An idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.
An infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as fully as if there were no others.
If God gives you a watch, are you honoring Him more by asking Him what time it is or by simply consulting the watch?
In almost everything that touches our everyday life on earth, God is pleased when we're pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our maker's praise without anxiety.
"Let God be true but every man a liar" is the language of true faith.
Man appears for a little while to laugh and weep, to work and play, and then to go to make room for those who shall follow him in the never-ending cycle.
One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.
Salvation is from our side a choice, from the divine side it is a seizing upon, an apprehending, a conquest by the Most High God. Our "accepting" and "willing" are reactions rather than actions. The right of determination must always remain with God.
The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.
The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.
We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum.
We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing.
You can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him.
No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in seeking to know and do the will of God, leaving to Christ the matter of how happy he should be.
Peace of heart that is won by refusing to bear the common yoke of human sympathy is a peace unworthy of a Christian. To seek tranquility by stopping our ears to the cries of human pain is to make ourselves not Christian but a kind of degenerate stoic having no relation either to stoicism or Christianity.
Faith, as Paul saw it, was a living, flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ.
Salvation is from our side a choice, from the divine side it is a seizing upon, an apprehending, a conquest by the Most High God. Our ''accepting'' and ''willing'' are reactions rather than actions. The right of determination must always remain with God.
God may allow His servant to succeed when He has disciplined him to a point where he does not need to succeed to be happy. The man who is elated by success and is cast down by failure is still a carnal man. At best his fruit will have a worm in it.
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
What I believe about God is the most important thing about me.
The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.
The man or woman who is wholly or joyously surrendered to Christ can't make a wrong choice/any choice will be the right one.
Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God.
In almost everything that touches our everyday life on earth, God is pleased when we're pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our maker's praise without anxiety.
This frightening hour calls aloud for men with the gift of prophetic insight. Instead we have men who conduct surveys, polls and panel discussions. We need men with the gift of knowledge. In their place we have men with scholarship---nothing more.
If the church in the second half of this century is to recover from the injuries she suffered in the first half, there must appear a new type of preacher. The proper, ruler-of-the-synagogue type will never do. Neither will the priestly type of man who carries out his duties, takes his pay and asks no questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type who knows how to make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these have been tried and found wanting. Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has heard a voice from the Throne. When he comes (and I pray God there will be not one but many) he will stand in flat contradiction to everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear. He will contradict, denounce and protest in the name of God and will earn the hatred and opposition of a large segment of Christendom.
We desperately need seers who can see through the mist---Christian leaders with prophetic vision. Unless they come soon it will be too late for this generation. And if they do come we will no doubt crucify a few of them in the name of our worldly orthodoxy.
Christianity is so entangled with the world that millions never guess how radically they have missed the New Testament pattern. Compromise is everywhere.
Keep your feet on the ground, but let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average or to surrender to the chill of your spiritual environment.
Perhaps our greatest present need may be the coming of a prophet to dash the stones at the foot of the mountain and call the Church out to repentance or to judgment.
For a man to understand revealed truth requires an act of God equal to the original act which inspired the text.
We need to learn that truth consists not in correct doctrine, but in correct doctrine plus the inward enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.
Men who have been used of God in any generation from Calvary down to this hour have not invented and preached new truths. They have simply had the anointed vision to discover truths that had been obscured by the overemphasis of certain other truths.
The church has lost her testimony. She has no longer anything to say to the world. Her once robust shout of assurance has faded away to an apologetic whisper. She who one time went out to declare now goes out to inquire. Her dogmatic declaration has become a respectful suggestion, a word of religious advice, given with the understanding that it is after all only an opinion and not meant to sound bigoted.
Pure Christianity, instead of being shaped by its environment, actually stands in sharp opposition to it.
Could it be that too many of God's true children, and especially the preachers, are sinning against God by guilty silence?...I for one am waiting to hear the loud voices of the prophets and reformers sounding once more over a sluggish and drowsy church. They'll pay a price for their boldness, but the results will be worth it.
To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men. This is such a common truth that one hesitates to mention it, yet it appears to have been overlooked by the majority of Christians today.
Apart from God nothing matters. We think that health matters, that freedom matters, or knowledge or art or civilization. And but for one insistent word they would matter indeed. That word is eternity.
We are in real need of a reformation that will lead to revival among the churches.
The man who has been taught by the Holy Spirit will be a seer rather than a scholar. The difference is that the scholar sees and the seer sees through; and that is a mighty difference indeed.
The apostles went to jail, and that is not too revealing because they went against their will; but when they got out of jail and could go where they would they immediately went to the praying company. The choices of life, not the compulsions, reveal character.
