Let men in whose
hearts are the ways of God seriously consider the use that hath been made,
under the blessing of God, of the conscientious observation of the Lord's
day, in the past and present ages, unto the promotion of holiness, righteousness,
and religion universally, in the power of it; and if they are not under
invincible prejudices, it will be very difficult for them to judge that
it is a plant which our heavenly Father hath not planted. For my part,
I must not only say, but plead whilst I live in this world, and leave this
testimony to the present and future ages, if these papers see the light
and do survive, that if I have ever seen any thing in the ways and worship
of God wherein the power of religion or godliness hath been expressed,
any thing that hath represented the holiness of the gospel and the Author
of it, any thing that hath looked like a preludium unto the everlasting
Sabbath and rest with God, which we aim through grace to come unto, it
hath been there and with them where and amongst whom the Lord's day hath
been had in highest esteem, and a strict observation of it attended unto,
as an ordinance of our Lord Jesus Christ.
... John
Owen
If you ask me how
I believe in God, how God creates Himself in me, and reveals Himself to
me, my answer may perhaps provoke your smiles or laughter, and even scandalize
you. I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath
of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand drawing me, leading
me, grasping me.
... Miguel
de Unamuno
It is, of course,
impossible to exaggerate the importance of the historicity of what is commonly
known as the Resurrection. If, after all His claims and promises, Christ
had died and merely lived on as a fragrant memory, He would only be revered
as an extremely good but profoundly mistaken man. His claims to be God,
His claims to be Himself the very principle of life, would be mere self-delusion.
His authoritative pronouncements on the nature of God and Man and Life
would be at once suspect. Why should He be right about the lesser things,
if He was proved to be completely wrong in the greater?
... J.
B. Phillips, Your God is Too Small
Before I can have
any joy in being alone with God I must have learned not to fear being alone
with myself. Shrinking from any deep self-scrutiny is by no means an uncommon
thing, and often goes far to explain the feverish restlessness with which
a world-loving heart plunges into perpetual rounds of gaieties and dissipations;
they serve as an escape from troublesome questions about the soul, and
help to get rid of the clamours of conscience.
... G.
H. Knight, In the Secret of His Presence
God's manifestation
of Himself has not been for our personal experience only, but all creation,
and all time, all mankind and all man's life upon the earth, are manifestations
of God; and the man turns to barrenness and folly who limits himself to
his own narrow thought and futile endeavours. All human experience is revelation
if the great purpose of life is the discipline of souls, and the one unchanging
guidance for all men is duty.
... John
Oman, Vision and Authority
In this age when
it seems tacitly assumed that the Church is concerned only with another
world than this, and in this world with nothing but individual conduct
as bearing on prospects in that other world, hardly anyone reads the history
of the Church in respect to its exercise of political influence. It is
often assumed that the Church exercises little such influence and ought
to exercise none; it is further assumed that this assumption is self-evident
and has always been made by reasonable men. As a matter of fact the assumption
is entirely modern and unjustified.
... Archbishop
William Temple, Christianity
and Social Order
Other sins find
their vent in the accomplishment of evil deeds, whereas pride lies in wait
for good deeds, to destroy them.
... St.
Augustine
It frequently happens
that the value of a thing lies in the fact that someone has possessed it.
A very ordinary thing acquires a new value, if it has been possessed by
some famous person. In any museum we will find quite ordinary things--clothes,
a walking-stick, a pen, pieces of furniture--which are only of value because
they were possessed and used by some great person. It is the ownership
which gives them worth. It is so with the Christian. The Christian may
be a very ordinary person, but he acquires a new value and dignity and
greatness because he belongs to God. The greatness of the Christian lies
in the fact that he is God's.
... William
Barclay, The Letters of James and
Peter
If you believe,
where are your works? Your faith is something everyone knows, for everyone
knows that Christ was [crucified], and that everywhere men pray to Him.
The whole world knows that His glory has not been spread by force and weapons,
but by poor fishermen. 0 wise man, do you think the poor fishermen were
not clever enough for this? Where they worked, there they made hearts better;
where they could not work, there men remained bad; and therefore was the
faith true and from God. The signs which the Lord had promised followed
their teaching: in His name they drove out the devil; they spoke in new
tongues; if they drank any deadly drink, they received therefrom no harm.
