Words In The Bible

Psalm 126:5

2011-09-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

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Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.
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The Sacrament Of The Saint

2011-08-11T22:44:00.001-07:00

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To choose to suffer means that there is something wrong; to choose God's Will even if it means suffering is a very different thing. No healthy saint ever chooses suffering; he chooses God's will, as Jesus did, whether it means suffering or not.
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Beware of the thought that Jesus needed sympathy in His earthly life; He refused sympathy from man because He knew far too wisely that no one on earth understood what He was after. He took sympathy from His Father only, and from the angels in heaven. (Cf. Luke 15:10.)
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from My Utmost For His Highest
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John 16:23~24

2011-08-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

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In that day you will no longer ask me anything. I will tell you the truth, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.
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Put On Christ

2011-08-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

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We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.
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from The problem of pain
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Prayer In The Father's House

2011-08-07T22:45:00.000-07:00

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Do I look upon life as being in my Father's house? Is the Son of God living in His Father's house in me?
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The abiding Reality is God, and His order comes through the moments. Am I always in contact with Reality, or do I only pray when things have gone wrong, when there is a disturbance in the moments of my life? I have to learn to identify myself with my Lord in holy communion in ways some of us have not begun to learn as yet. "I must be about My Father's business" - live the moments in My Father's house.
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The Cross In Prayer

2011-08-06T01:26:00.000-07:00

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If we pray because we want answers, we will get huffed with God. The answers come every time, but not always in the way we expect, and our spiritual huff shows a refusal to identify ourselves with Our Lord in prayer. We are not here to prove God answers prayer; we are here to be living monuments of God's grace.
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When prayer seems to be unanswered, beware of trying to fix the blame on someone else. That is always a snare of Satan. You will find there is a reason which is a deep instruction to you, not to anyone else.
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Have you reached such an intimacy with God that the Lord Jesus Christ's life of prayer is the only explanation of your life of prayer? Has Our Lord's vicarious life become your vital life? "At that day" you will be so identified with Jesus that there will be no distinction.
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The Baffling Call Of GOD

2011-08-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

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God called Jesus Christ to what seemed unmitigated disaster. Jesus Christ called His disciples to see Him put to death; He led every one of them to the place where their hearts were broken. Jesus Christ's life was an absolute failure from every standpoint but God's. But what seemed failure from man's standpoint was a tremendous triumph from God's, because God's purpose is never man's purpose.
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The things that happen do not happen by chance, they happen entirely in the decree of God. God is working out His purposes.
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A Christian is one who trusts the wits and the wisdom of God, and not his own wits. If we have a purpose of our own, it destroys the simplicity and the leisureliness which ought to characterize the children of God.
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The Brave Comradeship Of GOD

2011-08-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

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The bravery of God in trusting us! You say - "But He has been unwise to choose me, because there is nothing in me; I am not of any value." That is why He chose you. As long as you think there is something in you, He cannot choose you because you have ends of your own to serve; but if you have let Him bring you to the end of your self-sufficiency then He can choose you to go with Him to Jerusalem, and that will mean the fulfilment of purposes which He does not discuss with you.
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The comradeship of God is made up out of men who know their poverty. He can do nothing with the man who thinks that he is of use to God. As Christians we are not out for our own cause at all, we are out for the cause of God, which can never be our cause.
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The Big Compelling Of GOD

2011-08-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

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The great thing to remember is that we go up to Jerusalem to fulfil God's purpose, not our own. Naturally, our ambitions are our own; in the Christian life we have no aim of our own. There is so much said to-day about our decisions for Christ, our determination to be Christians, our decisions for this and that, but in the New Testament it is the aspect of God's compelling that is brought out. "Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you." We are not taken up into conscious agreement with God's purpose, we are taken up into God's purpose without any consciousness at all. We have no conception of what God is aiming at, and as we go on it gets more and more vague. God's aim looks like missing the mark because we are too short sighted to see what He is aiming at. At the beginning of the Christian life we have our own ideas as to what God's purpose is - 'I am meant to go here or there,' 'God has called me to do this special work'; and we go and do the thing, and still the big compelling of God remains. The work we do is of no account, it is so much scaffolding compared with the big compelling of God.
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The Discipline Of Difficulty

2011-08-02T05:14:00.000-07:00

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An average view of the Christian life is that it means deliverance from trouble. It is deliverance in trouble, which is very different.

