Aiden Wilson Tozer (quotes)

Refuse to be average.
We must never edit God.
Man must choose his world
Acquaint thyself with God.
Perfect love knows no because
Very few things in life matter.
Faith in faith is faith astray.
Sermonettes make Christianettes.
Compare yourself only with Jesus.
A thankful heart cannot be cynical.
Light means nothing to a blind man.
The key to prayer is simply praying.
Beauty is in the eye of the Creator.
Only a disciple can make a disciple.
America is laughing her way to Hell.
Let me never become a slave to crowds.
A scared world needs a fearless church.
You have been forgiven, so act like it!
You win them to what you win them with.
Without worship, we go about miserable.
God dwells in the heart where praise is.
Oh, if we would only remember who God is!
Jesus came not to condemn, but to reclaim.
God’s plan will continue on God’s schedule.
If you want to be changed, read a good book.
When a man of God dies, nothing of God dies.
Listen to no man who has not listened to God.
All great Christians have been wounded souls.
The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed.
Where God is not glorified, that place is sick
Trust God in the dark until the light returns.
Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.
Everything is wrong until Jesus sets it right.
Every man is as holy as he really wants to be.
The heart that knows God can find God anywhere.
Whom God would use greatly He will hurt deeply.
Faith in God is to be demonstrated, not defined.
Unsaintly saints are the tragedy of Christianity.
If worship bores you, you are not ready for heaven.
God is never satisfied with anything less than all.
God expects of us only what He Himself has supplied.
The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin.
I can trust the One who has my best interest in mind.
What else should we do with the Word of God but obey?
Worship is why we are born and why we are born again.
[Prayer] takes no time, but it occupies all our time.
The scriptures are in print what Christ is in person.
The glory of God always comes at the sacrifice of self.
The man who would truly know God must give time to Him.
Faith is seeing the invisible, but not the nonexistent.
There is no place to hide but in the blood of the Lamb.
Wherever we find Jesus is the perfect place to worship.
No religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.
My aim each day is to adore God more than anything else.
To fear and not be afraid- that is the paradox of faith.
If we possess nothing, God will allow us to have plenty.
As Christians, we are not to be people without feelings.
In Him (God), history and prophecy are one and the same.
God is looking for men in whose hands His glory is safe.
I did not go through the Book. The Book went through me.
God never uses anyone greatly until He tests them deeply.
Silence is often the most eloquent answer to our critics.
It is quite impossible to worship God without loving Him.
Always God’s goodness is the ground of our expectation.
When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.
We’re here to be worshipers first and workers only second
Christian liberty is freedom from sin, not freedom to sin.
Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them.
Sometimes when we get overwhelmed we forget how big God is.
The true Christian ideal is not to be happy but to be holy.
The man who has God for his treasure has all things in one.
We must never rest until everything inside us worships God.
We modern Christians are long on talk and short on conduct.
Anything that God has declared that we should be we can be.
Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.
God doesn’t need anything nevertheless He wants worshipers.
Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us.
It takes simplicity and humility to worship God acceptably.
You can delegate many things, but prayer is not one of them.
Jesus will never qualify or compromise anything he has said.
We are vengeful. God is forgiving. We remember. God redeems.
God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust
What I cannot know by reason, I can know by simply believing.
God’s justice and God’s mercy do not quarrel with each other.
The complacency of Christians is the scandal of Christianity.
Refuse to be average. Let your heart soar as high as it will.
A Christian expects to go to Heaven on the virtue of another.
Faith is not a conclusion you reach…it’s a journey you live.
A local church will only be as great as its conception of God.
Love wills the good of all and never wills harm or evil to any
May God keep fresh the fountain of our laughter and our tears!
Prayer is the most sacred occupation a person could engage in.
God wants us to know that when we have Him, we have everything.
Whatever may befall us, God knows and cares as no one else can.
The most important thing you think is what you think about God.
True and absolute freedom is only found in the presence of God.
To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men.
God’s purpose in redemption is to make worshipers out of rebels.
Christians don’t tell lies they just go to church and sing them.
Pray; and as you pray, surrender; and as you surrender, believe.
An infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children.
Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience.
You can’t truly rest until every area in your life rests in God.
Each day presents a new opportunity to experience God’s presence.
Any doctrine that makes the world your friend is not your friend.
Complacency is easy…and it is a deadly foe of spiritual growth.
If [something] is of God, your dependence upon God will increase.
True faith is never found alone; it is accompanied by expectation.
Problems patiently endured will work for our spiritual perfecting.
God cannot use a man or woman greatly until he wounds them deeply.
God and I; here is the beginning and the end of personal religion.
An idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.
It is dangerous to be so busy that you have no time to wait on God.
The best preparation for worship is not a rehearsal, but surrender.
Yes, worship of the loving God is man’s whole reason for existence.
Justice is not something God has. Justice is something that God is.
Let God be true but every man a liar” is the language of true faith
We are not revived because we sing; we sing because we are revived.
May God grant us a desire for God that supersedes all other desires.
Always the most revealing thing about the church is her idea of God.
When we make a choice today, we are deciding who we will be tomorrow.
The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.
God’s gifts are many; His best gift is one. It is the gift of Himself.
What I was saved to is much more important than what I was saved from.
The most dangerous trap is just living and forgetting that God exists.
Wherever the Word comes without power its essential content is missed.
If your life does not worship God, your lips do not worship God either.
If we make provision for sinning tomorrow, we will be sinning tomorrow.
God tells us to make a sanctuary of our thoughts in which He can dwell.
You can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him.
While we are looking at God we do not see ourselves – blessed riddance.
God answers our prayers not because we are good, but because He is good.
Our walk by faith, if it is true biblical faith, will get us in trouble.
Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms.
You can blame circumstances, but backsliding always begins in the heart.
Until the Bible begins to talk to us, we really have not been reading it.
To know that God thinks about me is the beginning of my journey of faith.
Our problem is that we go from toy to toy rather than from glory to glory.
The Bible was written in tears, and to tears it yields its best treasures.
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love.
Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there.
Keep your heart with all diligence and God will take care of the universe.
When we become too glib in prayer we are most surely talking to ourselves.
Men are not revived because they sing; they sing because they are revived.
Real faith invariably produces holiness of heart and righteousness of life.
We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.
He had everything, but he possessed nothing. There is the spiritual secret.
We cannot enter into the presence of God while we are rebelling against God.
If you have believed but not obeyed, you have postponed your Christian life.
We are sent to bless the world, but we are never told to compromise with it.
We must invite the Cross to do its deadly work within before we can be free.
It is God who works in and through us, if only we would let God do His work.
I claim the holy right to disappoint men in order to avoid disappointing God.
Christ calls us to carry the Cross; churches call us to have fun in His name.
When we yield ourselves completely to God, He gives Himself completely to us.
It is no sin to doubt some things, but it may be fatal to believe everything.
If you want to be holy then you must give time to God and not just intend to.
The gravest question any of us face is whether we do or do not love the Lord.
We know how God would act if he were in our place – he has been in our place.
Worshipers never leave church…we carry our sanctuary with us wherever we go.
No one can know the true grace of God who has not first known the fear of God.
Wherever faith has eyes to see, there is a smiling presence of the Son of God.
If you do all the talking when you pray, how will you ever hear God’s answers?
The man who has made God his dwelling place will always have a safe habitation.
Nothing bothers the devil more than a Christian delighting in God’s presence.
Genuine Christian experience must always include an encounter with God Himself.
Christians aren’t finished products. We’re God’s sons and daughters in process.
The desire to fulfill the purpose for which we were created is a gift from God.
How completely satisfying to turn from [our] limitations to a God who has none.
I have found God to be cordial and generous and in every way easy to live with.
God spares us because He is good, but He could not be good if He were not just.
By nature, worship is not some performance we do, but a presence we experience.
The Bible is a supernatural book and can be understood only by supernatural aid.
It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.
What is wisdom? It is the skill to achieve the perfect means by the perfect ends
With a sacred expectation, I look for God in ALL of the circumstances of my day.
The fruit is what really matters, not how gnarly or beautiful the apple tree is.
Any faith that must be supported by the evidence of the senses is not real faith.
We go astray when we think that we can do spiritual work without spiritual power.
Prayer will become effective when we stop using it as a substitute for obedience.
Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God
Nothing should so occupy the mind of the Christian than discovering God each day.
Whatever keeps me from my Bible is my enemy, however harmless it may appear to be.
The Christian is a holy rebel loose in the world with access to the throne of God.
Many Christians are satisfied with their destination but they neglect the journey.
We must never allow the majority to overrule the clear teaching of the Word of God.
You can be straight as a gun barrel theologically, and as empty as one spiritually.
Holiness has nothing to do with what we know and everything to do with Who we know.
Spiritual Christians look upon the world not as a playground but as a battleground.
Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God.
Christianity at any given time is strong or weak depending upon her concept of God.
Faith is not merely a journey for the feet, but it is also a journey for the heart.
Men who refuse to worship the true God now worship themselves with tender devotion.
We boast in the Lord but watch carefully that we never get caught depending on Him.
Truth is a glorious but hard mistress. She never consults, bargains or compromises.
To know God is to fear Him. And this fear is to love Him as He deserves to be loved.
We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is.
The most important thing about you is what comes to your mind when you think of God.
We are called not to adjust ourselves to each other, but to adjust ourselves to God.
Our identification with Christ should be that whatever He is we also want to become.
In every generation the number of the righteous is small. Be sure you are among them.
Most Christians would rather be happy than feel the wounds of other peoples’ sorrows.
If you will not worship God seven days a week, you do not worship Him one day a week.
It is doubtful we can be Christian in anything unless we are Christian in everything.
Perception of ideas, rather than the storing of them, should be the aim of education.
Father, may my song today be a sweet sound in Your ears-even if in Yours alone. Amen.
We must meet the uncertainties of this world with the certainty of the world to come.
Abounding sin is the terror of the world, but abounding grace is the hope of mankind.
There is a restlessness within us that cannot be satisfied until we rest fully in God.
The driver on the highway is safe not when He reads the signs, but when He obeys them.
You are a mirror of the Almighty…this is the reason you were created…your purpose.
Whatever a man wants badly and persistently enough will determine the man’s character.
Faith never goes contrary to reason — faith simply ignores reason and rises above it.
Unselfish love does not exploit its object and it does not ask for anything in return.
Nothing is complete in itself but requires something outside itself in order to exist.
Always, everywhere God is present, and always He seeks to discover Himself to each one
God is never impressed with what a man can do. He is more concerned with what a man is.
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
A world of confusion and disappointment results from trying to believe without obeying.
Many things about our salvation are beyond our comprehension, but not beyond our trust.
God rescues us by breaking us, by shattering our strength and wiping out our resistance.
I don’t want the world to define God for me. I want the Holy Spirit to reveal God to me.
God does not love us because we are hard or easy to love, He loves us because He is God.
There is no limit to what God can do through us if we are a yielded and purified people.
We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum.
The more highly we think of ourselves-our abilities and talents-the less God can use us.
We Christians must simplify our lives or lose untold treasures on earth and in eternity.
The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world
The goodness of God is infinitely more wonderful than we will ever be able to comprehend.
No man has any right to speak to men about God who has not first spoken to God about men.
There is more healing joy in five minutes of true worship than in five nights of revelry.
Faith is not in itself a meritorious act; the merit is in the One to Whom it is directed.
There has been grave error. I do not mean so much error of doctrine as error of emphasis.
Jesus Christ knows the worst about you. Nonetheless, He is the one who loves you the most.
Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines him to bestow benefits on the undeserving.
To truly know God we must long for Him without any other motive than reaching God Himself.
Walking in humility isn’t focusing on what we are NOT; rather, it’s declaring what God is.
God is running the universe. We ought not think like scientists, but think like psalmists.
True worship, worship that is pleasing to God, radiates throughout a person’s entire life.
In an effort to get the work of the Lord done we often lose contact with the Lord of work.
God works as long as His people live daringly; He ceases when they no longer need His aid.
Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He IS that standard.
The only Christian you want to listen to is the one who gives you more of a hunger for God.
