Sorry guys, I have been sick with fever, sore throat and
sinus infection. I am not able to think
clearly or sit and write for a long period of time. As soon as I am back on my
feet, you will get one my long post. I apologize to you all.
Oswald Chambers
Quotes
The agony of man's affliction is often necessary to put him into the right mood to face the fundamental things of life. The Psalmist says. Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now I have kept Thy Word.
We all know people who have been made much meaner and more irritable and more intolerable to live with by suffering: it is not right to say that all suffering perfects. It only perfects one type of person...... the one who accepts the call of God in Christ Jesus.
Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have. Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditat e before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship. If you hoard a thing for yourself, it will turn into spiritual dry rot, as the manna did when it was hoarded. God will never let you hold a spiritual thing for yourself; it has to be given back to Him that He may make it a blessing to others.
We lean to our own understanding, or we bank on service and do away with prayer, and consequently by succeeding in the external we fail in the eternal, because in the eternal we succeed only by prevailing prayer.
Can Jesus Christ see the agony of His soul in us? He can't unless we are so closely identified with Him that we have His view concerning the people for whom we pray. May we learn to intercede so wholeheartedly that Jesus Christ will be completely and overwhelmingly satisfied with us as intercessors.
In the midst of the awesomeness, a touch comes, and you know it is the right hand of Jesus Christ. You know it is not the hand of restraint, correction, nor chastisement, but the right hand of the Everlasting Father. Whenever His hand is laid upon you, it gives inexpressible peace and comfort, and the sense that "underneath are the everlasting arms," (Deuteronomy 33:27) full of support, provision, comfort and strength.
I have to get to the point of the absolute and unquestionable relationship that takes everything exactly as it comes from Him. God never guides us at some time in the future, but always here and now. Realize that the Lord is here now, and the freedom you receive is immediate.
The inattentive, slovenly way we drift into the presence of God is an indication that we are not bothering to think about Him. Whenever our Lord spoke of prayer, He said, "Ask." It is impossible to ask if you do not concentrate.
Leave the broken, irreversible past
in God's hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.
Jesus Christ became Incarnate for
one purpose, to make a way back to God that man might stand before Him as He
was created to do, the friend and lover of God Himself.
Faith for my deliverance is not
faith in God. Faith means, whether I am visibly delivered or not, I will stick
to my belief that God is love.
Have you ever realized that you can
give things to God that are of value to Him? Or are you just sitting around
daydreaming about the greatness of His redemption, while neglecting all the
things you could be doing for Him? I'm not referring to works which could be
regarded as divine and miraculous, but ordinary, simple human things - things
which would be evidence to God that you are totally surrendered to Him.
Beware of reasoning about God's Word - obey it.
All of God's people are ordinary people
who have been made extraordinary by the purpose he has given them.
It is impossible to live the life
of a disciple without definite times of secret prayer. You will find that the
place to enter in is in your business, as you walk along the streets, in the
ordinary ways of life, when no one dreams you are praying, and the reward comes
openly, a revival here, a blessing there.
The "words" of God and
the "Word" of God stand together; to separate them is to render both
powerless. Any expounder of the words of God is liable to go off on a tangent
if he or she does not remember this stern, undeviating standard of exposition,
namely, that no individual experience is of the remotest value unless it is up
to the standard of the Word of God. The Bible not only tests experience, it
tests truth. The Bible tests all experience, all truth, all authority by our
Lord Himself and our relationship to Him personally.
Prayer is simple, prayer is supernatural,
and to anyone not related to our Lord Jesus Christ, prayer is apt to look
stupid.
Until we know Jesus, God is merely
a concept, and we can't have faith in Him. But once we hear Jesus say, "He
who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 14:9) we immediately have
something that is real, and our faith is limitless.
One of the most subtle burdens God
ever puts on us as saints is this burden of discernment concerning
other souls. He reveals things in order that we may take the burden of these
souls before Him and form the mind of Christ about them. It is not that we
bring God into touch with our minds, but that we rouse ourselves until God is
able to convey His mind to us about the one for whom we intercede.
Perseverance is more than
endurance. It is endurance combined with absolute assurance and certainty that
what we are looking for is going to happen.
The real test of a saint is
not one's willingness to preach the gospel, but one's willingness to do something
like washing the disciples' feet - that is, being willing to do those things
that seem unimportant in human estimation but count as everything to God.
