Is a mediator between
the eternal spirit and the finite an unreality, an intrusion? The mystic
soul may impatiently think so, but the moral soul finds such mediation
the way to reality; and the mystic experience is not quite trustworthy
about reality. The pagan gods had no mediators, because they were not real
or good gods; but the living God has a living Revealer. To know the living
God is to know Christ; to know Christ is to know the living God. We do
not know God by Christ but in Him. We find God when we find Christ; and
in Christ alone we know and share his final purpose. Our last knowledge
is not the contact of our person with a thing or a thought; it is intercourse
of person and person.
... P.
T. Forsyth, This Life and the Next
Do those who say,
"Lo here, or lo there, are the signs of His coming", think to be too keen
for Him, and spy His approach? When He tells them to watch lest He find
them neglecting their work, they stare this way and that, and watch lest
He should succeed in coming like a thief!
... George
Macdonald, "The Word of Jesus on Prayer"
"The Kingdom of
Heaven", said the Lord Christ, "is among you." But what, precisely, is
the Kingdom of Heaven? You cannot point to existing specimens, saying,
"Lo, here!" or "Lo, there!" You can only experience it. But what is it
like, so that when we experience it we may recognize it? Well, it
is a change, like being born again and relearning everything from the start.
It is secret, living power -- like yeast. It is something that grows, like
seed. It is precious like buried treasure, like a rich pearl, and you have
to pay for it. It is a sharp cleavage through the rich jumble of things
which life presents: like fish and rubbish in a draw-net, like wheat and
tares; like wisdom and folly; and it carries with it a kind of menacing
finality; it is new, yet in a sense it was always there -- like turning
out a cupboard and finding there your own childhood as well as your present
self; it makes demands, it is like an invitation to a royal banquet --
gratifying, but not to be disregarded, and you have to live up to it; where
it is equal, it seems unjust; where it is just it is clearly not equal
-- as with the single pound, the diverse talents, the labourers in the
vineyard, you have what you bargained for; it knows no compromise between
an uncalculating mercy and a terrible justice -- like the unmerciful servant,
you get what you give; it is helpless in your hands like the King's Son,
but if you slay it, it will judge you; it was from the foundations of the
world; it is to come; it is here and now; it is within you. It is recorded
that the multitudes sometimes failed to understand.
... Dorothy
L. Sayers, The Poetry of Search
Sin is a base and
ill-natured thing, and renders a man not so apt to be affected with the
injuries he hath offered to God as with the mischief which is likely to
fall upon himself.
... John
Tillotson
No wonder if the
Christians made an impression out of all proportion to their numbers. Conviction
in the midst of waverers, fiery energy in a world of disillusion, purity
in an age of easy morals, firm brotherhood in a loose society, heroic courage
in a time of persecution, formed a problem that could not be set aside,
however polite society might affect to ignore it: and the religion of the
future turned on the answer to it. Would the world be able to explain it
better than the Christians, who said it was the living power of the risen
Saviour?
... Henry
M. Gwatkin, Early Church History to
A.D. 312
Silence, indeed,
is the one form of worship which is almost universally thought intolerable
by Dissenting clergy. Despite their not-too-distant affinity to the Quakers,
they think they will be heard for their much speaking. And since their
organists too are equally reluctant to let any liturgical action pass without
a ruminative obbligato on the Swell manual, congregations are subjected
to unrelieved noise during a service which may well have begun with the
reading of the sentence, "Be still, and know that I am God."
... Christopher
Driver, A Future for the Free Churches?
We may look into
a church, almost any church, and discover someone who, though he is offered
a gospel of love, must subtly convert it into a gospel of hate before he
can receive it. The gospel of love -- with its emphasis upon brotherhood,
equality before God, the dignity of every human being, and man's social
responsibility toward man -- does not satisfy the lack that he urgently
feels. That calls for something altogether different, for an assurance
that he is superior, that he is right where others are wrong -- a kind
of cosmic teacher's pet.
... Bonaro
W. Overstreet
The tremendous
power of mass-suggestion, which we call the world, can only be confronted,
and its victims cured, if they are received into a body which is filled
with a vivid, vigorous, and conscious community life of the Spirit. Individuals
are powerless to cope with a power so subtle and all-pervasive as this
mass-suggestion is. If we are to save and rescue sinners, there must grow
up in our Church a Spirit of Love and Brotherhood, a Christian community-life,
transcending class and national distinctions, as pungent, as powerful,
as impossible to escape as the Spirit of the world. No Apostolic Succession,
no Ecclesiastical correctness, no rigidity of orthodox doctrine, can be
themselves and in themselves give us this; it comes, and can only come,
from a clearer vision of the Christ, a more complete surrender to His call
and to the bearing of His Cross.
... G.
A. Studdert Kennedy, The Wicket Gate
A really patient
servant of God is as ready to bear inglorious troubles as those which are
honorable. A brave man can easily bear with contempt, slander, and false
accusations from an evil world; but to bear such injustice at the hands
of good men, of friends and relations, is a great test of patience.