Show me the condition of your Bible and I will accurately gauge the condition of your soul.
I want to live so fully in the Spirit that…every act of my life may be an act of worship.
Some morning, get up and allow the power of God to come on you, and allow Him to bless you.
Heaven is beautiful because it is the expression of that which is the perfection of beauty.
God does not stop at rescuing us; the purpose of that rescue is to enjoy fellowship with us.
God desires to reveal to us that His capacity to forgive is bigger than our capacity to sin.
The purpose of God isn’t to save us from Hell. The purpose of God is to make us like Christ.
When we have the Holy Spirit we have all that is needed to be all that God desires us to be.
To treat an imperfect brother (or sister) impatiently is to advertise our own imperfections.
The meetings least attended in our churches today are the ones whose only attraction is God.
The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems.
What is of man uses manipulation to conform. What is of #God uses implantation to transform.
The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.
The Cross is not responsible for God’s love; rather it was His love that conceived the Cross.
The importance of coming into God’s presence is worth overcoming all obstacles along the way.
My miseries have always come out of my own flesh, never from any burden Jesus has laid on me.
As we come to the Bible, we can come with the holy anticipation of actually meeting with God.
Faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all.
The inner life must overcome the flesh or the flesh will overcome and destroy the inner life.
It requires a serious mind and a determined heart to pray past the ordinary into the unusual.
As God is exalted to the right place in our lives, a thousand problems are solved all at once.
Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us.
I cannot recall, in any of my reading, a single instance of a prophet who applied for the job.
After my study of today’s church, my conclusion is that the church is politely bored with God.
An honest man is strange when he is among dishonest men, but it is a good kind of strangeness.
The natural man must know in order to believe; The spiritual man must believe in order to know
Let her love God as He is in Himself, and not as her imagination says He is, and pictures Him.
The Christian’s heart must be soaked in prayer before the true spiritual fruits begin to grow.
The widest thing in the universe is not space, it is the potential capacity of the human heart
Christianity is hard when we try to serve God in man’s way instead of serving God in God’s way.
The devil loves it when we say we believe then prioritize everything in our lives ahead of God.
The big problem is not whether the Bible is true. The big problem is whether it is true in you.
Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul.
In coming to Christ we don’t bring our old life up to a higher plane; we leave it at the cross.
Christ dazzles me and stirs within me such feelings of amazement that I can never get over Him.
All things as they move toward God are beautiful, and they are ugly as they move away from Him.
We must do worldly jobs, but if we do them with sanctified minds, they become offerings to God.
Honesty that can be trusted and respected is a very fragrant flower in the life of a Christian.
We can take whatever path in worship we choose, but not all paths will end at the feet of Jesus.
How utterly terrible is the current idea that Christians can serve God at their own convenience.
What has the church gained if it is popular but there is no conviction, no repentance, no power?
We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work.
The veil of money has never been about how much money you have but about how much money has you.
No man gives anything acceptable to God until has has first given himself in love and sacrifice.
Prayer for revival will prevail when it is accompanied by radical amendment of life; not before.
Do not allow the enemy of your soul to rob you of that unique quality God has breathed into you.
As long as Christ sits on the throne, every day is a good day and all days are days of salvation.
To regain her lost power the Church must see heaven opened and have a transforming vision of God.
Next to the Holy Scriptures, the greatest aide to the life of faith may be Christian biographies.
Man for all his genius is but an echo of the original Voice, a reflection of the uncreated Light.
The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.
Only the redeemed have the ability to like what God likes and to be pleased with what pleases God.
God’s Word is true whether we believe it or not. Human unbelief cannot alter the character of God.
Jesus Christ never thinks about what we have been! He always thinks about what we are going to be.
If I am to wholly follow the Lord Jesus Christ, I must forsake everything that is contrary to Him.
God loves us for ourselves. He values our love more than he values galaxies of new created worlds.
God loves you not because you are worthy, but because He is God and you are a fixture in His mind.
God created our souls to be satisfied only with the divine everlastingness of the Word made flesh.
The Christian is strong or weak depending upon how closely he has cultivated the knowledge of God.
When we are enjoying the conscious presence of God, we are fulfilling the tenets of our salvation.
Worship is no longer worship when it reflects the culture around us more than the Christ within us.
Nothing in or of this world measures up to the simple pleasure of experiencing the presence of God.
There is a strain of loneliness infecting many Christians, which only the presence of God can cure.
No one need fear to listen to the voice of God unless he has already made up his mind to resist it.
It is possible that we can get so busy doing work ‘for’ the Lord that we have no time FOR the Lord.
The ideal leader is one who hears the voice of God, and beckons on as the voice calls him and them.
Outside of the will of god, there is nothing I want. And in the will of god there is nothing I fear.
Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its faith not in the living God, but in dying men.
God is more concerned with the state of people’s hearts than He is with the state of their feelings.
If we take away any of the attributes of God, we do not weaken God but we weaken our concept of God.
We ought not to be looking for a place to hide, but a place to give ourselves as an offering to God.
The fact of God is necessary for the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.
Hope is the music of the whole Bible, the heartbeat, the pulse and the atmosphere of the whole Bible.
Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.
There is a better way. It is to repudiate our own wisdom and take instead the infinite wisdom of God.
To pray without expectation is to misunderstand the whole concept of prayer and relationship with God.
When God brings all things to light, you will discover just how significant you’ve been in God’s plan.
I do not know why God does some things, but I am convinced that nothing is accidental in his universe.
Be hard on yourself and easy on others. Carry your own cross but never lay one on the back of another
Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. No one can hinder him.
Any sermon that is not birthed in prayer is not a message from God no matter how learned the preacher.
God is trying to call us back to that for which He created us, to worship Him and to enjoy Him forever
Christians should be the boldest people in the world-not cocky and sure of ourselves, but sure of Him.
When people sugarcoat Christianity, arrange it all nicely, they have, in effect, taken away the Cross.
Jesus is not one of many ways to approach God, nor is He the best of several ways; He is the only way.
To pray with your fists closed means you’re hanging onto something. Let it go. Open your hands to God.
History is little more than the story of man’s sin, and the daily newspaper a running commentary on it.
God often hides His blessing in trouble or trial, which makes it all the sweeter when it comes our way.
Powerless religion may put a man through many surface changes and leave him exactly what he was before.
It is time for us to seek again the leadership of the Holy Spirit. Man’s lordship has cost us too much.
Any belief that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only.
Most Christians don’t hear God’s voice because we’ve already decided we aren’t going to do what He says.
If Jesus Christ isn’t the central figure in our lives and in our churches, we’re only fooling ourselves.
We are too quick to live this life and forget that there is another world to come…this is not the end.
We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing.
Go to church once a week and nobody pays attention. Worship God seven days a week and you become strange!
Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.
We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.
It is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend a meeting where the only attraction is God
Save me from the error of judging a church by its size, popularity or the amount of its yearly offerings.
Pure Christianity, instead of being shaped by its environment, actually stands in sharp opposition to it.
Religion can reform a person’s life, but it can never transform him. Only the Holy Spirit can transform!
Real faith never disappoints because it is in God, grounded on His character, promises, covenant and oath.
Come to the Word with a spirit of longing with devotion and humble expectation. Be determined to know God.
Because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological.
It’s not what you did, but what you could have done if you allowed the Lord to work His will in your life.
We Christians must look sharp that our Christianity does not simply refine our sins without removing them.
Some people’s lives would drastically change if they would obey God as strictly as they obey their doctors.
Trying to be happy without a sense of God’s presence is like trying to have a bright day without the sun.
It will cost you everything to follow the Lord. And it will cost you even more to be His man for this hour.
If we can trust the sufferings of Christ for our sake then we can trust Christ when we suffer for His sake.
When you focus on the eternal, victorious Son of God, you break the devil’s heart and render him powerless.
I want to be in a place where I have to have God in everything I do . . . where God is indispensable to me.
God is speaking. He is, by His nature, continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking voice.
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God.
His words are the essence of truth…Jesus never uttered opinions. He never guessed; He knew, and He knows.
A pharisee is hard on others and easy on himself, but a spiritual man is easy on others and hard on himself.
God expects us to measure the church not against tradition but against the standards & promises of His Word.
When the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has begun right here on earth.
The sacred page is not meant to be the end, but only the means toward the end, which is knowing God Himself.
The great test of faith is to wait on God. . . not expecting to push a button and get whatever we want now.
Religion is interested primarily in the One who is the source of all things, the master of every phenomenon.
What is wrong with Christians today is that we have the gifts of God but have forgotten the God of the gifts.
Dare to contend without being contentious. Preserve the truth without hurting people. Love and be charitable.
If I empty out half of my life, God can only fill half…God will fill as much of us as we allow Him to fill.
It’s time for us to rise up, get out of the rut and routine, and begin to take our Christian faith seriously.
Christians must understand most emphatically that the world around us is in conflict with the Word within us.
We have our ambition for the future and God. And thus we put God as a plus sign after something else we want.
We must do something about the cross, and there’s only one of two things we can do- flee it or die upon it!
The best way to prove that a stick is crooked is to set a straight one beside it. No words need to be spoken.
The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His Presence.
What we think about when we are free to think about what we will ‚ì that is what we are or will soon become.
God doesn’t work through us because we’re flawless; rather, He works through us in spite of our imperfections.
If your Christianity depends upon a pastor’s preaching, then you’re a long way from being where you should be.
What’s closest to your heart is what you talk about, and if God is close to your heart, you’ll talk about Him.
An honest man with an open Bible and a pad and pencil is sure to find out what is wrong with him very quickly.
We please God most, not by frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms.
God purposed redemption in Christ Jesus before the world began, and His plan does not need any editing by man.
The cross stands high above the opinions of men and to that cross all opinions must come at last for judgment.
Faith is a re-directing of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.
Any nation which for an extended period puts pleasure before liberty is likely to lose the liberty it misused.
I fear that for the most part people are worshiping worship rather than worshiping God and communing with Him.
The superior Christian lets God strip him of everything that might serve as a false refuge, a secondary trust.
If we try to obey without faith, we get nowhere. If we try to have faith without obedience, it ends in nothing.
Too often we are Christians by assumption, manipulation or instruction, rather than Christians by regeneration.
The victorious Christian neither exalts nor downgrades himself. His interests have shifted from self to Christ.
We must break the evil habit of ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest from the seen to the unseen.
Wherever we turn in the church of God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning, middle and end of everything to us.
Man doesnt have the patience or the power to wait. But God does. He has all eternity to accomplish His purposes.
We operate by faith, which means that we have confidence in what God says, whether we fully understand it or not
The purpose of good works isn’t to change us or save us; rather, it’s the demonstration of the change within us.
The grace of God is infinite and beyond our ability to measure. His grace has no beginning and therefore no end.
God wants us to make Jesus Christ the central figure in our church–not just say that we do, but actually do it.
To escape the error of salvation by works we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience.
We get the odd notion that God is showing mercy because Jesus died. No. Jesus died because God is showing mercy.
You will never be more than a common Christian until you give up your own interest and cease defending yourself.
God’s mercy is boundless, free and, through Jesus Christ our Lord, available to us now in our present situation.
We often try to put God in a box. The God who fits in our boxes isn’t the God & Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We understand and acknowledge that the Resurrection has placed a glorious crown upon all of Christ’s sufferings!
Our Lord told His disciples that love and obedience were organically united. The final test of love is obedience.
May God deliver us from the easygoing, smooth, comfortable Christianity that never lets the truth get hold of us.
Only the blood of Jesus can cleanse us, yet if we withhold ourselves from that blood, we will be unclean forever.
The more fascinated we become with the toys of this world, the more we forget that there’s another world to come.
God’s voice speaking tenderly to our hearts today is the same voice that powerfully called creation into being.
In the Bible, the race of life is never considered from the viewpoint of speed… We are to run it with patience.
It’s not my business to try and make God think like me… but to try, in prayer and penitence, to think like God.
The essence of surrender is getting out of God’s way so that He can do in us what He also wants to do through us.
