit of His grace. Health for the whole man is God's
gracious purpose for us here and now, often frustrated, often prevented
by unbelief. The life of the saints in light must not emphasize for us
simply the contrast between their state and ours, but rather the beginning
of the gift of eternal life and all its benefits of inner strength and
peace amid earthly vicissitudes. .
... David
Head, Shout for Joy
Every single time
a sacrament is celebrated, God takes action, there and then -- does something,
not on Calvary, but in that church. And what He does is to come to each
soul partaking in the Sacrament and to assure it that He stands to the
best and biggest of His promises and to the fullness of His grace in Christ...
de-universalizes the Scriptures and individualizes them, makes them a personal
promise, couched no longer in general terms but offered to very you and
very me, as individually as if they covered no other but referred to you
and me alone. We may be cold and dead and unresponsive. None the less,
something happens in the Sacrament. For God stands to His side of the Covenant,
whether we stand to ours or not.
... A.
J. Gossip, Experience Worketh
Hope
The Church is an
organism that grows best in an alien society.
... C.
Stacey Woods
To realize that
you are safe and happy standing at God's side, with His love encompassing
you because you are forgiven; too happy to take offense any more; too much
in love with life to want to be made miserable with an unforgiving heart,
and knowing that now every conflict is a chance to learn more of the exceeding
beauty of Love: that is worth living for, and surely worth dying to this
misery-making self for. [Continued tomorrow]
... The Notebooks
of Florence Allshorn
And let us be grateful
beyond words for this: that God will not let us alone until we have learnt
it and stand by His side. He troubles us, He brings His disturbing light
back and back to us, showing us how coarse and heavy the dying self, seeking
her own, is; how horrible it is that any feeling of unforgiveness, accepted
and held on to, towards our brother, drives God from our side; how quickly
we must do all we can to heal the separation, because we are out in the
cold and the dark indeed, if divorced from that Love.
... The Notebooks
of Florence Allshorn
Prayer is the expression
of a good desire. The human heart is full of restless desires, and the
prayers of men consist for the most part of the unsifted petitions which
are urged by their varying passions. To desire what is right, and to desire
it consistently, and passionately, is the first condition of true living;
the desires can be corrected only by truth, the mind must apprehend God,
and then it will say, "There is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee."
... George
Macdonald, Unspoken Sermons
Constantly practice
the habit of inwardly gazing upon God. You know that something inside your
heart sees God. Even when you are compelled to withdraw your conscious
attention in order to engage in earthly affairs, there is within you a
secret communion always going on.
... A.
W. Tozer
Here he tells us
that the new birth is first of all "not of blood". You don't get it through
the blood stream, through heredity. Your parents can give you much, but
they cannot give you this. Being born in a Christian home does not make
you a Christian.
... E.
Stanley Jones, Conversion
Who rises from
prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.
... George
Meredith
All who call on
God in true faith, earnestly from the heart, will certainly be heard, and
will receive what they have asked and desired, although not in the hour
or in the measure, or the very thing which they ask; yet they will obtain
something greater and more glorious than they had dared to ask.
... Martin
Luther
We should always
pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God;
we should always act with as much energy as those who expect everything
from themselves.
... Charles
C. Colson
1. When there is
a want of brotherly love and Christian confidence among professors of religion,
then a revival is needed. Then there is a loud call for God to revive his
work. When Christians have sunk down into a low and backslidden state,
they neither have, nor ought to have, nor is there reason to have, the
same love and confidence toward each other, as when they are all alive,
and active, and living holy lives...
2. When there are
dissensions, and jealousies, and evil speakings among professors of religion,
then there is great need of a revival. These things show that Christians
have got far from God, and it is time to think earnestly of a revival.
Religion cannot prosper with such things in the church, and nothing can
put an end to them like a revival.
3. When there is a
worldly spirit in the church: it is manifest that the church is sunk down
into a low and backslidden state, when you see Christians conform to the
world in dress, equipage, parties, seeking worldly amusements, reading
novels and other books such as the world reads. It shows that they are
far from God, and that there is a great need of a Revival of Religion.
[Continued tomorrow]
... Charles
G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals
of Religion
God generally gives
spiritual blessings and deliverances as He does temporal ones; that is,
by the mediation of an active and vigorous industry. The fruits of the
earth are the gift of God, and we pray for them as such; but yet we plant,
and we sow, and we plough, for all that; and the hands which are sometimes
lift up in prayer must at other times be put to the plough, or the husbandman
must expect no crop. Everything must be effected in the way proper to its
nature, with the concurrent influence of the divine grace, not to supersede
the means, but to prosper and make them effectual.
... Robert
South
It is the Church's
mission to confront the world from the Godward side of life with the Christian
principles of a free and just society. The dignity, the value, and the
importance of every individual are made abundantly clear by the Son of
God. He has shown us what human life is intended to be, and we must be
willing to stand against whatever is amiss in the temper and disposition
of the world, or of any segment of it.
... Robert
R. Brown
When we are saved,
we are at home in the universe; and, in principle and in the main, feeble
and timid creatures as we are, there is nothing anywhere within the world
or without it that can make us afraid.
... Bernard
Bosanquet
We shall benefit
very much from the Sacrament if this thought has been impressed and engraved
upon our minds that none of the brethren can be injured, despised, rejected,
abused, or in any way offended by us, without [our] injuring, despising,
and abusing Christ by the wrongs we do; that we cannot disagree with our
brethren without at the same time disagreeing with Christ; that we cannot
love Christ without loving Him in the brethren; that we ought to take the
same care of our brethren's bodies as we take of our own; for they are
members of our body; and that, as no part of our body is touched by any
feeling of pain which is not spread among all the rest, so we ought not
to allow a brother to be affected by any evil, without being touched with
compassion for him.
