To make the improving
of our own character our central aim is hardly the highest kind of goodness.
True goodness forgets itself and goes out to do the right thing for no
other reason than that it is right.
... Lesslie
Newbigin
Rest in the Lord;
wait patiently for Him. In Hebrew, "Be silent in God, and let Him mould
thee." Keep still, and He will mould thee to the right shape.
... Martin
Luther
God frees our souls,
not from service, not from duty, but into service and into duty; and he
who mistakes the purpose of his freedom mistakes the character of his freedom.
He who thinks that he is being released from the work, and not set free
in order that he may accomplish that work, mistakes the condition into
which his soul is invited to enter.
... Phillips
Brooks, The Law of Growth
I have found (to
my regret) that the degrees of shame and disgust which I actually feel
at my own sins do not at all correspond to what my reason tells me about
their comparative gravity. Just as the degree to which, in daily life,
I feel the emotion of fear has very little to do with my rational judgment
of the danger. I'd sooner have really nasty seas when I'm in an open boat
than look down in perfect (actual) safety from the edge of a cliff. Similarly,
I have confessed ghastly uncharities with less reluctance than small unmentionables
-- or those sins which happen to be ungentlemanly as well as unchristian.
Our emotional reactions to our own behaviour are of limited ethical significance.
... C.
S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
Never do anything
through strife, or emulation, or vainglory. Never do anything in order
to excel other people, but in order to please God, and because it is His
will that you should do everything in the best manner that you can.
... William
Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and
Holy Life
Then are we servants
of God, then are we the disciples of Christ, when we do what is commanded
us and because it is commanded us.
... John
Owen
God, to redeem
us at the deepest portion of our nature -- the urge to love and be loved
-- must reveal His nature in an incredible and impossible way. He must
reveal it at a cross. At the cross God wrapped his heart in flesh and blood
and let it be nailed to the cross for our redemption.
... E.
Stanley Jones
To take up the
cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the
continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.
... John
Henry Newman
Logic may be viewed,
perhaps, as a machine which is designed, at best, to be such that when
we feed into it certain data and turn the logic crank, we inevitably get
certain conclusions out the other end. Logic is designed to give inevitably
true results starting from known true -- or assumed-to-be-true -- premises.
Logic is a wonderful tool when we want only logical conclusions. We should
not reject such a machine merely because it is not equipped to handle all
of reality. The scientist who commits himself to use a logic machine is
doing wisely, qua scientist, for use on data of science. But if he feeds
into that machine convictions that there is not God, or ignores God because
He is not in his corpus of data, and then draws from his logic the conclusion
that God does not exist, his conclusion is irrelevant. Logic is a tool;
it should not be made into a religion.
... Kenneth
L. Pike, With Heart and Mind
The Holy Scriptures
are our letters from home.
... St.
Augustine
The disorder of
secularism is perhaps nowhere more apparent in our contemporary Church
than in the extent to which we have permitted the order of the world to
creep into the order of the Church... That it should carry out its mission
to the men in the middle classes of capitalist society is doubtless a part
of the Church's order; but that the mission should result in the formation
of a middle-class church which defends the secular outlook and interests
of that class is an evident corruption.
... H.
Richard Niebuhr
If God bores you,
tell Him that He bores you, that you prefer the vilest amusements to His
presence, that you only feel at your ease when you are far from Him.
... François
Fénelon
This making of
your peace with God is not, and never can be, a mere matter of emotional
surrender, however honest and sincere. It must be an act of the whole man,
feeling, thinking, and doing, in every department of his life, in obedience
to a great governing and controlling principle. It must be the response
of the whole man to his whole world. God must be at least as big as the
world if He is to be God at all. Religion applies either to everything
or to nothing, and no department of life can be left outside of God. Whatever
appears to be beyond His control must, to the religious man, become either
a problem to serve or an obstacle to be overcome, and whatever is essentially
opposed to Him must become an evil to be destroyed. The soul that has really
made its peace with God simply cannot tolerate anything or anybody as being
permanently outside of Him.
... G.
A. Studdert Kennedy, The Wicket Gate
Lord, it belongs not to my care,
Whether I die or live;
To love and serve Thee is my share,
And this Thy grace must give.If life be long I will be glad,
That I may long obey;
If short--yet why should I be sad
To soar to endless day?Christ leads me through no darker rooms
Than He went through before;
He that unto God's kingdom comes,
Must enter by this door.Come, Lord, when grace has made me meet
Thy blessed face to see;
For if Thy work on earth be sweet,
What will Thy glory be!Then shall I end my sad complaints,
And weary, sinful days;
And join with the triumphant saints,
To sing Jehovah's praise.My knowledge of that life is small,
The eye of faith is dim;
But 'tis enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with him.