God does not give us overcoming life: He gives us life as we overcome. The strain is the strength. If there is no strain, there is no strength. Are you asking God to give you life and liberty and joy? He cannot, unless you will accept the strain. Immediately you face the strain, you will get the strength. Overcome your own timidity and take the step, and God will give you to eat of the tree of life and you will get nourishment. If you spend yourself out physically, you become exhausted; but spend yourself spiritually, and you get more strength. God never gives strength for to-morrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of the minute. The temptation is to face difficulties from a common-sense standpoint. The saint is hilarious when he is crushed with difficulties because the thing is so ludicrously impossible to anyone but God.
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Something More About His Ways

2011-08-02T04:59:00.000-07:00

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We have to keep our mouths shut and our spirits alert. God wants to instruct us in regard to His Son, He wants to turn our times of prayer into mounts of transfiguration, and we will not let Him. When we are certain of the way God is going to work, He will never work in that way any more.
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Wait on God and He will work, but don't wait in spiritual sulks because you cannot see an inch in front of you! Are we detached enough from our own spiritual hysterics to wait on God? To wait is not to sit with folded hands, but to learn to do what we are told. These are phases of His ways we rarely recognize.
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GOD Wants To Give

2011-07-31T00:06:00.000-07:00

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God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full-there's nowhere for Him to put it.
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The Discipline Of Disillusionment

2011-07-30T03:22:00.000-07:00

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Many of the cruel things in life spring from the fact that we suffer from illusions. We are not true to one another as facts; we are true only to our ideas of one another. Everything is either delightful and fine, or mean and dastardly, according to our idea.
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Our Lord trusted no man, yet He was never suspicious, never bitter. Our Lord's confidence in God and in what His grace could do for any man, was so perfect that He despaired of no one. If our trust is placed in human beings, we shall end in despairing of everyone.
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Why Are You Not Pious?

2011-07-29T05:44:00.000-07:00

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If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.
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from William Law's Serious Call
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AFTER OBEDIENCE - WHAT?

2011-07-28T05:41:00.000-07:00

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"And straightway He constrained His disciples to get into the ship, and to go to the other side. . . ." Mark 6:45-52
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We are apt to imagine that if Jesus Christ constrains us, and we obey Him, He will lead us to great success. We must never put our dreams of success as God's purpose for us; His purpose may be exactly the opposite. We have an idea that God is leading us to a particular end, a desired goal; He is not. The question of getting to a particular end is a mere incident. What we call the process, God calls the end.
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God's training is for now, not presently. His purpose is for this minute, not for something in the future. We have nothing to do with the afterwards of obedience.
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THE WAY TO KNOW

2011-07-27T01:12:00.000-07:00

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“If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine . . ." John 7:17
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The golden rule for understanding spiritually is not intellect, but obedience. If a man wants scientific knowledge, intellectual curiosity is his guide; but if he wants insight into what Jesus Christ teaches, he can only get it by obedience. If things are dark to me, then I may be sure there is something I will not do. Intellectual darkness comes through ignorance; spiritual darkness comes because of something I do not intend to obey.
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THE ACCOUNT WITH PURITY

2011-07-26T01:10:00.000-07:00

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"Out of the heart proceed . . ." Matthew 15:18-20
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We begin by trusting our ignorance and calling it innocence, by trusting our innocence and calling it purity.
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As long as I remain under the refuge of innocence I am living in a fool's paradise. If I have never been a blackguard, the reason is a mixture of cowardice and the protection of civilized life; but when I am undressed before God, I find that Jesus Christ is right in His diagnosis.
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The only thing that safeguards is the Redemption of Jesus Christ. If I will hand myself over to Him, I need never experience the terrible possibilities that are in my heart. Purity is too deep down for me to get to naturally: but when the Holy Spirit comes in, He brings into the centre of my personal life the very Spirit that was manifested in the life of Jesus Christ, viz., Holy Spirit, which is unsullied purity.
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AM I BLESSED LIKE THIS?