Even if these wonders had not occurred, there would have been the wonder
of wonders, that poor fishermen without any miracle could accomplish so
great a work as the faith. It came from God, and so is Christ true, and
Christ is thy God, who is in heaven and awaits thee.
... Girolamo
Savonarola
From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings,
(Not thus are spirits fortified;
Not this way went the Crucified;)
From all that dims Thy Calvary,
0 Lamb of God, deliver me.Give me the love that leads the way,
The faith that nothing can dismay,
The hope no disappointments tire,
The passion that will burn like fire;
Let me not sink to be a clod:
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God!
... Amy Carmichael
When no tensions
are confronted and overcome, because insiders or outsiders of a certain
class or group meet happily among themselves, then the one new thing, peace,
and the one new man created by Christ, are missing; then no faith, no church,
no Christ, is found or confessed. For if the attribute "Christian" can
be given sense from Eph. 2, then it means reconciled and reconciling, triumphant
over walls and removing the debris, showing solidarity with the "enemy"
and promoting not one's own peace of mind but "our peace"... When this
peace is deprived of its social, national, or economic dimensions, when
it is distorted or emasculated so much that only "peace of mind" enjoyed
by saintly individuals is left -- then Jesus Christ is being flatly denied.
To propose, in the name of Christianity, neutrality or unconcern on questions
of international, racial, or economic peace -- this amounts to using Christ's
name in vain.
... Markus
Barth, The Broken Wall
God tolerates even
our stammering, and pardons our ignorance whenever something inadvertently
escapes us -- as, indeed, without this mercy there would be no freedom
to pray.
... John
Calvin
Do not desire crosses,
unless you have borne well those laid on you; it is an abuse to long after
martyrdom while unable to bear an insult patiently.
... François
de Sales
God will not hold
us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination,
and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these
truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, "0 Lord,
Thou knowest." Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound
of God's omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will
never make saints.
... A.
W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
The Divine Wisdom
has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of
earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them; not as a means
whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet
it.
... Frederick
W. Robertson
He does not believe,
that does not live according to his belief.
... Thomas
Fuller
The Way is not
a religion: Christianity is the end of religion. "Religion" means here
the division between sacred and secular concerns, other-worldliness, man's
reaching toward God in a way which projects his own thoughts.
... David
Kirk
Sectarianism is
limitation. Some truth taught in Scripture, some part of the divine revelation,
is apprehended, and the heart responds to it and accepts it. As it is dwelt
upon, expounded, defended; its power and beauty increasingly influence
those affected by it. Another side of truth, another view of revelation,
also contained in Scripture, seems to weaken, even to contradict, the truth
that has been found to be so effectual. and in jealous fear for the doctrine
accepted and taught, the balancing truth is minimized, explained away,
and even denied. So on a portion of revelation, on a part of the Word,
a sect is founded, good and useful because it preaches and practices Divine
truth, but limited and unbalanced because it does not see all truth, nor
frankly accept the whole of Scripture. Its members are not only deprived
of the full use of all Scripture, but are cut off from the fellowship of
many saints, who are less limited than they, or limited in another direction.
... E.
H. Broadbent, The Pilgrim Church
JESUS, the infinite I AM,
With God essentially the same,
With him enthroned above all height,
As God of God, and Light of Light,
Thou art by thy great Father known,
From all eternity his Son.Thou only dost the Father know,
And wilt to all thy followers show,
Who cannot doubt thy gracious will
His glorious Godhead to reveal;
Reveal him now, if thou art he,
And live, eternal Life, in me.
... Charles Wesley
It is not for nothing
that the central rite of Christ's religion is not a fast but a feast, as
if to say that the one indispensable requirement for obtaining a portion
in Him is an appetite, some hunger -- is to be without what we must have
and He can give.
... A.
J. Gossip, The Galilean Accent
He who loveth God
with all his heart feareth not death, nor punishment, nor judgment, nor
hell, because perfect love giveth sure access to God. But he who still
delighteth in sin, no marvel if he is afraid of death and judgment.
... Thomas
à Kempis
The word religion
is extremely rare in the New Testament and the writings of mystics. The
reason is simple. Those attitudes and practices to which we give the collective
name of religion are themselves concerned with religion hardly at all.