... François
de Sales
When we look out
towards this love that moves the stars and stirs in the child's heart and
claims our total allegiance, and remember that this alone is Reality and
we are only real so far as we conform to its demands, we see our human
situation from a fresh angle; and we perceive that it is both more humble
and dependent, and more splendid, than we had dreamed. We are surrounded
and penetrated by great spiritual forces of which we hardly know anything.
Yet the outward events of our life cannot be understood, except in their
relation to that unseen and intensely living world, the Infinite Charity
which penetrates and supports us, the God whom we resist and yet for whom
we thirst; who is ever at work, transforming the self-centred desire of
the natural creature into the wide spreading, outpouring love of the citizen
of Heaven.
... Evelyn
Underhill, The School of Charity
At the Day of Judgment,
we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done.
... Thomas
à Kempis
I have heard professing
Christians of our own day speak as though the historicity of the Gospels
does not matter -- all that matters is the contemporary Spirit of Christ.
I contend that the historicity does matter, and I do not see why we, who
live nearly two thousand years later, should call into question an Event
for which there were many eye-witnesses still living at the time when most
of the New Testament was written. It was no "cunningly devised fable" but
an historic irruption of God into human history which gave birth to a young
church so sturdy that the pagan world could not stifle or destroy it.
... J.
B. Phillips, Ring of Truth
If a poet or an
artist puts himself into his Productions he is criticized. But that is
exactly what God does, he does so in Christ. And precisely that is Christianity.
The creation was really only completed when God included himself in it.
Before the coming of Christ, God was certainly in the creation, but as
an invisible sign, like the watermark in paper. But the creation was completed
by the Incarnation because God thereby included himself in it.
... Søren
Kierkegaard, Journals
I am persuaded
that some have scarce any better or more forcible argument to satisfy their
own minds that they are in the right in religion than the inclination they
find in themselves to hate and persecute them whom they suppose to be in
the wrong.
... John
Owen
The real conviction
of the living Christ was not carried to the world by a book nor by a story.
Men might allege that they had seen the risen Lord; but that was nothing
till they themselves were known. The witness of the resurrection was not
the word of Paul (as we see at Athens) nor of the Eleven; it was the new
power in life and death that the world saw in changed men... The legend
of a reputed resurrection of some unknown person in Palestine nobody needed
to consider; but what were you to do with the people who died in the arena,
the reborn slaves with their newness of life in your own house? And when
you "looked into the story", it was no mere somebody or other of whom they
told it. The conviction of the people you knew, amazing in its power of
transforming character and winning first the goodwill and the trust and
then the conversion of others, was supported and confirmed by the nature
and personality of the Man of whom they spoke, of whom you read in their
books. "Never man spake like this man", you read, nor thought like this
man, nor like this man believed in God. I can not but think that the factors
that make a man Christian to-day were those that won the world then, our
age and that age, in culture, in hopes and fears in loss of nerve, are
not unlike. [Continued tomorrow]
... T.
R. Glover, The Influence of Christ
in the Ancient World
Belief in immortality
for us does not depend on a story, however well attested, in an ancient
book... No, here was a sequence of great character and emancipated spirit,
all attached to and explained by such a personality as the world never
saw; and the central doctrine of the risen Christ squared with the rationality
and the goodness of God... The wise said that God and the godlike could
have no contact with suffering, but Jesus was no phantom feigning to be
crucified; he truly suffered on the cross, he truly rose. Suffering is
a language all can understand, and none can quite exhaust; and the suffering
Christ, victorious over pain and death, meant for all who grasped his significance
a new faith in God, a new freedom of mind in God.
... T.
R. Glover, The Influence of Christ
in the Ancient World
Some people want
to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love
their cow -- for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is
how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward
comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own
advantage. Indeed, I tell you the truth, any object you have in your mind,
however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost Truth.
... Meister
Eckhart
The great unity
which true science seeks is found only by beginning with our knowledge
of God, and coming down from Him along the stream of causation to every
fact and event that affects us.
... Howard
Crosby
... it be a certain
truth, that none can understand [the prophets' and apostles'] writings
aright, without the same Spirit by which they were written.
... The Journal
of George Fox
It is no longer
the fashion to suffer for the sake of God, and to bear the Cross for Him;
for the diligence and real earnestness, that perchance were found in man,
have been extinguished and have grown cold; and now no one is willing any
longer to suffer distress for the sake of God.
... Johannes
Tauler
As against Thee,
as without Thee, man is a thing of naught; ... as of Thee, man is a pearl
of price, the reflection of Thy own personal infinity, the child and heir
of immortality. He was formed in Thy creative counsels, 0 Thou Lover of
man, to transcend death forever, and to persist, not in a part of his being
only, but in its indissoluble ideal whole, unto the life of the world to
come.
... Handley
C. G. Moule
The reconciliation
of man to God begins when God accepts the child of man, exactly as he is,
into a relationship with himself -- "this grace wherein we stand". This
He does for the sake of what man is to inherit, to become. And for the
means, He gives him over to a Person, Christ, and a community, the Church;
and in attachment to these, personality grows, freedom is attained, sin
is forgiven, estrangement is ended, capacities for relationship extend.