Moral power has always accompanied definitive beliefs. Great saints have always been dogmatic. We need right now a return to a gentle dogmatism that smiles while it stands stubborn and firm on the Word of God that liveth and abideth forever.
The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way. The man who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him.
I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with symptoms.
When the children of God accept the world's values it is time some Christians spoke up. Babylon may have her gods, her own way of life and moral standards. It is when Israel begins to adopt them that the prophet of God becomes responsible to rise and cry out against them.
Truth consists not merely in correct doctrine but in correct doctrine to which is added the inward enlightenment of the Holy Spirit...John the Baptist said, "A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven" (John 3:27). He was not referring to men's gifts. He was speaking of spiritual truth.
The radical element in testimony and life that once made Christians hated by the world is missing from present-day evangelicalism.
It is useless for large companies of believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament pattern there can be no true revival.
The fact is that we are not today producing saints. We are making converts to an effete type of Christianity that bears little resemblance to that of the New Testament. The average so-called Bible Christian in our times is but a wretched parody on true sainthood. Yet we put millions of dollars behind movements to perpetuate this degenerate form of religion and attack the man who dares to challenge the wisdom of it.
And when the deliverers come---reformers, revivalists, prophets---they will be men of God and men of courage. They will have God on their side because they will be careful to stay on God's side. They will be co-workers with Christ and instruments in the hand of the Holy Ghost. Such men will be baptized with the Spirit indeed...
Our only hope is that renewed spiritual pressure will be exerted increasingly by self-effacing and courageous men who desire nothing but the glory of God and the purity of the church. May God send us many of them.
Today we need prophetic preachers; not preachers of prophecy merely, but preachers with a gift of prophecy. The word of wisdom is missing. We need the gift of discernment again in our pulpits.
What is needed desperately today is prophetic insight. Scholars can interpret the past; it takes prophets to interpret the present.
Any spirit that permits compromise with the world is a false spirit. Any religious movement that imitates the world in any of its manifestations is false to the cross of Christ and on the side of the devil.
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 of it.
Some who desire to be teachers of the Word, but who understand neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm, insist upon "naked" faith as the only way to know spiritual things. By this they mean a conviction of the trustworthiness of the Word of God (a conviction, it may be noted, which the devils share with them). But the man who has been taught even slightly by the Spirit of Truth will rebel at this perversion. His language will be, "I have heard Him and observed Him. What have I to do any more with idols?" For he cannot love a God who is no more than a deduction from a text.
The man who preaches truth and applies it to the lives of his hearers will feel the nails and the thorns. He will lead a hard life, but a glorious one. May God raise up many such prophets. The church needs them badly.
The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another...He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over-serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens.
If there's anything necessary to your eternal happiness but God, you're not the kind of Christian that you ought to be. For only God is the true rest.
Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. It is a self- existent principle inherent in the divine nature and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast, and bring into favor those who were before under disapprobation
Sometimes I go to God and say, "God, if Thou dost never answer another prayer while I live on this earth, I will still worship Thee as long as I live and in the ages to come for what Thou hast done already. " God’s already put me so far in de4bt that if I were to live one million millenniums I couldn’t pay Him for what He’s done for me.
Looking at what John wrote, I wonder how so many present – day Christians can consider an hour of worship Sunday morning as adequate adoration of the holy God who created them and then redeemed them back to Himself…
God is please with His people when His praise is continually and joyfully on their lips. The heavenly scene John describes is the unceasing cry of the adoring living creatures, "Holy, holy, holy!" They rest not, day or night. My fear is that too many of God’s professing people down here are resting far too often between their efforts at praise.
There is a point in true worship where the mind may cease to understand and goes over to a kind of delightful astonishment---probably to what Carlyle described as "transcendent wonder," a degree of wonder without limit and beyond expression!….
It is always true that an encounter with God brings wonderment and awe!
It is delightful to worship God, but it is also a humbling thing; and the man who has not been humbled in the presence of God will never be a worshiper of God at all. He may be church member who keeps the rules and obeys the discipline, and who tithes and goes to conference, but he’ll never be a worshiper unless he is deeply humbling.
I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.
In my opinion, the great single need of the moment is that light-hearted superficial religionists be struck down with a vision of God high and lifted up, with His train filling the temple. The holy art of worship seems to have passed away like the Shekinah glory from the tabernacle. As a result, we are left to our own devices and forced to make up the lack of spontaneous worship by bringing in countless cheap and tawdry activities to hold the attention of the church people.
In the majority of our meetings there is scarcely a trace of reverent thought, no recognition of the unity of the body, little sense of the divine Presence, no moment of stillness, no solemnity, no wonder, no holy fear.
