Christian Life

October 21, 2011

The popular notion that the first obligation of the church is to spread the gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth is false. Her first obligation is to be spiritually worthy to spread it. Our Lord said “Go ye,” but He also said, “Tarry ye,” and the tarrying had to come before the going. Had the disciples gone forth as missionaries before the day of Pentecost it would have been an overwhelming spiritual disaster, for they could have done no more than make converts after their likeness, and this would have altered for the worse the whole history of the Western world and had consequences throughout the
ages to come.

– AW Tozer –
from Of God and Men, 35-37.

October 19, 2011

As long as Christians people can trust religious organization, material wealth, popular preaching, shallow evangelistic crusades and promotion drives, there will never be revival. But when confidence in the flesh is smashed, and the church comes to the realization of her desperate wretchedness, blindness and nakedness before God, then and only then will God breathe in. Yes, there must be the point of desperation but there must also be the point of intercession. Oh, that God would bring us to this place of intercession! We cannot think or talk, let alone taste of revival, without intercessory prayer. Indeed, the reason for an unrevived church in the last analysis is the sin of prayerlessness.

– Stephen Olford –

October 18, 2011

Satan trembles when he sees the weakest saint upon his knees.

– William Cowper –

October 17, 2011

God is not dead. The gospel has lost none of its power. It is we Christians who have lost OUR power with God. God is able right now to give us the same times of blessing that He gave this church one hundred years ago—even greater! Are you willing to let God search your hearts to see that there are no sins which grieve God and keep back the blessing?”

From a sermon of the father of William Chalmers Burns preached at the gravesite of James Robe, whose pastoral efforts brought a great revival in Kilsyth Scotland in 1742

October 16, 2011

Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still.

– E. M. Bounds –

October 15, 2011

We are quite certain that what we are cannot be the end of God’s design. When I see a block of marble half chiselled with just perhaps a hand peeping out from the rock, no man can make me believe that that is what the artist means it should be. And I know I am not what God would have me to be, because I feel yearnings and longings within myself to be infinitely better, infinitely holier and purer, than I am now. And so it is with you; you are not what God means you to be; you have only just begun to be what He wants you to be. He will go on with His chisel of affliction, using wisdom and the graving tool together, till by and by it shall appear what you shall be for; you shall be like Him, and you shall see Him as He is. Oh! what comfort this is for our faith, that from the fact of our vitality and the tact that God is at work with us, it is clear, and true and certain, that our latter end shall be increased. I do not think that any man yet has ever got an idea of what a man is to be. We are only the chalk crayon, rough drawings of men; yet when we come to be filled up in eternity, we shall be marvellous pictures, and our latter end indeed shall be greatly increased.

– Charles Spurgeon –

October 14, 2011

The Christian on his knees sees more than the philosopher on tiptoe.

– D. L. Moody –

October 13, 2011

There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.

– William Law –