"The idea
that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted
in practice by the vast majority of Christians.”
"The
‘worship’ growing out of such a view of life is as far off center as the view
itself - a sort of sanctified nightclub without the champagne and the
dressed-up drunks."
"Faith is
at the root of all true worship, and without faith it is impossible to please
God. Through unbelief Israel failed to inherit the promises. “By
grace are ye saved through faith.” “The just shall live by faith.” Such verses
as these come trooping to our memories, and we wince just a little at the
suggestion that unbelief may also be a good and useful thing”
"Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as
far from God as the man who refuses to
believe anything. Faith engages the person and promises of God and rests
upon them with perfect assurance. Whatever has behind it the character and word
of the living God is accepted by faith as the last and final truth from which
there must never be any appeal.”
"To great
sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its
place has come that strange and foreign thing called the `program.' This word
has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of
public service which now passes for worship among us.”
"Sound
Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the living
God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning
of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the
hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere
words that nourish the soul, but God Himself...."
"The way to
deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and
abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who
have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all
sense of possessing. These are the 'poor in spirit.'
"To have
found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed
by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by
the children of the burning heart."
"Where God
and man are in relationship, this must be the ideal. God must be the
communicator, and man must be in the listening, obeying attitude. If men and
women are not willing to assume this listening attitude, there will be no
meeting with God in living, personal experience.”
"What comes
into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
... Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of
God.”
For this reason
the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most
portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but
what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of
the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the
individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the
Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of
God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves
unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech.”
Were we able to
extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ”What comes into your
mind when you think about God?” we might predict with certainty the spiritual
future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most influential
religious leaders think of God today, we might be able with some precision to
foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow.”
”A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to
practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to
the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must
sooner or later collapse. I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a
failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect
and ignoble thoughts about God.”
All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together
and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God:
That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.
The idolatrous
heart assumes that God is other than He is - in itself a monstrous
sin - and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness.
Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be
base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from
which it emerges.
Perverted
notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. The long career
of Israel demonstrates this clearly enough, and
the history of the Church confirms it. So necessary to the Church is a lofty
concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with
her worship and her moral standards declines along with it. The first step down
for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God.
Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a
corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the
question, 'What is God like?' and goes on from there. Though she may continue
to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become
false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from
what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.
The heaviest
obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her
concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him - and of her. In all her
prayers and labors this should have first place. We do the greatest service to
the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and
undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew and
Christian fathers of generations past. This will prove of greater value to them
than anything that art or science can devise.
"Christianity
today is man-centered, not God-centered. God is made to wait patiently, even
respectfully, on the whims of men. The image of God currently popular is that
of a distracted Father, struggling in heartbroken desperation to get people to
accept a Savior of whom they feel no need and in whom they have very little
interest. To persuade these self-sufficient souls to respond to His generous
offers God will do almost anything, even using salesmanship methods and talking
down to them in the chummiest way imaginable. This view of things is, of
course, a kind of religious romanticism which, while it often uses flattering
and sometimes embarrassing terms in praise of God, manages nevertheless to make
man the star of the show."
“We need to improve the quality of our Christianity and we never will until we
raise our concept of God back to that held by apostle, sage, prophet, saint and
reformer. When we put God back where he really belongs, we will instinctively
and automatically move up again; the whole spiral of our religious direction
will be upward."
"Many of us
Christians have become extremely skilful in arranging our lives so as to admit
the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications. We
arrange things so that we can get on well enough without divine aid, while at
the same time ostensibly seeking it. We boast in the Lord but watch carefully
that we never get caught depending on Him."
"I say that a Christian congregation can
survive and often appear to prosper in the community by the exercise of human
talent and without any touch from the Holy Spirit! All that religious activity
and the dear people will not know anything better until the great and terrible
day when our self-employed talents are burned with fire and only that which was
wrought by the Holy Ghost will stand forever!"