If in our Saturday pursuits we’re far from God’s presence, we’re not in very good shape to worship Him on Sunday.
A true leader will have no desire to lord it over God’s heritage. He is rather ready to follow as well as lead.
I contend that whatever does not raise the moral standard of the church or community has been a revival from God.
We should discipline ourselves to read the Word until it comes alive…until we can almost feel the breath of God.
As long as we think we own anything, that thing owns us. As soon as we know that we own nothing, then God owns us.
One compromise here, another there and soon enough the so-called Christian and the man in the world look the same.
Maybe God is calling you to do something extraordinary that isn’t on your calendar; something to revive your soul!
The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him.
A holy man isn’t aware that he’s holy..As soon as we begin to talk about how holy we are, we aren’t holy any more.
Distractions must be conquered or they will conquer us. So let us cultivate simplicity; let us walk in the Spirit.
The degree of blessing enjoyed by any man will correspond exactly with the completeness of God’s victory over him.
I can’t sing a lick but that’s nobody’s business. God listens when I sing to Him and He thinks I am an opera star.
If you’re not worshiping God on Monday the way you [did] the day before, perhaps you’re not worshiping Him at all.
If God is the Supreme good then our highest blessedness on earth must lie in knowing Him as perfectly as possible.
We are here to affirm, not to deny… when we affirm all that is God, all that is not God is automatically denied.
When a man falls on his knees and stretches his hands heavenward, he is doing the most natural thing in the world.
If JESUS cannot control you, HE cannot save you. And if HE cannot control ALL of you HE cannot control any of you.
Cultivating quietness is a missing discipline today…the quietness needed to nurture an inner life hid in Christ.
We may say simply that in the sight of God we are judged not so much by what we do as by our reasons for doing it.
Is it ever possible to overdo the talking about the glory of Christ? Is it ever too often to be in God’s presence?
The KEY to disciplining ourselves in the area of obedience is always keeping in mind to whom we are being obedient.
Every ransomed man owes his salvation to the fact that during his days of sinning, God kept the door of mercy open.
I accomplish more when I rest wholly in the labor of Jesus than I do when I frantically try to do the work for Him.
Are you satisfied being filled with good information about God, or do you long to burst into His manifest presence?
What a blessed truth to understand that, in the middle of all of our difficulties and calamities, we have a refuge.
True obedience is the refusal to compromise in any regard our relationship with God, regardless of the consequences.
Did you ever stop to think that God is going to be as pleased to have you with Him in Heaven as you are to be there?
Regret for a sinful past will remain until we truly believe that for us in Christ that sinful past no longer exists.
Faith, as Paul saw it, was a living, flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ.
It’s hard to rest knowing that millions of people merely carry on religious traditions but don’t actually reach God.
Any manipulation of the Scriptures to make them speak peace to the natural man is evil and can only lead to ruin.
Satan hates God for His own sake, and everything that is dear to God he hates for the very reason that God loves it.
If God gives you a watch, are you honoring Him more by asking Him what time it is or by simply consulting the watch?
Our self-trust is such a subtle thing that it still comes around whispering to us even after we are sure it is gone.
When I understand that everything happening to me is to make me more Christlike, it resolves a great deal of anxiety.
We are saved to worship God. All that Christ has done in the past and all that He is doing now leads to this one end.
The good news isn’t that God is victorious. How can He not be victorious? The good news is we can be victorious, too.
Most Christians are satisfied living as common Christians, without an insatiable hunger for the deeper things of God.
The idea of the divine-human friendship originated with God. Had not God said first ‘Ye are my friends?’ (John 15:14)
Be thankful, but be careful that you don’t become so enamored of God’s good gifts that you fail to worship the giver.
If you never mention the Lord in conversation with each other,isn’t that proof that you aren’t so concerned about Him?
The Church can’t be a religious theater where paid men perform for the religious amusement of the people who pay them.
We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek Him.
To desire revival…and at the same time to neglect(personal) prayer and devotion is to wish one way and walk another.
Repentance isn’t only sorrow for past sins, it’s also a determination to now do the will of God as He reveals it to us
It is altogether doubtful whether any man can be saved who comes to Christ for His help with no intention to obey Him.
The pain of sacrificing our old selves is nothing compared to the joy of Christ living in us in our transformed lives.
The creeping wilderness will soon take over that church that trusts in its own strength and forgets to watch and pray.
No one can long worship God in spirit and in truth before the obligation to holy service becomes too strong to resist.
When we allow God to be exalted in our difficulties we are in the perfect place to smell the fragrance of His Presence.
If the envious, the defamers and the backbiters were taken out of the average church, there would be revival overnight.
Speaking as a minister it is my strong feeling that no man has a right to preach to a crowd that he has not prayed for.
The man who remains in his sin will be damned just as surely as the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west.
There are rare Christians whose very presence incites others to be better Christians. I want to be that rare Christian.
I like Easter. But let’s remember that Christ’s resurrection is not truer at Easter than at any other time of the year.
There cannot be two absolutely free beings in the universe, for sooner or later two completely free wills must collide.
God sees us perfect in His Son while He disciplines and chastens and purges us that we may be partakers of His holiness.
Don’t allow false modesty,doubts or unbelief prevent you from accepting God’s favor. The door of mercy stands wide open.
Prayer is always in danger of degenerating into a glorified gold rush. How to get things from God occupies most [books].
God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God. He has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays.
God is raising up His heroes and the time will come when they will appear and the world will wonder where they came from.
No one will make progress with God until our eyes are lifted to the faithfulness of God and we stop looking at ourselves!
Men are free to decide their own moral choices, but they are also under the necessity to account to God for those choices.
God’s Kingdom isn’t divided into areas of important people and areas of little people. In God’s sight, everyone’s needful.
This is what you are here for: to glorify God and enjoy Him thoroughly and forever, telling the universe how great God is.
Because we have shut out the Holy Spirit in so many ways, we are stumbling along as though we are spiritually blindfolded.
The neglected heart will soon be a heart overrun with worldly thoughts; the neglected life will soon become a moral chaos.
True faith rests upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfections of the One who cannot lie.
Progress in the Christian life is exactly equal to the growing knowledge we gain of the Triune God in personal experience.
Nothing’s easier to talk about than surrendering ourselves and dying on the Cross. Nothing’s harder than actually doing it.
Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now.
God wants worshipers before workers; indeed the only acceptable workers are those who have learned the lost art of worship.
Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God.
We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts
In trying to count our many blessings the difficulty is not to find things to count, but to find time to enumerate them all.
Quoting Scripture leads you to the fountain, but only if you plunge in and come up wet will I know that you are a Christian.
The man or woman who is wholly or joyously surrendered to Christ can’t make a wrong choice/any choice will be the right one.
As the excellence of steel is strength, and the excellence of art is beauty, so the excellence of mankind is moral character.
We can be in our day what the heroes of faith were in their day – but remember at the time they didn’t know they were heroes.
Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything.
All things else being equal, our prayers are only as powerful as our lives. In the long pull we only pray as well as we live.
A whole new generation of Christians has come up believing that it is possible to ‘accept’ Christ without forsaking the world.
To know the Creator and the God of all the universe is to revere Him. It is to bow down before Him in wonder and awesome fear.
As mercy is God’s goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is his goodness directed toward human debt and demerit.
A low view of God is the cause of a hundred lesser evils. A high view of God is the solution to ten thousand temporal problems.
The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us.
We might be wise to follow the insight of the enraptured heart rather than the more cautious reasoning of the theological mind.
The idea that God will pardon a rebel who has not given up his rebellion is contrary both to the Scriptures and to common sense.
We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone.
One thing the young Christian should be taught as quickly as possible after his conversion is that Jesus Christ is all he needs.
Among the plastic saints of our times, Jesus has to do all the dying, and all we want to hear is another sermon about his dying.
Before there can be fullness there must be emptiness. Before God can fill us with Himself we must first be emptied of ourselves.
The church that can’t worship must be entertained. And leaders who can’t lead a church to worship must provide the entertainment.
The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.
Thinking carries a moral imperative. The searcher for truth must be ready to obey truth without reservation or it will elude him.
Only after all the noise has spent itself do we begin to hear in the silence of our heart, the still, small, mighty voice of God.
Lord, how great is our dilemma! In Thy Presence silence best becomes us, yet love inflames our hearts and constrains us to speak.
God is looking for those with whom He can do the impossible – what a pity that we plan only the things that we can do by ourselves.
What is needed desperately today is prophetic insight. Scholars can interpret the past; it takes prophets to interpret the present.
If I understand this correctly Christ taught here the alarming doctrine that the desire for honor among men made belief impossible.
God wants the whole person and He will not rest till He gets us in entirety. No part of the man will do” (101) – “The Pursuit of God
Judas Iscariot was not a greatly wicked person, just a common money-lover, and like most money-lovers, he did not understand Christ.
Leadership requires vision, and whence will vision come except from hours spent in the presence of God in humble and fervent prayer?
God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. The man who would know God must give time to Him.
God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which he must work. Only to know this is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves.
Plain horse sense ought to tell us that anything that makes no change in the man who professes it makes no difference to God, either.
Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction.
We need to learn that truth consists not in correct doctrine, but in correct doctrine plus the inward enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit-filled life is not a special, deluxe edition of Christianity. It is part and parcel of the total plan of God for His people.
Failure to get a right viewpoint in the beginning of our Christian lives may result in weakness and sterility for the rest of our days!
I want the presence of God Himself, or I don’t want anything at all to do with religion… I want all that God has or I don’t want any.
The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians.
Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, have come into some kind of religious experience by accepting Christ, and they have not been saved.
At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His Presence.
The blessed and inviting truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and in our worship of Him we should find unspeakable pleasure.
The world is waiting to hear an authentic voice, a voice from God- not an echo of what others are doing and saying, but an authentic voice.
When a person, yielding to God and believing the truth of God, is filled with the Spirit of God, even his faintest whisper will be worship.
The cross is the lightning rod of grace that short-circuits God’s wrath to Christ so that only the light of His love remains for believers.
The church can have light only as it is full of the Spirit, and it can be full only as the members that compose it are filled individually.
Many’s very human habit of trusting in himself is generally the last great obstacle blocking his pathway to victory in Christian experience.
For the Christian, humility is absolutely indispensable. Without it there can be no self-knowledge, no repentance, no faith and no salvation.
As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol.
It appears that too many Christians want to enjoy the thrill of feeling right but are not willing to endure the inconvenience of being right.
Our religious activities should be ordered in such a way as to have plenty of time for the cultivation of the fruits of solitude and silence.
Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies.
We can seek God and find him! God is knowable, touchable, hearable, seeable, with the mind, the hands, the ears and the eyes of the inner man.
To be effective the preacher’s message must be alive; it must alarm, arouse, challenge; it must be God’s present voice to a particular people.
Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightest word in any language is its word for God.
Jesus our Lord is Prophet, Priest, and King. The concept is not new, yet many preachers never preach it, and many congregations never hear it.
The heart that is constantly overflowing with gratitude will be safe from those attacks of resentfulness and gloom that bother so many persons.
When men no longer fear God, they transgress His laws without hesitation. The fear of consequences is no deterrent when the fear of God is gone.
The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of Christ.
We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, And long to feast upon Thee still: We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.
Everything God does has purpose and intention behind that design. It is a master design, and every little thing has its proper place and function.
We fear extremes and shy away from too much ardor in religion as if it were possible to have too much love or too much faith or too much holiness.
God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace.
A man by his sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which on earth is most like God. This is man’s greatest tragedy and God’s heaviest grief.
Labor in the Lord is not in vain. Labor outside the Lord may well be in vain. We labor in the Lord when we labor using His enablement for His glory.
Gratitude is an offering precious in the sight of God, and it is one that the poorest of us can make and be not poorer but richer for having made it.
Of all forms of deception self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud.
Let the seeking man reach a place where life and lips join to say continually, “Be thou exalted,” and a thousand minor problems will be solved at once.
People have faith in ‘faith’ and largely forget that our confidence is not in the power of faith but in the Person and work of the Savior, Jesus Christ.
