To be “in the will of God” is not a matter of intellectual discernment, but a state of heart.
– Oswald Chambers –
Obedience
March 11, 2014
People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
– DA Carson –
January 30, 2014
Not many would fault the modern church for being unloving these days, but unloving is exactly what we are. For if we truly loved God, we would obey Him (John 14:21). If we truly loved the church, we would labor to keep it unstained and unmolested by this world (James 1:27). And if we truly loved the lost, we would introduce them to the God of the Bible who is able to save their souls, and not the pitiful god of our own making who is having a hard time saving anything at all (Psalm 50:21).
– Eric Ludy –
January 25, 2014
. . . there’s no burden too heavy, there’s no situation too hard for the one that you love. And if we’re love-controlled, love-motivated, love-energized, it’ll be all right when we stand [at the Judgment Seat], because if there’s anything about love, one thing about it: it’s obedient. [We must] get back to [being] a people who are really baptized with obedience, submissive to the total will of God, not concerned about human opinion, not asking for more to spend prodigally on ourselves, but say, “Oh God, I want this life of mine adjusting so when I stand in Your awesome presence, as [John] says, ‘We shall not be ashamed at His appearing.'”
– Leonard Ravenhill –
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 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 –
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”
December 19, 2013
A readiness to believe every promise implicitly, to obey every command unhesitatingly, to stand perfect and complete in all the will of God, is the only true spirit of Bible study.
– Andrew Murray –
December 13, 2013
Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.
– Corrie ten Boom –