Thus we are guilty of a kind of temporary atheism which leaves us alone in the universe while, for the time, God is not. We talk of Him much and loudly, but we secretly think of Him as being absent, and we think of ourselves as inhabiting a parenthetic interval between the God who was and the God who will be. And we are lonely with an ancient and cosmic loneliness.
We must return to New Testament Christianity, not in creed only but in complete manner of life as well. Separation, obedience, humility, simplicity, gravity, self-control, modesty, cross-bearing: these all must again be made a living part of the total Christian concept and be carried out in everyday conduct.
Time began in Him and will end in Him. To it He pays no tribute and from it He suffers no change. He is immutable, which means that He has never changed and can never change in any smallest measure.
All our lives long we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to an end of the sweet things that might be said of Him. Eternity will not be long enough to learn all He is, or to worship Him for all He has done, but then, that matters not; for we shall be always with Him, and we desire nothing more.
If you were fine like an archangel, made thousands of dollars, never failed and never fumbled, you would be a saint, and there would be no place in God’s grace for you. Because you are the kind of person you are and have fits of slipping back a little, the grace of God operates toward you. This is your hope. So I say, be cheerful, be hopeful, dare to rise and say, “I’ll not sit and be gloomy anymore. I will dare to believe that the grace of God, that vast grace of God, is big enough for me.
We have too many dry preachers in the world now. We have so many dry preachers and so many men who never shed a tear. If you can keep the tears of God on you and can keep your heart tender, keep it! You have a treasure you should never give up.
It is one thing to read about being filled with the Holy Spirit and quite another thing to experience the mighty infilling of the Holy Spirit that radically changes our life to a life of adoring wonder and amazement at the things of God. Reading and experiencing are two quite different things.
Augustine’s, “Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” The great saint states here in few words the origin and interior history of the human race. God made us for Himself: that is the only explanation that satisfies the heart of a thinking man, whatever his wild reason may say.
Is it not true that for most of us who call ourselves Christians there is no real experience? We have substituted theological ideas for an arresting encounter; we are full of religious notions, but our great weakness is that for our hearts there is no one there. Whatever else it embraces, true Christian experience must always include a genuine encounter with God.
Unbelief has put self where God should be, and is perilously close to the sin of Lucifer who said, “I will set my throne above the throne of God.” Faith looks out instead of in and the whole life falls into line.
Only to sit and think of God, Oh what a joy it is! To think the thought, to breathe the Name; Earth has no higher bliss. Father of Jesus, love’s reward! What rapture will it be, Prostrate before Thy throne to lie, And gaze and gaze on Thee!
Our thoughts are the decorations inside the sanctuary where we live.
We should seek to be cleansed from the childish notion that to have lived in Abram’s day, or in Paul’s, would have been better than to live today.
God created man to know Him, and to know Him in a fuller degree than any other creature can know God. No other creature has Christ, and no other creature has the capacity to know God.
If I have a low conception of God, I have a low conception of myself and if I have a low conception of myself, I have a dangerous conception of sin! And if I have a dangerous conception of sin, I have a degraded conception of Christ! So, here’s the way it works: God is reduced and man is degraded and sin is underestimated and Christ is disparaged!
David’s life was a torrent of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with the cry of the seeker and the glad shout of the finder.
We are constantly being fed harmful ideas that we adopt and learn to believe in, thinking they are all right, and so we ignorantly follow. This is done without our knowing that a keen, sharp, unscrupulous mind is seeking to control us.
To put it differently, we have accepted one another’s notions, copied one another’s lives and made one another’s experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed.
The sinner prides himself on his independence, completely overlooking the fact that he is the weak slave of the sins that rule his members.
The old self-sins must die, and the only instrument by which they can be slain is the Cross. “If any man come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,” said our Lord, and years later the victorious Paul could say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.