2011-07-25T18:36:00.001-07:00

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"Blessed are . . ." Matthew 5:3-10
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The Beatitudes seem merely mild and beautiful precepts for all unworldly and useless people, but of very little practical use in the stern workaday world in which we live. We soon find, however, that the Beatitudes contain the dynamite of the Holy Ghost.
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The teaching of Jesus is out of all proportion to our natural way of looking at things and it comes with astonishing discomfort to begin with.
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DISPOSITION AND DEEDS

2011-07-24T06:02:00.000-07:00

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"Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 5:20
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The characteristic of a disciple is not that he does good things, but that he is good in motive because he has been made good by the super-natural grace of God. The only thing that exceeds right-doing is right-being.
The great marvel of Jesus Christ's salvation is that He alters heredity. He does not alter human nature; He alters its mainspring.
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SANCTIFICATION

2011-07-23T04:25:00.000-07:00

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“Of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us . . . sanctification." 1 Corinthians 1:30
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Sanctification means the impartation of the Holy qualities of Jesus Christ. It is His patience, His love, His holiness, His faith, His purity, His godliness, that is manifested in and through every sanctified soul. Sanctification is not drawing from Jesus the power to be holy; it is drawing from Jesus the holiness that was manifested in Him, and He manifests it in me. Sanctification is an impartation, not an imitation. Imitation is on a different line. In Jesus Christ is the perfection of everything, and the mystery of sanctification is that all the perfections of Jesus are at my disposal,
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SANCTIFICATION

2011-07-22T02:20:00.000-07:00

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"This is the will of God, even your sanctification." 1 Thessalonians 4:3
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The Spirit of God begins to show us what sanctification means, the struggle begins. "If any man come to Me and hate not . . his own life, he cannot be My disciple.

Am I willing to reduce myself simply to "me," determinedly to strip myself of all my friends think of me, of all I think of myself, and to hand that simple naked self over to God?
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THE GATEWAY TO THE KINGDOM

2011-07-21T02:41:00.000-07:00

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"Blessed are the poor in spirit." Matthew 5:3
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"Blessed are the paupers in spirit," that is the first principle in the Kingdom of God. The bedrock in Jesus Christ's kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility - I cannot begin to do it. Then Jesus says - Blessed are you. That is the entrance, and it does take us a long while to believe we are poor!
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DEPENDENT ON GOD'S PRESENCE

2011-07-20T03:45:00.000-07:00

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"They that wait upon the Lord . . . shall walk and not faint." Isaiah 40:31

The reality of God's presence is not dependent on any place, but only dependent upon the determination to set the Lord always before us. Our problems come when we refuse to bank on the reality of His presence.
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[July 19th] MASTERY OVER THE BELIEVER

2011-07-20T03:37:00.000-07:00

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"Ye call Me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am." John 13:13
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We have to rescue the word "obedience" from the mire. Obedience is only possible between equals; it is the relationship between father and son, not between master and servant. "I and My Father are one." "Though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered." The Son's obedience was as Redeemer, because He was Son, not in order to be Son.
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[July 18th] THE MYSTERY OF BELIEVING

2011-07-19T01:41:00.000-07:00

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"And he said, Who art Thou, Lord?" Acts 9:5

If one man says to another - 'You must,' and - 'You shall,' he breaks the human spirit and unfits it for God. A man is a slave for obeying unless behind his obedience there is a recognition of a holy God.
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THE MIRACLE OF BELIEF

2011-07-17T00:26:00.000-07:00

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My speech and my preaching was not with enticing words. -1 Corinthians 2:1-5

Anything that flatters me in my preaching of the Gospel will end in making me a traitor to Jesus; I prevent the creative power of His Redemption from doing its work.
"I, if I be lifted up . . . , will draw all men unto Me."
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THE NOTION OF DIVINE CONTROL

2011-07-16T01:47:00.000-07:00

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How much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him? - Matthew 7:11

Keep the notion of the mind of God behind all things strong and growing. Nothing happens in any particular unless God's will is behind it, therefore you can rest in perfect confidence in Him. Prayer is not only asking, but an attitude of mind which produces the atmosphere in which asking is perfectly natural. "Ask, and it shall be given you."
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THE POINT OF SPIRITUAL HONOUR

2011-07-15T04:41:00.001-07:00

I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise. - Romans 1:14

Every bit of my life that is of value I owe to the Redemption of Jesus Christ; am I doing anything to enable Him to bring His Redemption into actual manifestation in other lives?
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