Christian Life

January 8, 2014

One doesn’t learn to speak a language in a couple of months. It will be plugging for a good while yet. Seems that I’ll never get through ‘preparing’ for the mission field. But I’ve been comforted this week thinking of our Lord’s thirty silent years of readying Himself at home with His family and bending over a carpenter’s bench. Were those days any less of a fragrance to God than His later work before the eyes of the people? I think not. A well-made piece of furniture and a healed blind man represented the same thing to the Father—a job well done; mission accomplished. So with us here. Nothing great, but what is that to Him with whom there is no great or small?

– Jim Elliot –

January 7, 2014

If it sounds like I’m sticking my nose into your business, remember that I say this with a regard to the eternal profit of your soul, and that the Lord has stirred me up to write of this. Christ needs some young fellows to sell out to Him and recklessly toss their lives into His work.

– Jim Elliot –
From a letter written to a friend, as quoted in Shadow of the Almighty

January 6, 2014

O Lord, make me to forget myself. I would not be of those who already have their reward in receiving recognition from men.

– Jim Elliot –

January 5, 2014

My life is lived now both externally and internally different from what I knew when the old man was in the saddle. Bless the Lord for this . . .

– Jim Elliot –

January 4, 2014

. . . in the whole work we desire to stand with God, and not to depend upon the favourable or unfavourable judgment of the multitude . . .

– George Müller –

January 3, 2014

Tenacity is more than endurance, it is endurance combined with the absolute certainty that what we are looking for is going to transpire. Tenacity is more than hanging on, which may be but the weakness of being too afraid to fall off. Tenacity is the supreme effort of a man refusing to believe that his hero is going to be conquered . . . If our hopes are being disappointed just now, it means that they are being purified . . . One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God.

– Oswald Chambers –

January 2, 2014

It is a safe thing too to trust Him to fulfill the desire which He creates …

– Amy Carmichael –

January 1, 2014

For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.

– God –
Jeremiah 2:13

December 31, 2013

Where we have failed is in the practical application of the teaching concerning the crucified life. Too many have been content to be armchair Christians, satisfied with the theology of the cross. Plainly Christ never intended that we should rest in a mere theory of self-denial. His teaching identified His disciples with Himself so intimately that they would have had to be extremely dull not to have understood that they were expected to experience very much the same pain and loss as He Himself did.

The healthy soul is the victorious soul and victory never comes while self is permitted to remain unjudged and uncrucified. While we boast or belittle we may be perfectly sure that the cross has not yet done its work within us. Faith and obedience will bring the cross into the life and cure both habits.

– AW Tozer –
From Man – The Dwelling Place of God, ch. 18, “Boasting or Belittling”