A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.
– John Calvin –
Christian Life
November 16, 2011
The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted.
– Jonathan Edwards –
November 15, 2011
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
– C. S. Lewis –
November 14, 2011
Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years.
– Charles Spurgeon –
November 13, 2011
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 –
November 12, 2011
Conviction of sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a man. It is the threshold of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ said that when the Holy Spirit came He would convict of sin, and when the Holy Spirit rouses a man’s conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not his relationship with men that bothers him, but his relationship with God – against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight. Conviction of sin, the marvel of forgiveness, and holiness are so interwoven that it is only the forgiven man who is the holy man, he proves he is forgiven by being the opposite to what he was, by God’s grace. Repentance always brings a man to this point: I have sinned. The surest sign that God is at work is when a man says that and means it. Anything less than this is remorse for having made blunders, the reflex action of disgust at himself.
The entrance into the Kingdom is through the panging pains of repentance crashing into a man’s respectable goodness; then the Holy Ghost, Who produces these agonies, begins the formation of the Son of God in the life. The new life will manifest itself in conscious repentance and unconscious holiness, never the other way about. The bedrock of Christianity is repentance. Strictly speaking, a man cannot repent when he chooses; repentance is a gift of God. The old Puritans used to pray for the gift of tears. If ever you cease to know the virtue of repentance, you are in darkness. Examine yourself and see if you have forgotten how to be sorry.
– Oswald Chambers –
My Utmost For His Highest, December 7th
November 11, 2011
The deeper we are willing to enter into the death of self, the more shall we know of the mighty power of God, and the perfect blessedness of a perfect trust.
– Andrew Murray –
November 10, 2011
WHEN HE GIVETH QUIETNESS
by Mrs. TD Crewdson in “The Little While and Other Poems”
Jesus! if Thou be near to bless,
We shall not faint nor fail;
For when Thou givest quietness,
No trouble shall prevail.
Thy quietness! — ’tis not the calm
That spreads in Vesper hours.
O’er earth’s green vales, the dewy balm
Of nature’s closing flowers.
‘Tis not the calm the worldling knows.
In dreamy hours of pride;
Though, softly lapped in false repose,
His gilded shallop ride.
Thy quietness! — no fount of earth
Hath ever proved its source;
No mortal skill revealed its birth,
Or traced its hidden course.
Saviour! — Thou hast met the gale
On Thy unsheltered breast,
That we, the weak, the sick, the frail.
Might joy in peace and rest.
November 9, 2011
God always gives His best to those who leave the choice to Him.
– Jim Elliot –