I must labor to keep my heart actively responsive to God.
Wisdom will not go with comforting illusions, false sentiment, or the use of rose-colored glasses.
C. H. Spurgeon was once asked if he could reconcile these two truths to each other. “I wouldn’t try,” he replied; “I never reconcile friends.” Friends? – yes, friends. This is the point that we have to grasp. In the Bible, divine sovereignty and human responsibility are not enemies. They are not uneasy neighbors; they are not in an endless state of cold war with each other. They are friends, and they work together.
Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you.
A British professor of theology once described to me the world to which believers will go as “an unknown country with a well-known inhabitant.” When Jesus Christ the courier has already become well known to us through the Gospels and Pastoral Letters of the New Testament, the prospect of transitioning with him into a world in which we shall see him as he is and be constantly in his company will be something we find alluring rather than alarming.
This is what all the work of grace aims at – an ever deeper knowledge of God, and an ever closer fellowship with him. Grace is God drawing us sinners closer and closer to himself.
God seems always to have intended that the life of humans in this world should be probationary and temporary, and should lead in due course to some form of transformation and transition for a richer life elsewhere.
The preacher should work to convert his congregation; the wife should work to save her unbelieving husband. Christians are sent to convert, and they should not allow themselves, as Christ’s representatives in the world, to aim at anything less. Evangelizing, therefore, is not simply a matter of teaching, and instructing, and imparting information to the mind. There is more to it than that. Evangelizing includes the endeavor to elicit a response to the truth taught.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is both God for man and man for God;.
Our proud humanism, so-called, has made the world more like hell than heaven.
We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God. It was for this purpose that revelation was given, and it is to this use that we must put it.
New Testament writers do not tell me why God chose to save me. They only tell me to be thankful that He did.
What Is the Motive for Evangelizing? There are, in fact, two motives that should spur us constantly to evangelize. The first is love of God and concern for his glory; the second is love of man and concern for his welfare.
When you are not conscious of temptation, pray “lead us not into temptation”; and when you are conscious of it, pray “deliver us from evil”; and you will live.
Daydreaming and indulgence of nostalgia are unhappy habits, making for unrealism and discontent. Like all bad habits, they tighten their grip on us until we set ourselves against them and, with God’s help, break them. Elderly retirees are prone to find that a disciplined breaking of them is an increasingly necessary task in life’s last lap, in which steady looking ahead in each present moment becomes a bigger and bigger factor in inner spiritual health.
It is the sovereign prerogative of Christ’s Spirit to convince men’s consciences of the truth of Christ’s gospel; and Christ’s human witnesses must learn to ground their hopes of success not on clever presentation of the truth by man, but on powerful demonstration of the truth by the Spirit.
There is no holiness without a Christ-centered, Christ-seeking, Christ-serving, Christ-adoring heart.
Rarely does this world look as if a beneficent Providence were running it.
The process of learning to be holy, like the process of learning to pray, may properly be thought of as a school – God’s own school, in which the curriculum, the teaching staff, the rules, the discipline, the occasional prizes and the fellow pupils with whom one studies, plays, debates and fraternizes, are all there under God’s sovereign providence.
Good works begin with praise, worship, and honoring and exalting of God as the temper of one’s whole waking life.