Every advance that we make for God and for His cause must be made at our inconvenience. If it does not inconvenience us at all, there is no cross in it.
I am Thy servant to do Thy will, and that will is sweeter to me than position or riches or fame, and I choose it above all things on Earth or in Heaven.
Anything God has ever done, he can do now. Anything God has ever done anywhere, he can do here. Anything God has ever done for anyone, he can do for you.
Man appears for a little while to laugh and weep, to work and play, and then to go to make room for those who shall follow him in the never-ending cycle.
Those who seek the deeper Christian life and those who want the riches that are in Christ Jesus the Lord seek no place, no wealth, no things, only Christ.
Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.
The unattended garden will soon be overrun with weeds; the heart that fails to cultivate truth and root out error will shortly be a theological wilderness.
If the Lord’s people were only half as eager to be filled with the Spirit as they are to prove that they cannot be filled, the church would be crowded out.
You cannot study the Bible diligently and earnestly without being struck by an obvious fact-the whole matter of personal holiness is highly important to God!
Shall it be a religion or shall it be Christ? Shall it be churchianity or shall it be Jesus Christ? Shall it be pride or shall it be humility in Jesus Christ?
Jesus Christ our Lord surrendered in order that He might win; He destroyed His enemies by dying for them and conquered death by allowing death to conquer Him.
We wonder why we don’t have faith; the answer is, faith is confidence in the character of God and if we don’t know what kind of God God is, we can’t have faith.
I remind you that there are churches so completely out of the hands of God that if the Holy Spirit withdrew from them, they wouldn’t find it out for many months
God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all His works. He is transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.
Christian theology teaches the doctrine of prevenient grace, which briefly stated means this, that before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man.
The task of the church is twofold: to spread Christianity throughout the world and to make sure that the Christianity she spreads is the pure New Testament kind.
True religion is removed from diet and days, from garments and ceremonies, and placed where it belongs – in the union of the spirit of man with the Spirit of God.
The body becomes stronger as its members become healthier. The whole church of God gains when the members that compose it begin to seek a better and a higher life.
We can afford to follow Him to failure. Faith dares to fail. The resurrection and the judgment will demonstrate before all worlds who won and who lost. We can wait.
As a sunbeam perishes when cut off from the sun, so man apart from God would pass back into the void of nothingness from which he first leaped at the creative call.
The atonement in Jesus Christ’s blood is perfect; there isn’t anything that can be added to it. It is spotless, impeccable, flawless. It is perfect as God is perfect.
Worship, I say, rises or falls with our concept of God …. and if there is one terrible disease in the Church of Christ, it is that we do not see God as great as He is.
But the sons of this world have not God; they have only each other, and they walk holding to each other and looking to one another for assurance like frightened children.
Selfishness is never so exquisitely selfish as when it is on its knees. … Self turns what would otherwise be a pure and powerful prayer into a weak and ineffective one.
If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.
You will never please everybody. Some men will say you have gone too far. Other men will say you haven’t gone far enough. I just compromise and say I won’t please anybody.
Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him. They should be recognized for what they are, God’s loan to us, and should never be considered in any sense our own
The true follower of Christ will not ask, “If I embrace this truth, what will it cost me?” Rather he will say, “This is truth. God help me to walk in it, let come what may!”
For millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.
The Christian woman should remember that she cannot buy true attractiveness; that radiance which really shines forth in beauty is of the heart and spirit and not of the body.
Until we believe that we are as bad as God says we are, we can never believe that He will do for us what He says He will do. Right here is where popular religion breaks down.
I have no doubt that historians will conclude that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.
The average Christian is so cold and so contented with His wretched condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can rush in satisfying fullness.
What God declares the believing heart confesses without the need of further proof. Indeed, to seek proof is to admit doubt, and to obtain proof is to render faith superfluous.
Holiness, as taught in the Scriptures, is not based upon knowledge on our part. Rather, it is based upon the resurrected Christ in-dwelling us and changing us into His likeness.
People who are crucified with Christ have three distinct marks: 1. they are facing only one direction, 2. they can never turn back, and 3. they no longer have plans of their own.
I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.
Nothing that God has ever said about Himself will be modified; nothing the inspired prophets and apostles have said about Him will be rescinded. His immutability guarantees this.
The various elements of truth stand in perpetual antithesis, sometimes requiring us to believe apparent opposites while we wait for the moment when we shall know as we are known.
The Bible recognizes no faith that does not lead to obedience, nor does it recognize any obedience that does not spring from faith. The two are at opposite sides of the same coin.
Hardly anything else reveals so well the fear and uncertainty among men as the length to which they will go to hide their true selves from each other and even from their own eyes.
In many churches Christianity has been watered down until the solution is so weak that if it were poison it would not hurt anyone, and if it were medicine it would not cure anyone!
If God gives you a few more years, remember, it is not yours. Your time must honor God, your home must honor God, your activity must honor God, and everything you do must honor God.
I believe that entertainment and amusements are the work of the Enemy to keep dying men from knowing they’re dying; and to keep enemies of God from remembering that they’re enemies.
Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, “What comes into your mind when you think about God?” we might predict with certainty the future of that man.
For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.
It is because of the hasty and superficial conversation with God that the sense of sin is so weak and that no motives have power to help you to hate and flee from sin as you should.
I think a new world will arise out of the religious mists when we approach our Bible with the idea that it is not only a book which was once spoken, but a book which is now speaking.
The true Christian is one who is kind of sick of this world. If I find anybody who is settled down too snugly into this world, I am made to doubt whether he’s ever truly been born again
The man who is seriously convinced that he deserves hell is not likely to go there, while the man who believes that he is worthy of heaven will certainly never enter that blessed place.
The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it.
When our Lord looked at us, He saw not only what we were — He was faithful in seeing what we could become! He took away the curse of being and gave us the glorious blessing of becoming.
In almost everything that touches our everyday life on earth, God is pleased when we’re pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our maker’s praise without anxiety.
One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.
With the goodness of God to desire our highest welfare, the wisdom of God to plan it, and the power of God to achieve it, what do we lack? Surely we are the most favored of all creatures.
Men may flee from the sunlight to dark and musty caves of the earth, but they cannot put out the sun. So men may in any dispensation despise the grace of God, but they cannot extinguish it.
There are such things as consecrated griefs, sorrows that may be common to everyone but which take on a special character when accepted intelligently and offered to God in loving submission.
The man who has been taught by the Holy Spirit will be a seer rather than a scholar. The difference is that the scholar sees and the seer sees through; and that is a mighty difference indeed.
Jesus calls us to his rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort.
A satisfying prayer life elevates and purifies every act of body and mind and integrates the entire personality into a single spiritual unit. In the long pull we pray only as well as we live.
No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in seeking to know and do the will of God, leaving to Christ the matter of how happy he should be.
There is scarcely anything so dull and meaningless as Bible doctrine taught for its own sake. Truth divorced from life is not truth in its Biblical sense, but something else and something less.
What now does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience? It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here. Ther eis no place, there can be no place, where He is not.
What do we value most? What would we most hate to lose? What do our thoughts turn to most frequently when we are free to think of what we will? And finally, what affords us the greatest pleasure?
To become effective men of God, then, we must know and acknowledge that every grace and every virtue proceeds from God alone, and that not even a good thought can come from us except it be of Him.
A true and safe leader is likely to be one who has no desire to lead, but is forced into a position of leadership by the inward pressure of the Holy Spirit and the press of the external situation.
Religious externals may have meaning for the God-inhabited soul; for any others they are not only useless but may actually become snares, deceiving them into a false and perilous sense of security.
To be entirely safe from the devil’s snares the man of God must be completely obedient to the Word of the Lord. The driver on the highway is safe, not when he reads the signs but when he obeys them.
An infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as fully as if there were no others.
For myself, I long ago decided that I would rather know the truth than be happy in ignorance. If I can not have both truth and happiness, give me truth. We’ll have a long time to be happy in heaven.
Apart from God nothing matters. We think that health matters, that freedom matters, or knowledge or art or civilization. And but for one insistent word they would matter indeed. That word is eternity.
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.
To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men. This is such a common truth that one hesitates to mention it, yet it appears to have been overlooked by the majority of Christians today.
If faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest things possible to do.
To expose our hearts to truth and consistently refuse or neglect to obey the impulses it arouses is to stymie the motions of life within us and, if persisted in, to grieve the Holy Spirit into silence.
The meek man will attain a place of soul rest. As he walks on in meekness he will be happy to let God defend him. The old struggle to defend himself is over. He has found the peace which meekness brings.
The basic trouble with the church today is her unworthy concept of God… Our religion is weak because our God is weak… Christianity at any given time is strong or weak depending on her concept of God.
Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and bring Him nearer to our own image.
We can express our worship to God in many ways. But if we love the Lord and are led by His Holy Spirit, our worship will always bring a delighted sense of admiring awe and a sincere humility on our part.
If we cooperate with Him in loving obedience, God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face.
Only as He is faithful will His covenants stand and His promises be honored. Only as we have complete assurance that He is faithful may we live in peace and look forward with assurance to the life to come.
Any spirit that permits compromise with the world is a false spirit. Any religious movement that imitates the world in any of its manifestations is false to the cross of Christ and on the side of the devil.
We must of necessity be servant to someone, either to God or to sin. The man who surrenders to Christ exchanges a cruel slave driver for a kind and gentle master whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.
It is necessary for God to use the hammers, the file, and the furnace in His holy work of preparing a saint for true sainthood. It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.
The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.
…popular fundamentalist theology has emphasized the utility of the cross rather than the beauty of the One who died on it… The “work” of Christ has been stressed until it has eclipsed the person of Christ.
Keep my eyes fixed on You, Lord. Help me to stop tinkering and realize my total inability to change. I look to You to change me and give me victory as I focus on Your friendly eyes looking lovingly at me. Amen.
Rules for Self Discovery: 1. What we want most; 2. What we think about most; 3. How we use our money; 4. What we do with our leisure time; 5. The company we enjoy; 6. Who and what we admire; 7. What we laugh at.
The doctrine of the Trinity…is truth for the heart. The fact that it can not be satisfactorily explained, instead of being against it, is in its favor. Such a truth had to be revealed; no one could imagine it.
We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensibl e and unattainable… Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard.
Teach us to know that we cannot know, for the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Let faith support us where reason fails, and we shall think because we believe, not in order that we may believe.
The most critical need of the church at this moment is men, bold men, free men. The church must seek, in prayer and much humility, the coming again of men made of the stuff of which prophets and martyrs are made.
God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.
When the Spirit illuminates the heart, then a part of the man sees which never saw before; a part of him knows which never knew before, and that with a kind of knowing which the most acute thinker cannot imitate.
The faith of Christ offers no buttons to push for quick service. The new order must wait the Lord’s own time, and that is too much for the man in a hurry. He just gives up and becomes interested in something else.
One of the most popular current errors, and the one out of which springs most of the noisy, blustering religious activity in evangelical circles, is the notion that as times change the church must change with them.
The believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and whispers, “God.” The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things.
The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed… The heart’s fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest.
I wish that we might get back to worship again. Then when people come into the church they will instantly sense that they have come among holy people, God’s people. They can testify, ‘Of a truth God is in this place’
God will speak to the hearts of those who prepare themselves to hear; and conversely, those who do not so prepare themselves will hear nothing even though the Word of God is falling upon their outer ears every Sunday.
The man who preaches truth and applies it to the lives of his hearers will feel the nails and the thorns. He will lead a hard life, but a glorious one. May God raise up many such prophets. The church needs them badly.
If you do not worship God seven days a week, you do not worship Him on one day a week. There is no such thing known in heaven as Sunday worship unless it is accompanied by Monday worship and Tuesday worship and so on.
Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it.
Deliverance can come to us only by the defeat of our old life. Safety and peace come only after we have been forced to our knees. God rescues us by breaking us, by shattering our strength and wiping out our resistance.
To men and women everywhere Jesus says, “Come unto me, and I will give you rest.” The rest He offers is the rest of meekness, the blessed relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to pretend.
We get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God. We are right when, and only when, we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position.