"Faith as
Paul saw it, was a living flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to
the commandments of Christ. Faith in our day often means no more than a meek
assent to a doctrine."
The only fear I
have is to fear to get out of the will of God. Outside of the will of God,
there's nothing I want, and in the will of God there's nothing I fear, for God
has sworn to keep me in His will. If I'm out of his will that's another matter.
But if I'm in His will, He's sworn to keep me."
"Whatever a man wants badly and persistently enough will determine the
man's character."
What Christian when faced with a moral
problem goes straight to the Sermon on the Mount or other New Testament
Scripture for the authoritative answer? Who lets the words of Christ be final.
The causes back of the decline in our Lord’s authority are many. I name only two. One
is the power of custom, precedent and tradition within the older religious
groups. These like gravitation affect every particle of religious practice
within the group, exerting a steady and constant pressure in one direction. Of
course that direction is toward conformity to the status quo. Not Christ but
custom is lord in this situation”
The second cause
is the revival of intellectualism among the evangelicals. This, if I sense the
situation correctly, is not so much a thirst for learning as a desire for a
reputation of being learned.
One sign of His diminishing authority is that many churches have for years
baptized professing Christians in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit without even asking them to commit themselves to learn to obey
all that Christ commanded (Matthew 28:18-20). Consequently Christ’s supreme
authority is ignored at the entrance into the membership and fellowship of His
church. A disciple is a person who is committed to learn to obey all that
Christ commanded, but the majority of Christians spend a lifetime in church and
never even know that they should become a disciple.
"The idea that God will pardon a rebel who has not given up his rebellion
is contrary both to the Scriptures and to common sense."
"The man that believes will obey; failure to obey is convincing proof that
there is no true faith present. To attempt the impossible God must give faith
or there will be none, and He gives faith to the obedient heart only."
"The average Christian is so cold and so contented with His wretched
condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can
rush in satisfying fullness."
"In the Book of Acts faith was for each believer a beginning, not an end;
it was a journey, not a bed in which to lie while waiting for the day of our
Lord's triumph. Believing was not a once-done act; it was more than an act, it
was an attitude of heart and mind which inspired and enabled the believer to
take up his cross and follow the Lamb whithersoever He went."
Actually, I do find Christians these days who seem to have largely wasted their
lives. They were converted to Christ but they have never sought to go on to an
increasing knowledge of God. There is untold loss and failure because they have
accepted the whole level of things around them as being normal and desirable.
We may as well face it: the whole level of spirituality among us is low. We
have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher
plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone."
"To be
right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men."
"God being who He is must always be sought for Himself, never as a means
toward something else." "Whoever seeks God as a means toward desired
ends will not find God. The mighty God, the maker of heaven and earth, will not
be one of many treasures, not even the chief of all treasures. He will be all
in all or He will be nothing. God will not be used."
Man
Much of our
difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He
is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to
bring Him nearer to our own image.
"We may as
well face it: the whole level of spirituality among us is low. We have measured
ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the
things of the Spirit is all but gone."
"Grace will
save a man but it will not save him and his idol.
"The
Lordship of Jesus Christ is not quite forgotten among Christians, but it has
been relegated to the hymnal where all responsibility toward it may be
comfortably discharged in a glow of religious emotion. Or if it is taught as a
theory in the classroom it is rarely applied to practical living. The idea that
the Man Christ Jesus has absolute final authority over the whole church and
over its members in every detail of their lives is simply not now accepted as
true by the rank and file of evangelical Christians."
The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.
“Rules for Self
Discovery:
1. What we want most;
2. What we think about most;
3. How we use our money;
4. What we do with our leisure time;
5. The company we enjoy;
6. Who and what we admire;
7. What we laugh at.”
“O God, I have
tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more.
I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace. I am ashamed of my lack
of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with
longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray
Thee, so that I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within
me. Say to my soul, ‘Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.’ Then give me
grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered
so long.”
