Christian Life

September 21, 2013

We can stand affliction better than we can prosperity, for in prosperity we forget God.

– DL Moody –

September 20, 2013

[The Christian life is] to be like [Christ]. To displace self from the inner throne and to enthrone Him; to make not the slightest compromise with the smallest sin. We aim at nothing less than to walk with God all day long, to abide every hour in Christ, and He and His words in us, to love God with all the heart, and our neighbor as ourselves. . . .  It is possible to cast every care on Him daily, and to be at peace amidst pressure, to see the will of God in everything, to put away all bitterness and clamor and evil speaking, daily and hourly. It is possible by unreserved resort to divine power under divine conditions to become strongest through and through at our weakest point. . . . It does not depend on wearisome struggle, but on God’s power to take the consecrated soul and to keep him. . . . Christ [is] our righteousness, upon Calvary, received by faith, is also Christ our holiness, in the heart that submits to Him and relies upon Him. . . . A message as old as the Apostles but too much forgotten: the open secret of inward victory for liberty in life and service through the trusted power of an indwelling Christ; Christ in us for our deliverance from sin, for our emancipation from the tyranny of self, for the conquest of temptation.

– Bishop Moule –
from Thoughts on Christian Sanctity, as quoted in The Keswick Story by John Charles Pollock (CLC Publications, 2006, pages 98-99)

September 19, 2013

Men are in a restless pursuit after satisfaction in earthly things. They will exhaust themselves in the deceitful delights of sin, and, finding them all to be vanity and emptiness, they will become very perplexed and disappointed. But they will continue their fruitless search. Though wearied, they still stagger forward under the influence of spiritual madness, and though there is no result to be reached except that of everlasting disappointment, yet they press forward. They have no forethought for their eternal state; the present hour absorbs them. They turn to another and another of earth’s broken cisterns, hoping to find water where not a drop was ever discovered yet.

– Charles Spurgeon –

September 18, 2013

A quickening that will last must come through the Word of God. A man stood up in one of our meetings and said he hoped for enough out of the series of meetings to last him all his life. I told him he might as well try to eat enough breakfast at one time to last him his lifetime. That is a mistake that people are making; they are running to religious meetings and they think the meetings are going to do the work. But if these don’t bring you into closer contact with the Word of God, the whole impression will be gone in three months. The more you love the Scriptures, the firmer will be your faith. There is little backsliding when people love the Scriptures. If you come into closer contact with the Word, you will gain something that will last, because the Word of God is going to endure.

– DL Moody –
from Pleasure and Profit in Bible Study

September 17, 2013

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. 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. Worship is pure or base as the worshipper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself.

– AW Tozer –
from The Knowledge of the Holy

September 16, 2013

Beware of saying, “I haven’t time to read the Bible, or to pray”; say rather, “I haven’t disciplined myself to do these things.”

– Oswald Chambers –

September 15, 2013

The world today is looking for, and desperately needs, true Christians. I am never tired of saying that what the Church needs to do is not to organize evangelistic campaigns and attract outside people, but to begin herself to live the Christian life. If she did that, men and women would be crowding into our buildings. They would say, “What is the secret of this?”

– D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones –
from Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, 13

September 14, 2013

The one concern of the Devil is to keep the saints from praying. He fears nothing from prayer-less studies, prayer-less work, prayer-less religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray.

– Samuel Chadwick –