Power

November 13, 2012

It has been shown that the primary limitation imposed upon you as man, in order that you may be in the likeness of your Maker and bear the image of the invisible, is that of total dependence upon God – in that your behavior, to be godly, must derive directly and exclusively from God’s activity in you and through you.  Any activity, therefore, in which you may engage, no matter how nobly conceived, which does not stem from this humble attitude of dependence upon God, violates the basic principles of your true humanity and the role for which you were created.  By independence (or the absence of faith), you eliminate God, the source of your own “godliness.”  But only God has the right to be the source of His own godliness, so that however unwittingly, you are acting as your own god!

You will still believe or pretend that you are worshiping God; but as the object of your imitation, even Christ Himself may only be an excuse for worshiping your own ability to imitate – an ability vested in yourself.  And this is the basis of all self-righteousness!

It is startling to discover that even God may be used as an excuse for worshiping yourself, demonstrating again the satanic genius for distorting truth and deceiving man – for it was to this temptation that Adam and Eve fell in the Garden!

– Ian Thomas –
The Mystery of Godliness, p187

November 10, 2012

Your new birth puts God into action in you.  It lets all of God loose, clothed with the redeemed humanity of your own flesh and blood as a forgiven sinner, so that at last you become a normal human being as Jesus was.

– Ian Thomas –
The Indwelling Life, p26

November 6, 2012

God is waiting for you to stop so He can begin.

– Watchman Nee –

October 21, 2012

If weak in prayer we are weak everywhere.

– Leonard Ravenhill –

October 10, 2012

We have missed the whole office and virtue of praying if it does not rectify our conduct. The very nature of things is that we must either quit praying or quit bad conduct. Cold, dead praying may exist with bad conduct, but cold, dead praying is no praying in God’s eyes. Our praying advances in power as it rectifies our lives. A life growing in its purity and devotion will be a more prayerful life.

– EM Bounds –

October 8, 2012

We must remember that the goal of prayer is the ear of God. Unless that is gained, the prayer has utterly failed. The uttering of it may have kindled devotional feeling in our  minds, the hearing of it may have comforted and strengthened the hearts of those with whom we have prayed, but if the prayer has not gained the heart of God, it has failed in its essential purpose.

– Charles Spurgeon –

October 7, 2012

The prayers of holy men appease God’s wrath, drive away temptations, resist and overcome the Devil, procure the ministry and service of angels, rescind the decrees of God. Prayer cures sickness and obtains pardon; it arrests the sun in its course and stays the wheels of the chariot of the moon; it rules over all gods and opens and shuts the storehouses of rain; it unlocks the cabinet of the womb and quenches the violence of fire; it stops the mouths of lions and reconciles our suffering and weak faculties with the violence of torment and violence of persecution; it pleases God and supplies all our need.

– Jeremy Taylor –

September 27, 2012

If there is any trouble in your heart, if you are in darkness, or in the power of sin, I bring to you the Son of God, with the promise that He will come in and take charge.

– Andrew Murray –
from his book Master’s Indwelling 

September 25, 2012

When our life is not only Christ’s but Christ, our life will be a winning life, for He cannot fail.

– Charles Trumbull –