Mans nature indicates that he was created for three things: To think, to worship and to work. But thinking is not enough. Men are made to worship also, to bow down and adore in the presence of the Mystery inexpressible.
The man that believes will obey; failure to obey is convincing proof that there is no true faith present. To attempt the impossible God must give faith or there will be none, and He gives faith to the obedient heart only.
Made as we were in the image of God we scarcely find it strange to take again our God as our All. God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode.
The sovereign God wants to be loved for Himself and honoured for Himself, but that is only part of what He wants. The other part is that He wants us to know that when we have Him we have everything – we have all the rest.
God is not silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second person of the Holy Trinity is called “The Word.” The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind.
For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he is his deep heart conceives God to be like.
Have you noticed how much praying for revival has been going on of late – and how little revival has resulted? I believe the problem is that we have been trying to substitute praying for obeying, and it simply will not work.
When the Holy Spirit is in full control of our lives, He will expect our obedience to the written Word of God. But it is part of our human problem that we would like to be full of the Spirit and yet go on and do as we please!
The author squares man’s depravity with still being made in the image of God with this word picture. A vase that has held beautiful roses though now broken, will nevertheless hold something of the fragrance it once contained.
I believe in Christian charity, but I don’t believe in Christian tolerance… When we become so tolerate that we lead people into mental fog and spiritual darkness, we are not acting like Christians; we are acting like cowards!
There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the [christian] life. Because it is so natural, it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is. But its outworkings are tragic.
The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven’t yet come to the end of themselves. We’re still trying to give orders, and interfering with God’s work within us.
God did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a distance by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to persist across the years.
The idea that the Man Christ Jesus has absolute and final authority over the whole church and over all of its members in every detail of their lives is simply not now accepted as true by the rank and file of evangelical Christians
God’s redemptive revelation in Scripture is necessary to saving faith and peace with God. Faith in a risen Savior is necessary if the vague stirrings toward immortality are to bring us to restful and satisfying communion with God.
The love of God is one of the great realities of the universe, a pillar upon which the hope of the world rests. But it is a personal, intimate thing too. God does not love populations, He loves people. He loves not masses, but men.
All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with that overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.
Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.
This is the tragedy and woe of the hour–that we neglect the most important One who could possibly be in our midst–the Holy Spirit of God. Then, in order to make up for His absence, we have to do something to keep up our own spirits.
Pseudo faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God fails it. Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped of any second way or makeshift substitutes. For true faith, it is either God or total collapse.
God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities. He meant us to see Him and live with Him and draw our life from His smile.
The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him.
The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.
I’m not afraid of the devil. The devil can handle me – he’s got judo I never heard of. But he can’t handle the One to whom I’m joined; he can’t handle the One to whom I’m united; he can’t handle the One whose nature dwells in my nature.
He fills heaven and earth as the ocean fills the bucket that is submerged in it, and as the ocean surrounds the bucket so does God in the universe He fills. “The heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee.” God is not contained: He contains.
The main thing is this: we should never blame anyone or anything for our defeats. No matter how evil their intentions may be, they are altogether unable to harm us until we begin to blame them and use them as excuses for our own unbelief.
If Bible Christianity is to survive the present world upheaval, we shall need to have a fresh revelation of the greatness and the beauty of Jesus…. He alone can raise our cold hearts to rapture and restore again the art of true worship.
No matter what the circumstances, we Christians should keep our heads. God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, of love and of a sound mind. It is a dismal thing to see a son of heaven cringe in terror before the sons of earth.
May not the inadequacy of much of our spiritual experience be traced back to our habit of skipping through the corridors of the Kingdom like children in the market place, chattering about everything, but pausing to learn the value of nothing.
We Christians must simplify our lives or lose untold treasures on earth and in eternity. Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. The need for solitude and quietness was never greater than it is today.
Yes, I believe you can be right with God and still not like the way some people behave. Our admonition is to love them in a larger and more comprehensive way because we are all one in Christ Jesus. This kind of love is indeed a Christian virtue!
What I am anxious to see in Christian believers is a beautiful paradox. I want to see in them the joy of finding God while at the same time they are blessedly pursuing Him. I want to see in them the great joy of having God yet always wanting Him.
The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all.
God wants us to worship Him. He doesn’t need us, for He couldn’t be a self-sufficient God and need anything or anybody, but He wants us. When Adam sinned it was not he who cried, ‘God, where art Thou?’ It was God who cried, ‘Adam, where art thou?’
God may allow His servant to succeed when He has disciplined him to a point where he does not need to succeed to be happy. The man who is elated by success and is cast down by failure is still a carnal man. At best his fruit will have a worm in it.
When God justifies a sinner, everything in God is on the sinner’s side. All the attributes of God are on the sinner’s side. It isn’t that mercy is pleading for the sinner and justice is trying to beat him to death. All of God does all that God does.
Salvation is from our side a choice, from the divine side it is a seizing upon, an apprehending, a conquest by the Most High God. Our ‘accepting’ and ‘willing’ are reactions rather than actions. The right of determination must always remain with God.
The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal, how can you hope to find inward peace?
It is a high Christian privilege to pray for one another within each local church body and then for other believers throughout the world. As a Christian minister, I have no right to preach to people I have not prayed for. That is my strong conviction.
I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with symptoms.
We have full confidence in Jesus Christ. Our confidence rises as the character of God becomes greater and more trustworthy to our spiritual comprehension. The One with whom we deal is the One who embodies faithfulness and truth-the One who cannot lie.
Our most pressing obligation is to do all in our power to obtain a revival that will result in a reformed, revitalized, purified church. Each generation of Christians is the seed of the next, and degenerate seed is sure to produce a degenerate harvest.
It is either all of Christ or none of Christ! I believe we need to preach again a whole Christ to the world – a Christ who does not need our apologies, a Christ who will not be divided, a Christ who will either be Lord of all or will not be Lord at all!
Whoever seeks God as a means toward desired ends will not find God. The mighty God, the maker of heaven and earth, will not be one of many treasures, not even the chief of all treasures. He will be all in all or He will be nothing. God will not be used.
When we try to focus our thought upon One who is pure uncreated being we may see nothing at all, for He dwelleth in light that no man can approach unto. Only by faith and love are we able to glimpse Him as He passes by our shelter in the cleft of the rock.
Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God. Believing, then, is directing the hearts’ attention to Jesus. It is lifting the mind to ‘behold the Lamb of God,’ and never ceasing that beholding for the rest of our lives.
Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its trust, not in the living God but in dying men. The unbeliever denies the selfsufficiency of God and usurps attributes that are not his. This dual sin dishonors God and ultimately destroys the soul of man.
We desperately need seers who can see through the mist- Christian leaders with prophetic vision. Unless they come soon it will be too late for this generation. And if they do come we will no doubt crucify a few of them in the name of our worldly orthodoxy.
Most of us go through life praying a little, planning a little, jockeying for position, hoping but never being quite certain of anything, and always secretly afraid that we will miss the way. This is a tragic waste of truth and never gives rest to the heart.
Any faith that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living.
Until self-effacing men return again to spiritual leadership, we may expect a progressive deterioration in the quality of popular Christianity year after year till we reach the point where the grieved Holy Spirit withdraws – like the Shekinah from the temple.
Wise leaders should have known that the human heart cannot exist in a vacuum. If Christians are forbidden to enjoy the wine of the Spirit they will turn to the wine of the flesh….Christ died for our hearts and the Holy Spirit wants to come and satisfy them.
The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life: In himself, nothing; In God, everything. He knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring.
He (God) may sometimes chasten us, it is true, but even this He does with a smile, the proud, tender smile of a Father who is bursting with pleasure over an imperfect but promising son who is coming every day to look more and more like the One whose child he is.
You know, we’ll hardly get our feet out of time [and] into eternity that we’ll bow our heads in shame and humiliation. We’ll gaze on eternity and say, ‘My God! Look at all the riches there were in Jesus Christ, and I’ve come to the Judgment Seat almost a pauper!
God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ’s sake, Amen.
The experiences of men who walked with God in olden times agree to teach that the Lord cannot fully bless the a man until He has first conquered him. The degree of blessing enjoyed by any man will correspond exactly with the completeness of God’s victory over him.
Christians alone are in a position to rescue the perishing. We dare not settle down to try to live as if things were ‘normal.’ Nothing is normal while sin and lust and death roam the world, pouncing upon one and another till the whole population has been destroyed.
Pay no heed to the passing religious vogue. Go back to the grass roots. Open your hearts and search the Scriptures. Bear your cross, follow your Lord. The masses are always wrong. In every generation the number of the righteous is small. Be sure you are among them.
We are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations, and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart.
Let any man turn to God in earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness, let him seek to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days.
Whenever you see confusion, you can be sure that something is wrong. Disorder in the world implies that something is out of place. Usually, at the heart of all disorder you will find man in rebellion against God. It began in the Garden of Eden and continues to this day.
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 by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.
We who follow Christ are men and women of eternity. We must put no confidence in the passing scenes of the disappearing world. We must resist every attempt of Satan to palm off upon us the values that belong to mortality. Nothing less than forever is long enough for us.
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.
The victorious Christian neither exalts nor downgrades himself. His interests have shifted from self to Christ. What he is or is not no longer concerns him. He believes that he has been crucified with Christ and he is not willing either to praise or deprecate such a man.
To understand a Bible text it takes an act of the Holy Spirit equal to the act that inspired the text in the first place. A revelation of the Holy Spirit in one glorious flash of inward illumination would teach you more of Jesus than five years in a theological seminary.
What good is all our busy religion if God isn’t in it? What good is it if we’ve lost majesty, reverence, worship-an awareness of the divine? What good is it if we’ve lost a sense of the Presence and the ability to retreat within our own hearts and meet God in the garden?
I think that most Christians would be better pleased if the Lord did not inquire into their personal affairs too closely. They want Him to save them, to keep them happy, and to take them off to heaven at last, but not to be too inquisitive about their conduct or services.
One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency.. Orthodox Christianity has fallen to its present low estate from lack of spiritual desire. Among the many who profess the Christian faith, scarcely one in a thousand reveals any passionate thirst for God.
We who live in this nervous age would be wise to meditate on our lives and our days long and often before the face of God and on the edge of eternity. For we are made for eternity as certainly as we are made for time, and as responsible moral beings we must deal with both.
It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity.
If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to you. Do not come with the notion that it is a thing which you may push around at your convenience. It is more than a thing, it is a voice, a word, the very Word of the living God.
I am looking for the fellowship of the burning heart–for men and women of all generations everywhere who love the Savior until adoration becomes the music of their soul until they don’t have to be fooled with and entertained and amused. Jesus Christ is everything, all-in-all.
Though the cross of Christ has been beautified by the poet and the artist, the avid seeker after God is likely to find it the same savage implement of destruction it was in the days of old. The way of the cross is still the pain-wracked path to spiritual power and fruitfulness.
God desires and is pleased to communicate with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills, and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the souls of the redeemed men and women is the throbbing heart of the New Testament.
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.
Where God and man are in relationship, this must be the ideal. God must be the communicator, and man must be in the listening, obeying attitude. If men and women are not willing to assume this listening attitude, there will be no meeting with God in living, personal experience.
If God takes away from us the old, wrinkled, beat-up dollar bill we have clutched so desperately, it is only because He wants to exchange it for the whole Federal mint, the entire treasury! He is saying to us, ‘I have in store for you all the resources of heaven. Help yourself.’
If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.
If a man has only correct doctrine to offer me, I am sure to slip out at the first intermission to seek the company of someone who has seen for himself how lovely is the face of Him who is the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley. Such a man can help me, and no one else can.
The kingdom of God is not in words. Words are only incidental and can never be fundamental. When evangelicalism ceased to emphasize fundamental meanings and began emphasizing fundamental words, and shifted from meaning to words and from power to words, they began to go down hill.
Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. If we understand our first and sole duty to consist of loving God supremely and loving everyone, even our enemies, for God’s dear sake, then we can enjoy spiritual tranquility under every circumstance.