Reconciliation is the Spirit's liberating work of love, exercised through
a Person and a community of persons.
... G.
R. Dunstan
Modern civilization
is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears
us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down destroying our solitude,
where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength, before going out
to face the world again. "The thoughtful soul to solitude retires," said
the poet of other and quieter times; but where is the solitude to which
we can retire today? "Commune with your own heart upon your bed and be
still," is a wise and healing counsel; but how can it be followed in this
day of the newspaper, the telephone, the radio and television? These modern
playthings, like pet tiger cubs, have grown so large and dangerous that
they threaten to devour us all. What was intended to be a blessing has
become a positive curse. No spot is now safe from the world's intrusion.
The need for solitude and quietness was never greater than it is today.
What the world will do about it is their problem. Apparently the masses
want it the way it is, and the majority of Christians are so completely
conformed to this present age that they, too, want things the way they
are. They may be annoyed a bit by the clamor and by the goldfish-bowl existence
they live, but apparently they are not annoyed enough to do anything about
it.
... A.
W. Tozer, Of God and Men
Supply-and-demand,
-- alas! For what noble work was there ever yet any audible demand in that
poor sense? The man of Macedonia, speaking in vision to the Apostle Paul,
"Come over and help us", did not specify what rate of wages he would give.
... Thomas
Carlyle
The Old Testament
does not occupy itself with how Israel thought of God. Its concern is with
how Israel ought to think of God. To it, the existence of God is not an
open question, nor His nature, nor the accessibility of knowledge of Him.
God Himself has taken care of that He has made Himself known to His people,
and their business is not to feel after Him if haply they may fumblingly
find Him, but to hearken to Him as He declares to them what and who He
is. [Continued]
... Benjamin
B. Warfield
The fundamental
note of the Old Testament, in other words, is revelation. Its seers and
prophets are not men of philosophic mind, who have risen from the seen
to the unseen and, by dint of much reflection, have gradually attained
to elevated conceptions of Him who is the Author of all that is. They are
men of God whom God has chosen, that He might speak to them and, through
them, to His people. Israel has not, in and by them, created for itself
a God: God has, through them, created for Himself a people.
... Benjamin
B. Warfield
Providence is a
greater mystery than revelation. The state of our world is more humiliating
to our reason than the doctrines of the Gospel. A reflecting Christian
sees more to excite his astonishment, and to exercise his faith, in the
state of things between Temple Bar [in Dublin] and St. Paul's [in London],
than in what he reads from Genesis to Revelation.
... Richard
Cecil
In the person of
Christ, the formidable law of God, which by itself appalls us by its vast
comprehensiveness and truth, and makes us hide ourselves from its dread
sanctity, is brought down into the life of a brother, ... and we see it
illustrated and ratified in human action, we see righteousness that makes
us feel more bitterly our sin, that makes us look more disparagingly upon
our own efforts, yet leaves in us a longing to be like Him, as if we ought
to be as He is.
... E.
E. Jenkins, Life and Christ
What will move
you? Will pity? Here is distress never the like. Will duty? Here is a person
never the like. Will fear? Here is wrath never the like. Will remorse?
Here are sins never the like. Will kindness? Here is love never the like.
Will bounty? Here are benefits never the like. Will all these? Here they
be all, all in the highest degree.
... Lancelot
Andrewes, "Sermon on Good Friday"
From the very first,
the conviction that Jesus had been raised from death has been that by which
[the Christians'] very existence has stood or fallen. There was no other
motive to account for them, to explain them... At no point within the New
Testament is there any evidence that the Christians stood for an original
philosophy of life or an original ethic. Their sole function is to bear
witness to what they claim as an event --the raising of Jesus from among
the dead... The one really distinctive thing for which the Christians stood
was their declaration that Jesus had been raised from the dead according
to God's design, and the consequent estimate of him as in a unique sense
Son of God and representative man, and the resulting conception of the
way to reconciliation.
... C.
F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of
the New Testament
Though natural
men, who have induced secondary and figurative consideration, have found
out this... emblematical use of sleep, that it should be a representation
of death, God, who wrought and perfected his work, before Nature began,
(for Nature was but his Apprentice, to learn in the first seven days, and
now is his foreman, and works next under him) God, I say, intended sleep
only for the refreshing of man by bodily rest, and not for a figure of
death, for he intended not death itself then. But Man having induced death
upon himself, God hath taken Man's Creature, death, into his hand, and
mended it, and whereas it hath in itself a fearfull form and aspect, so
that Man is afraid of his own Creature, God presents it to him, in a familiar,
in an assiduous, in an agreeable and acceptable form, in sleep, that so
when he awakes from sleep and says to himself, shall I be no otherwise
when I am dead, than I was even now, when I was asleep, he may be ashamed
of his waking dreams, and of his Melancholique fancying out a horrid and
an affrightful figure of that death which is so like sleep. As then we
need sleep to live out our threescore and ten years, so we need death,
to live that life which we cannot out-live.
... John
Donne, Meditations
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2008, by Robert McAnally Adams,
Report problems to curator@cqod.com.