Many humanists in the West are stirred by a sense of outrage at what professed Christians, past and present, have done; and this makes them see their humanism as a kind of crusade, with the killing of Christianity as its prime goal.
One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious.
Sanctification has a double aspect. Its positive side is vivification, the growing and maturing of the new man; its negative side is mortification, the weakening and killing of the old man.
A simple Bible reader and sermon hearer who is full of the Holy Spirit will develop a far deeper acquaintance with his God and Savior than a more learned scholar who is content with being theologically correct.
Wherever Christianity has produced what historians call a ‘popular piety’ claiming to be part of the national heritage, anti-Christian reaction among the intelligentsia has followed.
If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it’s bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited.
Ease and luxury, such as our affluence brings today, do not make for maturity; hardship and struggle however do.
God made us thinking beings, and he guides our minds as we think things out in his presence.
The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.
The more you praise, the more vigor you will have for prayer; and the more you pray, the more matter you will have for praise.
There is unspeakable comfort in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.
What we often feel in ecstatic moments in this world – ‘I don’t ever want this to stop’ – will be the constant thought of our hearts in that world. We shall think it, knowing that in fact it never WILL stop.
Evangelizing includes the endeavor to elicit a response to the truth taught.
I must ask the Lord to direct the Holy Spirit within me to drain the life out of sin and in prayer.
Live each day as if thy last” is a wise word from a hymn written in 1674 by Thomas Ken. The older we get, the more needful its wisdom becomes, and if we have not already taken it to heart, we should do so now.
All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me.
To be right with God the judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is a greater.
We should not... think of our fellowship with other Christians as a spiritual luxury, an optional addition to the exercises of private devotion. We should recognise rather that such fellowship is a spiritual necessity, for God has made us in such a way that our fellowship with himself is fed by our fellowship with fellow Christians, and requires to be so fed constantly for its own deepening and enrichment.
John Wesley at eighty-five wrote in his journal that the only sign of deterioration that he could see in himself was that he could not run as fast as he used to. With all due deference to that wonderful, seemingly tireless little man, we may reasonably suspect that he was overlooking some things at this point, just as some do when they assure us that they never had a day’s illness in their life. We cannot stop our bodies aging, any more than King Canute’s say-so could stop the tide coming in.
Today, vast stress is laid on the thought that God is personal, but this truth is so stated as to leave the impression that God is a person of the same sort as we are – weak, inadequate, ineffective, a little pathetic. But this is not the God of the Bible!