The cross where Jesus died became also the cross where His apostle died. The loss, the rejection, the shame, belong both to Christ and to all who in very truth are His. the cross that saves them also slays them, and anything short of this is a pseudo-faith and not true faith at all.
Religion today is not transforming people; rather it is being transformed by the people. It is not raising the moral level of society; it is descending to society’s own level, and congratulating itself that it has scored a victory because society is smilingly accepting its surrender.
Time is a resource that is non-renewable and non-transferable. You cannot store it, slow it up, hold it up, divide it up or give it up. You can’t hoard it up or save it for a rainy day when it’s lost it is unrecoverable. When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.
Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they found Him, the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.
The notion that the careless sinner is the smart fellow and the serious-minded Christian, though well-intentioned, is a stupid dolt altogether out of touch with life will not stand up under scrutiny. Sin is basically an act of moral folly, and the greater the folly the greater the fool.
Nobody ever got anything from God on the grounds that he deserved it. Haven fallen, man deserves only punishment and death. So if God answers prayer it’s because God is good. From His goodness, His lovingkindness, His good-natured benevolence, God does it! That’s the source of everything.
We must have a new reformation. There must come a violent break with that irresponsible, amusement-mad, paganized pseudo-religion which passes today for the faith of Christ and which is being spread all over the world by unspiritual men employing unscriptural methods to achieve their ends.
Love is both a principle and an emotion; it is something both felt and willed. It is capable of almost infinite degrees. Love in the human heart may begin so modestly as to be hardly perceptible and go on to become a raging torrent that sweeps its possessor before it in total helplessness.
No one can know truth except the one who obeys truth. You think you know truth. People memorize the Scriptures by the yard, but that is not a guarantee of knowing the truth. Truth is not a text. Truth is in the text, but it takes the text plus the Holy Spirit to bring truth to a human soul.
A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us, altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize it. God Himself is here awaiting our response to His presence. This eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon its reality.
The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing. The word Jesus used means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do. His own meekness, that is the rest.
The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the ‘poor in spirit.’
To great sections of the church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the ‘program.’ This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.
The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel to much at home in the world. In their effort to achieve restful ‘adjustment’ to unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very moral order against which they are sent to protest.
God takes that which is nothing and makes something out of it. When you become a Christian, you cannot patch your Christianity onto your old life. You are to start over. Accept God’s call as a promotion. Burn the old bridges and fix it so you cannot go back ; then serve God with all your heart.
Our error today is that we do not expect a converted man to be a transformed man, and as a result of this error our churches are full of substandard Christians. A revival is among other things a return to the belief that real faith invariably produces holiness of heart and righteousness of life.
The moment we make up our minds that we are going on with this determination to exalt God overall, we step out of the world√≠s parade… We acquire a new viewpoint; a new and different psychology will be formed within us; a new power will begin to surprise us by its upsurgings and its outgoings.
It is useless for large companies of believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament pattern there can be no true revival.
I find that when people haven’t found God and do not know the new birth and the Spirit is not on them, yet they have the ancient impulse to worship something. If they’re not educated they kill a chicken and put a funny thing on their head and dance around. If they are educated they write poetry.
Nowhere in the Word of God is there any text or passage or line that can be twisted or tortured into teaching that the organic living church of Jesus Christ just prior to His return will not have every right and every power and every obligation that she knew in that early part of the book of Acts.
One thing is certain: the call of Christ is always a promotion. Were Christ to call a king from his throne to preach the gospel to some tribe of aborigines, that king would be elevated above anything he had known before. Any movement toward Christ is ascent, and any direction away from Him is down.
Brother Lawrence expressed the highest moral wisdom when he testified that if he stumbled and fell he turned at once to God and said, ‘O Lord, this is what you may expect of me if You leave me to myself.’ He then accepted forgiveness, thanked God, and gave himself no further concerns about the matter.
How frightful a thing it is for the preacher when he becomes accustomed to his work, when his sense of wonder departs, when he gets used to the unusual, when he loses his solemn fear in the presence of the High and Holy One; when, to put it bluntly, he gets a little bored with God and heavenly things.
We’re here to be worshipers first and workers only second. We take a convert and immediately make a worker out of him. God never meant it to be so. God meant that a convert should learn to be a worshiper, and after that he can learn to be a worker…The work done by a worshiper will have eternity in it.
…revivals (or any other spiritual gifts and graces) come only to those who want them badly enough. It may be said without qualification that every man is as holy and as full of the Spirit as he wants to be. He may not be as full as he wishes he were, but he is most certainly as full as he wants to be.
The Christian church was designed to make sinners sweat. I have always believed that, and I still believe it. The messages preached in our churches should make backslidden Christians sweat. And if I achieve that objective when I preach, I thank God with all of my heart, no matter what people think of me.
Nothing that comes from God will minister to my pride of self-congratulation. If I am tempted to be complacent and to feel superior because I have had a remarkable vision or an advanced spiritual experience, I should go at once to my knees and repent of the whole thing. I have fallen victim to the enemy.
Peace of heart that is won by refusing to bear the common yoke of human sympathy is a peace unworthy of a Christian. To seek tranquility by stopping our ears to the cries of human pain is to make ourselves not Christian but a kind of degenerate stoic having no relation either to stoicism or Christianity.
Let the average man be put to the proof on the question of who is above, and his true position will be exposed. Let him be forced into making a choice between God and money, between God and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human love, and God will take second place every time.
It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought.
The only fear I have is to fear to get out of the will of God. Outside of the will of God, there’s nothing I want, and in the will of God there’s nothing I fear, for God has sworn to keep me in His will. If I’m out of his will that’s another matter. But if I’m in His will, He’s sworn to keep me.
The church that is not jealously protected by mighty intercession and sacrificial labors will before long become the abode of every evil bird and the hiding place for unsuspected corruption. The creeping wilderness will soon take over that church that trusts in its own strength and forgets to watch and pray.
The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians… The ‘worship’ growing out of such a view of life is as far off center as the view itself – a sort of sanctified nightclub without the champagne and the dressed-up drunks.
A Christian should put away all defense and make no attempt to excuse himself either in his own eyes or before the Lord. Whoever defends himself will have himself for his defense, and he will have no other. But let him come defenseless before the Lord and he will have for his defender no less than God Himself.
I would like to live to see the time when the men and woman of God – holy, separated and spiritually enlightened – walk out of the evangelical church and form a group of their own; when they get off the sinking ship and let her go down in the brackish and worldliness and form a new ark to ride out the storm.
What then are we to do about our problems? We must learn to live with them until such time as God delivers us from them…we must pray for grace to endure them without murmuring. Problems patiently endured will work for our spiritual perfecting. They harm us only when we resist them or endure them unwillingly.
The man with a cross no longer controls his destiny; he lost control when he picked up his cross. That cross immediately became to him an all-absorbing interest, an overwhelming interference. No matter what he may desire to do, there is but one thing he can do; that is, move on toward the place of crucifixion.
Prayer is never an acceptable substitute for obedience. The sovereign Lord accepts no offering from His creatures that is not accompanied by obedience. To pray for revival while ignoring or actually flouting the plain precept laid down in the Scriptures is to waste a lot of words and get nothing for our trouble.
Worship is to feel in your heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder and overpowering love in the presence of that most Ancient Mystery, that Majesty which philosophers call the first cause, but which we call our Father which art in heaven.
The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she has not done deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic.
We may sing, ‘Crown Him Lord of all,’ and rejoice in the tones of the loud-sounding organ and the deep melody of harmonious voices, but still we have done nothing until we have left the world and set our faces toward the city of God in hard practical reality. When faith becomes obedience then it is true faith indeed.
In Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure , although He shows Himself not to reason but to faith and love. Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience. God came to us in the incarnation; in atonement He reconciled us to Himself, and by faith and love we enter and lay hold on Him.
When God would make His Name known to mankind He could find no better word than “I AM.” When He speaks in the first person He says, “I AM”; when we speak of Him we say, “He is”; when we speak to Him we say, “Thou art.” Everyone and everything else measures from that fixed point. “I am that I am,” says God, “I change not.”
I am a Bible Christian and if an archangel with a wingspread as broad as a constellation shining like the sun were to come and offer me some new truth, I’d ask him for a reference. If he could not show me where it is found in the Bible, I would bow him out and say, I’m awfully sorry, you don’t bring any references with you
And what kind of habitation pleases God? What must our natures be like before he can feel at home within us? He asks nothing but a pure heart and a single mind. He asks no rich paneling, no rugs from the Orient, no art treasures from afar. He desires but sincerity, transparency, humility, and love. He will see to the rest.
Whenever God begins something, we have the assurance that He will finish it. Nothing will stand in the way of Him accomplishing His purpose in this world and in our lives. What God starts, He finishes, and nobody can hinder Him. Sure, delays will happen. Just remember, God is in charge of the delays as well as the progress.
Such words as amen, hallelujah, glory and others of like sacred association are repeated endlessly and meaninglessly in the apparent belief that they have in them some strange power for good. This can be no more than high-grade magic. It will pay us to search our own hearts thoroughly to discover just why we use these words.
The greatest encouragement throughout the Bible is God’s love for His lost race and the willingness of Christ, the eternal Son, to show forth that love in God’s plan of redemption. The love of Jesus is so inclusive that it knows no boundaries. At the point where we stop caring and loving, Jesus is still there loving and caring
There are two classes of Christians: the proud who imagine they are humble and the humble who are afraid they are proud. There should be another class: the self-forgetful who leave the whole thing in the hands of Christ and refuse to waste any time trying to make themselves good. They will reach the goal far ahead of the rest.
To me, it has always been difficult to understand those evangelical Christians who insist upon living in the crisis as if no crisis existed. They say they serve the Lord, but they divide their days so as to leave plenty of time to play and loaf and enjoy the pleasures of the world as well. They are at ease while the world burns.
The true Church has never sounded out public expectations before launching her mission. Her leaders heard from God, they knew their Lord’s will and did it. Their people followed them – sometimes to triumph, oftener to insults and public persecution – and their sufficient reward was the satisfaction of being right in a wrong world!
A church can wither as surely under the ministry of soulless Bible exposition as it can where no Bible is given. To be effective the preacher’s message must be alive; it must alarm, arouse, challenge; it must be God’s present voice to a particular people. Then, and not till then, is it the prophetic word and the man himself a prophet.
Churches are more prosperous than at any time within the past several hundred years. But the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly internal; and since it is the quality of our religion that is affected by internal conditions, it may be that our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field.
The yearning to know what cannot be known, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to touch and taste the unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its source.
Breezy, self-confident Christians tell us how wonderful it is to accept Christ and then have a good time all the rest of your life; the Lord won’t demand anything of you. Yes, He will, my friend! The Lord will demand everything of you. And when you give it all up to Him, He may bless it and hand it back, but on the other hand He may not.
The widest thing in the universe is not space; it is the potential capacity of the human heart. Being made in the image of God, it is capable of almost unlimited extension in all directions. And one of the world’s greatest tragedies is that we allow our hearts to shrink until there is room in them for little besides ourselves.
If you have to be reasoned into Christianity, some wise fellow can reason you out of it! If you come to Christ by a flash of the Holy Spirit so that by intuition you know that you are God’s child, you know it by the text but you also know it by the inner light, the inner illumination of the Spirit, and no one can ever reason you out of it.
Sometimes I go to God and say, “God, if Thou dost never answer another prayer while I live on this earth, I will still worship Thee as long as I live and in the ages to come for what Thou hast done already. God’s already put me so far in debt that if I were to live one million millenniums I couldn’t pay Him for what He’s done for me.
We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety; this is especially true when those treasures are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.
Retire from the world each day to some private spot. Stay in the secret place till the surrounding noises begin to fade out of your heart and a sense of God’s presence envelops you. Deliberately tune out the unpleasant sounds and come out of your closet determined not to hear them. Listen for the inward voice till you learn to recognize it.
The poor quality of Christian that grows out of our modern evangelistic meeting may be accounted for by the absence of real repentance accompanying the initial spiritual experience of the converts. And the absence of repentance is the result of an inadequate view of sin and sinfulness held by those who present themselves in the inquiry room.