... John
Calvin, The Institutes of the
Christian Religion
So long as we stand
"under the Law", we cannot perceive this hidden unity of all the commandments.
It is part of legalism that the will of God must appear to it as a multiplicity
of commandments. In actual fact, it is one and indivisible; God wants nothing
else except love because He Himself is love.
... Emil
Brunner, The Letter to the Romans
[Christians], at
their best, know that often they don't know. They do not have all the answers.
They do not have God in their pocket. We cannot answer every question that
any bright boy in the back row might ask. We have only light enough to
walk by.
... Howard
A. Johnson
The Church has
no mission of its own. All we can have by ourselves is a club or a debating
society; and our only hope, left to ourselves, is to win as many members
for our own club and away from other clubs as we can. And whatever this
is, it is not Mission. Mission belongs to God. The Mission was His from
the beginning; it is His; it will always be His. He has His purposes from
the foundation of the world, and the means to fulfill them; and the only
part the Church has in this is obedience -- a share in the eternal and
life-giving obedience of the Son of God... And the most terrible judgment
on the Church comes when God leaves us to our own devices because He is
tired of waiting for our obedience -- leaves us to be the domestic chaplains
to a comfortable secular world -- and goes Himself into the wilderness
of human need and injustice and pain. This judgment does come on churches
and nations, when they forget that God is in command, that He does the
choosing.
... Stephen
F. Bayne, Jr., An Anglican Turning
Point
And do these objectors
mean to say that, because God has redeemed us from the curse of the law,
therefore we owe him nothing, we have no duty now to him? Has not redemption
rather made us doubly debtors? We owe him more than ever: we owe his holy
law more than ever; more honor, more obedience. Duty has been doubled,
not canceled, by our being delivered from the law; and he who says that
duty has ceased, because deliverance has come, knows nothing of duty, or
law, or deliverance.
... Horatius
Bonar, God's Way of Holiness
There are still
those who would add to the faith human traditions and fancies, thus cluttering
it up and obscuring it; and those who would take away from it, rejecting
(often with little thought) whatever may seem to them to be out of harmony
with the so-called modern mind; and others who would distort it, making
it one way or another a pretext for injustice and oppression. But, if we
are to be effective in contending for the faith against false teachings,
we must certainly contend for it by striving ourselves to understand it
ever more truly and more fully.
... C.
E. B. Cranfield, I & II Peter and Jude
Jesus evidently
felt deeply the emptiness and futility of much... religious talk. He was
interested only in those emotions and professions which could get themselves
translated into character and action. Words have always been the bane of
religion as well as its vehicle. Religious emotion has enormous motive
force, but it is the easiest thing in the world for it to sizzle away in
high professions and wordy prayers. In that case, it is a substitute and
counterfeit, and a damage to the Reign of God among men.
... Walter
Rauschenbusch, The Social Principles
of Jesus
Many people not
only lose the benefit, but are even the worse for their mortifications
[i.e., sacrifices, abstensions], ... because they mistake the whole nature
and worth of them: they practice them for their own sakes, as things good
in themselves, they think them to be real parts of holiness, and so rest
in them and look no further, but grow full of a self-esteem and self-admiration
for their own progress in them. This makes them self-sufficient, morose,
severe judges of all those that fall short of their mortifications. And
thus their self-denials do only that for them which indulgences do for
other people: they withstand and hinder the operation of God upon their
souls, and instead of being really self-denials, they strengthen and keep
up the kingdom of self.
... William
Law, The Spirit of Prayer
The apologetic
of the New Testament, and of the early centuries generally, was addressed
to men who had been brought up within one or other of the great pre-Christian
religious systems and who had staunchly defended their own inherited traditions
against the innovation of the Christian outlook; whereas any apologetic
that is to be effective in this country today must be addressed to men
who stand within the inheritance of the Christian tradition and know nothing,
save by hearsay, of any other, but who have now in varying degrees disengaged
themselves from this tradition and whose quarrel with Christianity is therefore
undertaken from the point of view either of no religion at all or of some
very vague and tenuous residuum of Christian religiosity.
... John
Baillie, Invitation to Pilgrimage
Looking into my
heart, which is perhaps the best way of looking into other men's, I know
that the Savior I want is one of whom I can say with Thomas of old, "My
Lord and my God". It would not suffice for my need that He should be only
an heroic brother, man divinely inspired. I owe Him my soul, He fills my
whole spiritual horizon, I seek to lose myself in Him that I may find myself
eternally in life and love divine.
... R.
J. Campbell, The Call of Christ
If I be bound to
pray for all that be in distress, surely I am bound, so far as it is in
my power, to practice what I pray for.
... George
Herbert
The men of faith
might claim for their positions ancient tradition, practical usefulness,
and spiritual desirability, but one query could prick all such bubbles:
Is it scientific? That question has searched religion for contraband goods,
stripped it of old superstitions, forced it to change its categories of
thought and methods of work, and in general has so cowed and scared religion
that many modern-minded believers... instinctively throw up their hands
at the mere whisper of it... When a prominent scientist comes out strongly
for religion, all the churches thank Heaven and take courage, as though
it were the highest possible compliment to God to have Eddington believe
in Him. Science has become the arbiter of this generation's thought, until
to call even a prophet and a seer 'scientific' is to cap the climax of
praise.
... Harry
Emerson Fosdick
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2008, by Robert McAnally Adams,
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