To be religious is to have one's attention fixed on God and on one's neighbour
in relation to God. Therefore, almost by definition, a religious man, or
a man when he is being religious, is not thinking about religion; he hasn't
the time. Religion is what we (or he himself at a later moment) call his
activity from outside.
... C.
S. Lewis, "Lilies that Fester"
When we say that
the Scriptures are plain to all capacities in all things necessary, we
mean that any man of ordinary capacity, by his own diligence and care,
in conjunction with the helps and advantages which God hath appointed,
and in the due use of them, may attain to the knowledge of everything necessary
to his salvation; and that there is no book in the world more plain and
better fitted to teach a man any art or science than the Bible is to direct
and instruct men in the way to heaven.
... John
Tillotson
It seems that Paul
is here [I
Cor. 4:2] outlining the very ultimate degree of Christ's self-identification
with us, the very lowest point to which he condescended when he took the
form of a slave. He allowed himself (God allowed him) to be accounted sin
by the Law. He refused to do what orthodox Jews of his day thought God
had commanded them to do, (i.e.) seek to gain credit with God by keeping
the Law. He lived by faith, not Law, and therefore repudiated the Law and
the path of self-justification.... He stripped himself even of that claim
to moral goodness which would have distinguished him from sinners. Short
of becoming a sinner (and Paul shows that this idea is repudiated), how
could God come closer to us sinners?
... Anthony
T. Hanson, The Church of the Servant
If ye keep watch
over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in
one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man
in a thousand years.
... Johannes
Tauler
I thank Thee, O
Lord God, that though with liberal hand Thou hast at all times showered
thy blessing upon our human kind, yet in Jesus Christ Thou hast done greater
Things for us than Thou ever didst before:
Making home sweeter
and friends dearer:
Turning sorrow into
gladness and pain into the soul's victory:
Robbing death of its
sting:
Robbing sin of its
power
Making peace more peaceful and joy more joyful and faith and hope more
secure.
Amen.
... John
Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer
... Also see comments
on this book in Bookworms
We will have no
other master but our caprice -- that is to say, our evil self will have
no God, and the foundation of our nature is seditious, impious, refractory,
opposed to and contemptuous of all that tries to rule it, and therefore
contrary to order, ungovernable and negative. It is this foundation which
Christianity calls the natural man. But the savage which is within us,
and constitutes the primitive stuff of us, must be disciplined and civilized
in order to produce a man. And the man must be patiently cultivated to
produce a wise man; and the wise man must be tested and tried if he is
to become righteous, and the righteous man must have substituted the will
of God for his individual will, if he is to become a saint.
... Henri-Frédéric
Amiel
Some people are
reluctant to consider the future, arguing that it must be left to solve
its own problems and to shape its own beliefs. In all right efforts for
the future, religion must be given first place. No provision to secure
peace or just social principles can be worth much unless the foremost aim
be to establish the Kingdom of God. It is not the minds and bodies only
of generations to come that have to be remembered, but their immortal souls.
... John
Oxenham, Winds of the Dawn
Holding [the Way
of Affirmation], we see that every created thing is, in its degree, an
image of God, and the ordinate and faithful appreciation of that thing
a clue, which, truly followed, will lead back to Him. Holding [the Way
of Rejection], we see that every created thing, the highest devotion to
moral duty, the purest conjugal love, the saint and the seraph, is no more
than an image; that every one of them, followed for its own sake and isolated
from its source, becomes an idol whose service is damnation.
... C.
S. Lewis, ArthurianTorso
This means that
we do not know what are the limits of human history, but it does not mean
that there are no real limits. It is important to assert this, because
if we do not do so, the limit which we know apart from Christ becomes determinative
of our outlook. That limit is death -- the death of the individual, and
the death of the social structure in which his corporate personality is
embodied. When these are the only limits that men know, then they are left
in a hopeless alternation between hope for an individual survival of death,
which evacuates their corporate life of ultimate significance, and hope
for the eternity of some social or political or cultural achievement, which
evacuates personal existence of ultimate significance. This false alternation
is overcome in Christ in whom we are brought into relation with the true
limit -- a consummation of all things in which both the significance of
each personal life and the significance of history as a whole are to be
gathered up.
... Lesslie
Newbigin, The Household of God
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2008, by Robert McAnally Adams,
Report problems to curator@cqod.com.