When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life. But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart.
God calls us to worship, but in many instances we are in entertainment, just running a poor second to the theaters. That is where we are, even in the evangelical churches, and I don’t mind telling you that most of the people we say we are trying to reach will never come to a church to see a lot of amateur actors putting on a home-talent show.
Whoever will listen will hear the speaking heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion. We are at the opposite end of the pole from there. Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.
When religion has said its last word, there is little that we need other than God Himself. The evil habit of seeking God-and effectively prevents us from finding God in full revelation. In the and lies our great woe. If we omit the and we shall soon find God, and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing.
The only cross in all of history that was turned into an altar was the cross on which Jesus Christ died. It was a Roman cross. They nailed Him on it, and God, in His majesty and mystery, turned it into an altar. The Lamb who was dying in the mystery and wonder of God was turned into the Priest who offered Himself. No one else was a worthy offering.
We must like Moses cover ourselves with faith and humility while we steal a quick look at the God whom no man can see and live. The broken and the contrite heart He will not despise. We must hide our unholiness in the wounds of Christ as Moses hid himself in the cleft of the rock while the glory of God passed by. We must take refuge from God in God.
It is astonishing, how many difficulties clear up without any effort when the inner life gets straightened out. If half the time we spend trying to fix up outward things were spent in getting our hearts right, we would be delighted with the result. Strange as it may seem, harmony within our hearts depends mostly upon our getting into harmony with God.
We love the old saints, missionaries, martyrs, and reformers. Our Luthers, Bunyans, Wesleys and Asburys, etc… We will write their biographies, reverence their memories, frame their epitaphs, and build their monuments. We will do anything except imitate them. We cherish the last drop of their blood, but watch carefully over the first drop of our own.
What does this word holiness really mean? Is it a negative kind of piety from which so many people have shied away? No, of course not! Holiness in the Bible means moral wholeness– a positive quality which actually includes kindness, mercy, purity, moral blamelessness and godliness. It is always to be thought of in a positive, white intensity of degree.
Now, brethren, this is one of our greatest faults in our Christian lives. We are allowing too many rivals of God. We actually have too many gods. We have too many irons in the fire. We have too much theology that we don’t understand. We have too much churchly institutionalism. We have too much religion. Actually, I guess we just have too much of too much.
Fundamentalism has stood aloof from the liberal in self-conscious superiority and has on its own part fallen into error, the error of textualism, which is simply orthodoxy without the Holy Ghost. Everywhere among conservatives we find persons who are Bible-taught but not Spirit-taught. They conceive truth to be something which they can grasp with the mind.
We who preach the gospel must not think of ourselves as public relations agents sent to establish good will between Christ and the world. We must not imagine ourselves commissioned to make Christ acceptable to big business, the press, the world of sports or modern education. We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum.
Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications. We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it. We boast in the Lord but watch carefully that we never get caught depending on Him.
The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life in regeneration our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the Kingdom of God. It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart’s happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead.
In the Book of Acts faith was for each believer a beginning, not an end; it was a journey, not a bed in which to lie while waiting for the day of our Lord’s triumph. Believing was not a once-done act; it was more than an act, it was an attitude of heart and mind which inspired and enabled the believer to take up his cross and follow the Lamb whithersoever He went.
We must face the fact that many today are notoriously careless in their living. This attitude finds its way into the church. We have liberty, we have money, we live in comparative luxury. As a result, discipline has disappeared. What would a violin solo sound like if the strings on the musician’s instrument were all hanging loose, not stretched tight, not disciplined?
In the conduct of our public worship where is the authority of Christ to be found? The truth is that today the Lord rarely controls a service, and the influence He exerts is very small. We sing of Him and preach about Him, but He must not interfere; we worship our way, and it must be right because we have always done it that way, as have the other churches in our group.
I want to be a more serious-minded Christian, more detached from this world, more ready for heaven than I have ever been in my whole life. I want an ear that is sharp to know the voice of the enemy, whether it comes from religion, politics, or philosophy … I would rather stand and have everybody my enemy than to go along with the crowd to destruction. Do you feel that way?
So when we sing, ‘Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord,’ we are not thinking of the nearness of place, but of the nearness of relationship. It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence. We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts.
The Universal Presence is a fact. God is here. And He is no strange or foreign God, but the familiar Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who love has for thousands of years enfolded the sinful race of men. And always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate with us. We have within us the ability to know Him if we will but respond to His overtures.
The problem of why God created the universe still troubles thinking men; but if we cannot know why, we can at least know that He did not bring His worlds into being to meet some unfulfilled need in Himself, as a man might build a house to shelter him against the winter cold or plant a field of corn to provide him with necessary food. The word ‘necessary’ is wholly foreign to God.
The idea that God will pardon a rebel who has not given up his rebellion is contrary both to the Scriptures and to common sense. How horrible to contemplate a church full of persons who have been pardoned but who still love sin and hate the ways of righteousness. And how much more horrible to think of heaven as filled with sinners who had not repented nor changed their way of living.
Were all human beings suddenly 2 become blind, still the sun would shine by day and the stars by night, for these owe nothing 2 the millions who benifit from their light. So were every man on earth 2 become atheist it could not affect God in any way. He is what He is in Himself without regard to any other. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections to doubt Him takes nothing away.
Whatever God felt about anything, He still feels. Whatever He thought about anyone, He still thinks. Whatever He approved, He still approves. Whatever He condemned, He still condemns. Today we have what they call the relativity of morals. But remember this God never changes. Holiness and righteousness are conformity to the will of God. And the will of God never changes for moral creatures.
The love of Christ both wounds and heals, it fascinates and frightens, it kills and makes alive, it draws and repulses. There can be nothing more terrible or wonderful than to be stricken with love for Christ so deeply that the whole being goes out in a pained adoration of His person, an adoration that disturbs and disconcerts while it purges and satisfies and relaxes the deep inner heart.
In my creature impatience I am often caused to wish that there were some way to bring modern Christians into a deeper spiritual life painlessly by short, easy lessons; but such wishes are vain. No shortcut exists. God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. It is well that we accept the hard truth now: The man who would know God must give time to Him.
The God of the modern evangelical rarely astonishes anybody. He manages to stay pretty much with the constitution. Never break our by-laws. He’s a very well-behaved God and very denominational and very much like one of us…we ask Him to help us when we’re in trouble and look to Him to watch over us when we’re asleep. The God of the modern evangelical isn’t a God I could have much respect for.
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.
Jesus Christ left us an example for our daily conduct. He felt no bitter resentment and He held no grudge against anyone! Even those who crucified Him were forgiven while they were in the act. Not a word did He utter against them nor against the ones who stirred them up to destroy Him. How evil they all were. He knew better than any other man, but He maintained a charitable attitude toward them.
We may as well face it: the whole level of spirituality among us is low. We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone (We) have imitated the world, sought popular favor, manufactured delights to substitute for the joy of the Lord and produced a cheap and synthetic power to substitute for the power of the Holy Ghost.
So, it becomes the devil’s business to keep the Christian’s spirit imprisoned. He knows that the believing and justified Christian has been raised up out of the grave of his sins. From that point on, Satan works that much harder to keep us bound and gagged, in our own grave clothes. He knows that if we continue in this kind of bondage…we are not much better off than when we were spiritually dead.
I say that a Christian congregation can survive and often appear to prosper in the community by the exercise of human talent and without any touch from the Holy Spirit! All that religious activity and the dear people will not know anything better until the great and terrible day when our self-employed talents are burned with fire and only that which was wrought by the Holy Ghost will stand forever!
The Christian gospel is a message of freedom through grace and we must stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. But what shall we do with our freedom? The Apostle Paul grieved that some of the believers of his day took advantage of their freedom and indulged the flesh in the name of Christian liberty. They threw off discipline, scorned obedience and made gods of their own bellies.
Most of the world’s great souls have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness… Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross.
I am among those who believe that our Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has many commendable qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian ethic, but it lacks the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence. Future historians will record that we of the twentieth century had intelligence enough to create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.
Teach us, O God, that nothing is necessary to Thee. Were anything necessary to Thee that thing would be the measure of Thine imperfection: and how could we worship one who is imperfect? If nothing is necessary to Thee, then no one is necessary, and if no one, then not we. Thou dost seek us though Thou does not need us. We seek Thee because we need Thee, for in Thee we live and move and have our being. Amen.
Why do some persons ‘find’ God in a way that others do not? Why does God manifest His Presence to some and let multitudes of others struggle along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience? Of course the will of God is the same for all. He has no favorites within His household. All He has ever done for any of His children He will do for all of His children. The difference lies not with God but with us.
Any objection to the carryings on of our present gold-calf Christianity is met with the triumphant reply, ‘But we are winning them!’ Winning them to what? To true discipleship? To cross-carrying? To self-denial? To separation from the world? To crucifixion of the flesh? To holy living? To hard self-discipline ? To love for God? To total committal to Christ? Of course the answer to all these questions is…No.
As base a thing as money often is, yet it can be transmuted into everlasting treasure. It can be converted into food for the hungry and clothing for the poor. It can keep a missionary actively winning lost men to the light of the gospel and thus transmute itself into heavenly values. Any temporal possession can be turned into everlasting wealth. Whatever is given to Christ is immediately touched with immortality.
The fact is that, we are not producing saints. We are making converts to an effete type of Christianity, that bears little resemblance to that of the New Testament. The average so-called Bible Christian of our times is but a shallow display of true sainthood. Yet, we put millions of dollars behind movements’ to perpetuate this lower form of religion and attack the man who dares to challenge the wisdom of it.
The trouble is that the whole ‘accept Christ’ attitude is likely to be wrong. It shows Christ applying to us rather than us to him. It makes him stand hat-in-hand awaiting our verdict on him, instead of our kneeling with troubled hearts awaiting his verdict on us. It may even permit us to accept Christ by an impulse of mind or emotions, painlessly, at no loss to our ego and no inconvenience to our usual way of life.
If man had his way, the plan of redemption would be an endless and bloody conflict. In reality, salvation was bought not by Jesus fist, but by His nail-pierced hands; not by muscle but by love; not by vengeance but by forgiveness; not by force but by sacrifice. Jesus Christ our Lord surrendered in order that He might win; He destroyed His enemies by dying for them and conquered death by allowing death to conquer Him.
A true and safe leader is likely to be one who has no desire to lead, but is forced into a position by the inward pressure of the Holy Spirit and the press of [circumstances]… The man who is ambitious to lead is disqualified as a leader. The true leader will have no desire to lord it over God’s heritage, but will be humble, gentle, self-sacrificing and altogether ready to follow when the Spirit chooses another to lead.
Whatever God can do faith can do, and whatever faith can do prayer can do when it is offered in faith. An invitation to prayer is, therefore, an invitation to omnipotence, for prayer engages the Omnipotent God and brings Him into our human affairs. Nothing is impossible to the man who prays in faith, just as nothing is impossible with God. This generation has yet to prove all that prayer can do for believing men and women.
Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God, we do not see ourselves – blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One.
God’s justice stands forever against the sinner in utter severity. The vague and tenuous hope that God is ‘too kind’ to punish the ungodly has become deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. It hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of iniquity while death draws everyday nearer and the command to repent goes unregarded. As responsible moral beings, we dare not so trifle with our eternal future.
Without doubt the emphasis in Christian teaching today should be on worship. There is little danger that we shall become merely worshipers and neglect the practical implications of the gospel. No one can long worship God in spirit and in truth before the obligation to holy service becomes too strong to resist. Fellowship with God leads straight to obedience and good works. That is the divine order and it can never be reversed.
Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus’ feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.
Of all persons the Christian should be best prepared for whatever the New Year brings. He has dealt with life at its source. In Christ he has disposed of a thousand enemies that other men must face alone and unprepared. He can face his tomorrow cheerful and unafraid because yesterday he turned his feet into the ways of peace and today he lives in God. The man who has made God his dwelling place will always have a safe habitation.