... Richard Baxter
Christianity is
a religion which concerns us as we are here and now, creatures of body
and soul. We do not "follow the footsteps of his most holy life" by the
exercise of a trained religious imagination, but by treading the firm,
rough earth, up hill and down dale.
... Evelyn
Underhill
If indeed there
had been anything better and more profitable to the health of men than
to suffer, Christ would surely have shown it by word and example.
... Thomas
à Kempis
Now the great thing
is this: we are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may thereafter
think, speak, meditate, and do, nothing except to his glory. For a sacred
thing may not be applied to profane uses without marked injury to him.
... John
Calvin
To thee, O God,
we turn for peace; but grant us, too, the blessed assurance that nothing
shall deprive us of that peace, neither ourselves, nor our foolish, earthly
desires, nor my wild longings, nor the anxious cravings of my heart.
... Søren
Kierkegaard
From time immemorial
men have quenched their thirst with water without knowing anything about
its chemical constituents. In like manner we do not need to be instructed
in all the mysteries of doctrine, but we do need to receive the Living
Water which Jesus Christ will give us and which alone can satisfy our souls.
... Sadhu
Sundar Singh
God, in a man who
is made partaker of His nature, desireth and taketh no revenge for all
the wrong that is or can be done unto Him. This we see in Christ when He
saith: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
... Theologia
Germanica
Alas! day by day
we ask that His Will may be done, and yet, when it comes to the doing,
we find it so hard! We offer ourselves so often to God -- we continually
say, "Lord, I am Thine, I give Thee my heart," and when He accepts it,
we are such cowards. How dare we call ourselves His, if we cannot shape
our own wills to His?
... François
de Sales
Irresponsible spending
is the scandal of Christian America, in the face of the world's need. The
American standard of living has risen to unprecedented heights, although
a large portion of the world exists on a sub-human level. Philanthropy,
as we practice it, is not enough --- although the word philanthropy actually
means brotherhood. Our stewardship of God's goods requires that we administer
in God's name -- that is, with full awareness that the world is His and
that His love is directed toward us no more fully than toward every man.
... Rachel
Henderlite, A Call to Faith
Man is challenged
to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world.
He must therefore plunge himself into the life of a godless world, without
attempting to gloss over its ungodliness with a veneer of religion or trying
to transfigure it. He must live a 'worldly' life and so participate in
the suffering of God. He may live a worldly life as one emancipated from
all false religions and obligations. To be a Christian does not mean to
be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of
asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent, or a saint), but to be a man. It is
not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation
in the suffering of God in the life of the world.
... Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from
Prison
It takes a determined
effort of the mind to break free from the error of making books an end
in themselves. The worst thing a book can do for a Christian is to leave
him with the impression that he has received from it anything really good;
the best it can do is to point the way to the Good he is seeking. The function
of a good book is to stand like a signpost directing the reader toward
the Truth and the Life. That book serves best which early makes itself
unnecessary, just as a signpost serves best after it is forgotten, after
the traveler has arrived safely at his desired haven. The work of a good
book is to incite the reader to moral action, to turn his eves toward God
and urge him forward. Beyond that it cannot go.
... A.
W. Tozer, The Divine Conquest
To bear with patience
wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience
wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual
sin.
... Thomas
Aquinas
Enough has... been
said to show that the impoverished secularized versions of Christianity
which are being urged upon us for our acceptance today rest not upon a
serious application of the methods of scientific scholarship nor upon a
serious intuitive appreciation of the Gospels as a whole in their natural
context, but upon a radical distaste for the supernatural.
... E.
L. Mascall, The Secularization
of Christianity
God gave us faculties
for our use; each of them will receive its proper reward. Then do not let
us try to charm them to sleep, but permit them to do their work until divinely
called to something higher.
... Teresa
of Avila
Knowledge of God
can be fully given to man only in a Person, never in a doctrine. Faith
is not the holding of correct doctrine, but personal fellowship with the
living God.
... William
Temple
You cannot escape
Christ, do what You will. You reject His divinity, but, so doing, you have
not evaded Him. If He is a man just like us, then obviously you must be
a man like Him.
... A.
J. Gossip
It is no hard matter
to adhere to God while you are in the enjoyment of His comforts and consolations;
but if you would prove your fidelity to Him, you must be willing to follow
Him through the paths of dryness and desertion. The truth of a friend is
not known while he is receiving favours and benefits from us; but if he
remain faithful to us when we treat him with coldness and neglect, it will
be a proof of the sincerity of his attachment.
... William
Backhouse and James Jansen, A
Guide to True Peace
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2008, by Robert McAnally Adams,
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