I refer to the loss of the concept of majesty from the popular religious mind. The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping men…
With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence.
Now we were made to worship, but the Scriptures tell us something else again. They tell us that man fell and kept not estate; that he forfeited the original glory of God and failed to fulfill the creative purpose, so that he is not worshipping now in the way that God meant him to worship. All else fulfills its design; flowers are still fragrant and lilies are still beautiful and the bees still search for nectar amongst the flowers; the birds still sing with their thousand voice choir on a summer’s day and the sun and the moon and the stars all move on their rounds doing the will of God.
And from what we can learn from the Scriptures we believe tat the seraphim and cherubim and powers and dominions are still fulfilling their design – worshipping God who created them and breathed into them the breath of life. Man alone sulks in his cave. Man alone, with all of his brilliant intelligence, with all of his amazing, indescribable and wonderful equipment, still sulks in his cave. He is either silent, or if he opens his mouth at all, it is to boast and threaten and curse; or it’s nervous, ill-considered laughter, or it’s humor become big business, or it’s songs without joy.
The Chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.…
Yes, worship of the loving God is man’s whole reason for existence. That is why we are born and that is why we are born again from above. That is why were created and recreated. That is why there was a genesis at the beginning re-genesis, called re-generation
The purpose of God in sending His Son to die and rise and live and be at the right hand of God the Father was that He might restore to us the missing jewel, the jewel of worship; that we might come back and learn to do again that which we were created to do in the first place – worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, to spend our time in awesome wonder and adoration of God, feeling and expressing it, and letting it get into our labors and doing nothing except as an act of worship to Almighty God through His Son, Jesus Christ.
But a man who has passed the veil and looked eve briefly upon the holy face of Isaiah’s God can never be irreverent again. There will be a reverence in his spirit and instead of boasting, he will cover his feet modestly.
But thinking is not enough. Men are made to worship also, to bow down and adore in the presence of the mystery inexpressible. Man’s mind is not the top pea, of his nature. Higher than his mind is his spirit, that something within him which can engage the supernatural, which under the breath of the Spirit can come alive and enter into conscious communion with heaven, can receive the divine nature and hear and feel and see the eneffable wonder that is God….
The wise of the world who have not learned tow worship are but demi-men, unformed and rudimentary. Their further development awaits the life – giving touch of Christ to wake them to spiritual birth and life eternal.
Abraham was completely satisfied with God’s friendship. He becomes to us a faithful example in his willingness to put God first. With Abraham, only God mattered…
In Abraham’s encounter with God he learned why he was here upon earth. He was to Glorify God in all things and to continually worship…
There is a necessity for true worship among us. If God is who He says He is and if we are the believing people of God we claim to be, we must worship Him….
Oh, how I wish I could adequately set forth the glory of the One who is worthy to be the object of our worship! I do believe that if our new converts – the babes in Christ—could be made to see His thousand attributes and even partially comprehend His being, they would become faint with a yearning desire to worship and honor and acknowledge Him, now and forever.
God wants worshippers before workers; indeed the only acceptable workers are those who have learned the lost art of worship. It is inconceivable that a sovereign and holy God should be so hard up for workers that He would press into service anyone who had been empowered regardless of his moral qualifications. The very stones would praise Him if the need arose and a thousand legions of angels would leap to do His will.
Gifts and power for service the Spirit surely desires to impart; but holiness and spiritual worship come first.
Christians don't tell lies they just go to church and sing them
A pharisee is hard on others and easy on himself, but a spiritual man is easy on others and hard on himself.
Wise leaders should have known that the human heart cannot exist in a vacuum.
If Christians are forbidden to enjoy the wine of the Spirit they will turn to the wine of the flesh.... Christ died for our hearts and the Holy Spirit wants to come and satisfy them.
The hard work of prayer is getting yourself into a state of mind in which you prefer the will of God over your own.
Millions call themselves by His name, it is true, and pay some token respect to Him, but a simple test will show how little He is really honored among them. Let the average man be put of the proof on the question of who or what is above, and his true position will be exposed. Let him be forced into making a choice between God and money, God and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human love, and God will take second place every time. Those other things will be exalted above. However the man may protest, the proof is in the choices he makes day after day throughout his life.
Plain horse sense ought to tell us that anything that makes no change in the man who professes it makes no difference to God, either.
The widest thing in the universe is not space, it is the potential capacity of the human heart.
We have not progressed very far in the Christian life if we have not felt the groan that goes in creation ...and felt the also the groan in our own hearts - the longing to be released from bondage and be with Christ.
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