One of the purest souls ever to live on this fallen planet was Nicholas Herman, known as Brother Lawrence. He wrote very little, but what he wrote has seemed to several generations of Christians to be so rare and so beautiful as to deserve a place near the top among the world’s great books of devotion. The writings of Brother Lawrence are the ultimate in simplicity; ideas woven like costly threads to make a pattern of great beauty.
To accept Christ is to know the meaning of the words ‘as he is, so are we in this world.’ We accept his friends as our friends, his enemies as our enemies, his ways as our ways, his rejection as our rejection, his cross as our cross, his life as our life and his future as our future. If this is what we mean when we advise the seeker to accept Christ, we had better explain it to him. He may get into deep spiritual trouble unless we do.
I find that many men and women are troubled by the thought that they are too small and inconsequential in the scheme of things. But that is not our real trouble – we are actually too big and too complex, for God made us in His image and we are too big to be satisfied with what the world offers us!.. Man is bored, because he is too big to be happy with that which sin is giving him. God has made him too great, his potential is too mighty.
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear. Fear is a painful emotion that arises at the thought that we may be harmed or made to suffer. As long as we must trust for survival to our ability to out look or out maneuver the enemy, we have every good reason to be afraid. Fear is torment. To know that love is of God and to enter into the secret place leaning upon the arm of the Beloved, this and only this can cast out fear.
When Jesus died on the cross the mercy of God did not become any greater. It could not become any greater, for it was already infinite. We get the odd notion that God is showing mercy because Jesus died. No–Jesus died because God is showing mercy. It was the mercy of God that gave us Calvary, not Calvary that gave us mercy. If God had not been merciful there would have been no incarnation, no babe in the manger, no man on a cross and no open tomb.
When we try to imagine what God is like we must of necessity use that-which-is-not- God as the raw material for our minds to work on; hence whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not God. If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.
Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering.
I do not think I exaggerate when I say that some of us put our offering in the plate with a kind of triumphant bounce as much as to say: “There – now God will feel better!” I am obliged to tell you that God does not need anything you have. He does not need a dime of your money. It is your own spiritual welfare at stake in such matters as these. You have the right to keep what you have all to yourself – but it will rust and decay, and ultimately ruin you.
To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator. God has a voluntary relationg to everything He has made, but He has no Necessary relation to anything outside of Himself. His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply nor from any completeness they can dring to Him who is complete in himself.
How unutterably sweet is the knowledge that our Heavenly Father knows us completely. No talebearer can inform on us; no enemy can make an accusation stick; no forgotten skeleton can come tumbling out of some hidden closet to abash us and expose out past; no unsuspected weakness in our characters can come to light to turn God away from us, since He knew us utterly before we knew him and called us to Himself in the full knowledge of everything that was against us.
Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question ‘What is God like?’ and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind
Let no one imagine that he will lose anything of human dignity by this voluntary sell-out of his all to his God. He does not by this degrade himself as a man; rather he finds his right place of high honor as one made in the image of his Creator. His deep disgrace lay in his moral derangement, his unnatural usurpation of the place of God. His honor will be proved by restoring again that stolen throne. In exalting God over all, he finds his own highest honor upheld.
Worship is to feel in the heart . . . it is an attitude and a state of mind. It is a sustained act, subject to varying degrees of intensity and perfection . . . Real worship is, among other things, a feeling about the Lord our God . . . It is in our hearts. And we must be willing to express it in an appropriate manner. If we love the Lord and are led by His Holy Spirit, our worship will always bring a delighted sense of admiring awe and a sincere humility on our part.
I do not recall another period when ‘faith’ was as popular as it is today. If only we believe hard enough we’ll make it somehow.’ So goes the popular chant. What you believe is not important. Only believe… What is overlooked in all this is that faith is good only when it engages truth; when it is made to rest upon falsehood it can and often does lead to eternal tragedy. For it is not enough that we believe; we must believe the right thing about the right One.
We cannot grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of. God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God’s power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine.
Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshipers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were they to become ‘unity’ conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.
If He put tribulation before you and said He will give you patience by giving you a little trouble along the way, wouldn’t you take a little trouble? You say, ‘Lord, I want all my highways paved.’ the Lord says, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t accommodate you. I’m going to let you run over some bumps occasionally, so you will have patience.’ You do not like the bumps, but you like the patience, and if you want the patience, you will have to take the bumps. And what is patience but experience?
Let us think of a Christian believer in whose life the twin wonders of repentance and the new birth have been wrought. He is now living according to the will of God as he understands it from the written Word. Of such a one it may be said that every act of his life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord’s Supper. To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole of life into a sacrament.
Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. It is a self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast, and bring into favor those who were before under just disapprobation. Its use to us sinful men is to save us and make us sit together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
If we would find God amid all the religious externals we must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity. Now as always God discovers Himself to “babes” and hides Himself in thick darkness from the wise and the prudent. We must simplify our approach to Him. We must strip down to essentials (and they will be found to be blessedly few). We must put away all effort to impress, and come with the guileless candor of childhood. If we do this, without doubt God will quickly respond.
The church has lost her testimony. She has no longer anything to say to the world. Her once robust shout of assurance has faded away to an apologetic whisper. She who one time went out to declare now goes out to inquire. Her dogmatic declaration has become a respectful suggestion, a word of religious advice, given with the understanding that it is after all only an opinion and not meant to sound bigoted. Pure Christianity, instead of being shaped by its culture, actually stands in sharp opposition to it.
Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they? The hard voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.
We now demand glamour and fast-flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals…The tragic results of this spirit all all about us: shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies…the glorification of men, trust is religious externalities….salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such of these are the symptoms of an evil disease.
If man had written the Gospels – say Shakespeare or Eugene O’Neill – the story of the gospel would have been drastically different. They would have placed the prince in halls and palaces and had him walking among the great. They would have had him surrounded by the important and significant of the time. Potentates and kings would have been His companions. But how sweetly common was the real God-man; though He had inhabited all eternity, He had come down and was subject to the rising and the setting of the sun.
The Lordship of Jesus Christ is not quite forgotten among Christians, but it has been relegated to the hymnal where all responsibility toward it may be comfortably discharged in a glow of religious emotion. Or if it is taught as a theory in the classroom it is rarely applied to practical living. The idea that the Man Christ Jesus has absolute final authority over the whole church and over its members in every detail of their lives is simply not now accepted as true by the rank and file of evangelical Christians.
What we need very badly these days is a company of Christians who are prepared to trust God as completely now as they know they must do at the last day… It would be better to invite God now to remove every false trust, to disengage our hearts from all secret hiding places and to bring us out into the open where we can discover for ourselves whether or not we actually trust Him. That is a harsh cure for our troubles, but it is a sure one. Gentler cures may be too weak to do the work. And time is running out on us.
God knows instantly and effortlessly all matter and all matters, all mind and every mind, all spirit and all spirits, all being and every being, all creaturehood and all creatures, every plurality and all pluralities, all law and every law, all relations, all causes, all thoughts, all mysteries, all enigmas, all feeling, all desires, every unuttered secret, all thrones and dominions, all personalities, all things visible and invisible in heaven and in earth, motion, space, time, life, death, good, evil, heaven, and hell.
To square the records, however, it should be said that if the Calvinist does not rise as high, he usually stays up longer. He places more emphasis on the Holy Scriptures which never change, while his opposite number (as the newspapers say) tends to judge his spiritual condition by the state of his feelings, which change constantly. This may be the reason that so many Calvinistic churches remain orthodox for centuries, at least in doctrine, while many churches of the Arminian persuasion often go liberal in one generation.
I must be frank in my feeling that a notable heresy has come into being throughout our evangelical Christian circles — the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need Him as Saviour and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to Him as Lord as long as we want to… The truth is that salvation apart from obedience is unknown in the sacred scripture… Apart from obedience, there can be no salvation, for salvation without obedience is a self-contradictory impossibility.
The constantly recurring question must be: What shall we unite with and from what shall we separate? The question of coexistence does not enter here, but the question of union and fellowship does. The wheat grows in the same field as the tares, but shall the two cross-pollinate? The sheep graze near the goats, but shall they seek to interbreed? The unjust and the just enjoy the same rain and sunshine, but shall they forget their deep moral differences and intermarry? … The Spirit-illuminated church will have none of this
Yet if we would know God and for other’s sake tell what we know we must try to speak of his love. All Christians have tried but none has ever done it very well. I can no more do justice to that awesome and wonder-filled theme than a child can grasp a star. Still by reaching toward the star the child may call attention to it and even indicate the direction one must look to see it. So as I stretch my heart toward the high shining love of God someone who has not before known about it may be encouraged to look up and have hope.
All nature has come to expect from God a sense of orderliness. Whatever God does carries with it His fingerprint. And in the world around us His fingerprint of orderliness is evident to anybody who is honest with the facts. If you look at nature, you will discover a mathematical exactness. Without this precision, the entire world would be in utter confusion. One plus one always equals two no matter what part of the universe you happen to be in. And the laws of nature operate in beautiful harmony, a harmony that is ordered by God Himself.
It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply.” God actually rises up storms of conflict in relationships at times in order to accomplish that deeper work in our character. We cannot love our enemies in our own strength. This is graduate-level grace. Are you willing to enter this school? Are you willing to take the test? If you pass, you can expect to be elevated to a new level in the Kingdom. For He brings us through these tests as preparation for greater use in the Kingdom. You must pass the test first.
The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather. The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free. ‘The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.’ The life is in the speaking words. God’s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God’s Word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written word powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.
Our mistake is that we want God to send revival on our terms. We want to get the power of God into our hands, to call it to us that it may work for us in promoting and furthering our kind of Christianity. We want still to be in charge, guiding the chariot through the religious sky in the direction we want it to go, shouting “Glory to God,” but modestly accepting a share of the glory for ourselves in a nice inoffensive sort of way. We are calling on God to send fire on our altars, completely ignoring the fact that they are OUR altars and not God’s.
It is the Spirit of Christ in us that will draw satan’s fire. The people of the world will not much care what we believe and they will stare vacantly at our religious forms, but there is one thing they will never forgive us-the presence of God’s Spirit in our hearts. They may not know the cause of that strange feeling of antagonism which rises within them, but it will be nonetheless real and dangerous. satan will never cease to make war on the Man-child, and the soul in which dwells the Spirit of Christ will continue to be the target for his attacks.
A real Christian in an odd number anyway. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen, talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see, expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another, empties himself in order to be full, admits he is wrong so he can be declared right, goes down in order to get up, is strongest when he is weakest, richest when he is poorest, and happiest when he feels worst. He dies so he can live, forsakes in order to have, gives away so he can keep, sees the invisible, hears the inaudible, and knows that which passes knowledge.
In every Christian’s Heart, there is a cross and a throne, and the Christian is on the throne till he puts himself on the cross; if he refuses the cross, he remains on the throne. Perhaps this is at the bottom of the backsliding and worldliness among Gospel believers today. We want to be saved, but we insist that Christ do all the dying. No cross for us, no dethronement, no dying. We remain king within the little kingdom of man’s soul and wear our tinsel crown with all the pride of a caesar; but we doom ourselves to shadows and weakness and spiritual sterility.
God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, so that I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, ‘Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.’ Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.
The spiritual man habitually makes eternity-judgments instead of time-judgments. By faith he rises above the tug of earth and the flow of time and learns to think and feel as one who has already left the world and gone to join the innumerable company of angels and the general assembly and Church of the First-born which are written in heaven. Such a man would rather be useful than famous and would rather serve than be served. And all this must be by the operation of the Holy Spirit within him. No man can become spiritual by himself. Only the free Spirit can make a man spiritual.
To avoid the hard necessity of either obeying or rejecting the plain instructions of our Lord in the New Testament we take refuge in a liberal interpretation of them. We evangelicals also know how to avoid the sharp point of obedience by means of fine and intricate explanations. These are tailor-made for the flesh. They excuse disobedience, comfort carnality and make the words of Christ of none effect. And the essence of it all is that Christ simply could not have meant what He said. His teachings are accepted even theoretically only after they have been weakened by interpretation.

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