Every now and again, Our Lord lets
us see what we would be like if it were not for Himself; it is a justification
of what He said - "Without Me you can do nothing." That is why the
bedrock of Christianity is personal, passionate devotion to the Lord Jesus.
God never gives strength for
tomorrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of the minute.
A saint's life is in the hands of God as a bow and arrow in the hands of an archer. God is aiming at something the saint cannot see; He stretches and strains, and every now and again the saint says, I cannot stand any more. But God does not heed; He goes on stretching until His purpose is in sight, then He lets fly.
All God's revelations are sealed to us until they are opened to us by obedience. You will never get them open by philosophy or thinking. Immediately you obey, a flash of light comes. Let God's truth work in you by soaking in it, not by worrying into it. Obey God in the thing He is at present showing you, and instantly the next thing is opened up. We read tomes on the work of the Holy Spirit when...five minutes of drastic obedience would make things clear as a sunbeam. We say, I suppose I shall understand these things some day. You can understand them now: it is not study that does it, but obedience. The tiniest fragment of obedience, and heaven opens up and the profoundest truths of God are yours straight away. God will never reveal more truth about Himself till you obey what you know already. Beware of being wise and prudent.
The only right a Christian has is
the right to give up his rights.
There is nothing to be valued more
highly than to have people praying for us; God links up his power in answer to
their prayers.
The way to grow in holiness is to
be around people more holy than ourselves. We hear their stray comments and
absorb their judgment of what's important. We listen to their prayers and find
that God is bigger than we'd thought.
Jesus Christ did not say, "You
will understand why war has come," but "Do not be scared, do not be
put in a panic."...It is the most natural thing in the world to be scared.
There is no natural heart of man or woman that is not scared by these things,
and the evidence that God's grace is at work amongst us is that we do not get
terrified.
Fretting springs from a determination to get our own way!
We need to rely on the resurrection
life of Jesus on a much deeper level than we do now. We should get in the habit
of continually seeking His counsel on everything, instead of making our own
commonsense decisions and then asking Him to bless them. He cannot bless them;
it is not in His realm to do so, and those decisions are severed from reality.
If we do something simply out of a sense of duty, we are trying to live up to a
standard that competes with Jesus Christ. We become a prideful, arrogant
person, thinking we know what to do in every situation. We have put our sense
of duty on the throne of our life, instead of enthroning the resurrection life
of Jesus.
When we get into difficult
circumstances, we impoverish His ministry by saying, "Of course, He can't
do anything about this." We struggle to reach the bottom of our own well,
trying to get water for ourselves. Beware of sitting back, and saying, "It
can't be done." You will know it can be done if you will look to Jesus.
The well of your incompleteness runs deep, but make the effort to look away
from yourself and to look toward Him.
If I obey Jesus Christ in the
seemingly random circumstances of life, they become pinholes through which I
see the face of God.
Never tolerate through sympathy with yourself or with others any practice that is not in keeping with a holy God. Holiness means unsullied walking with the feet, unsullied talking with the tongue, unsullied thinking with the mind - every detail of the life under the scrutiny of God. Holiness is not only what God gives me, but what I manifest that God has given me.
A great many people do not pray because they do not feel any sense of need. The sign that the Holy Spirit is in us is that we realize that we are empty, not that we are full. We have a sense of absolute need. We come across people who try us, circumstances that are difficult, conditions that are perplexing, and all these things awaken a dumb sense of need, which is a sign that the Holy Spirit is there. If we are ever free from the sense of need, it is not because the Holy Spirit has satisfied us, but because we have been satisfied with as much as we have. "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." A sense of need is one of the greatest benedictions because it keeps our life rightly related to Jesus Christ.
The battle of prayer is against two things in the earthlies: wandering thoughts, and lack of intimacy with God's character as revealed in His word. Neither can be cured at once, but they can be cured by discipline.
God does not have to come and tell
me what I must do for Him, He brings me into a relationship with Himself where
I hear His call and understand what He wants me to do, and I do it out of sheer
love to Him...When people say they have had a call to foreign service, or to
any particular sphere of work, they mean that their relationship to God has
enabled them to realize what they can do for God.
"The Cross did not happen to
Jesus: He came on purpose for it. He is "the Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world."
"The centre of salvation is
the Cross of Jesus, and the reason it is so easy to obtain salvation is because
it cost God so much."
"A child of the light
confesses instantly and stands bared before God; a child of the darkness says -
"Oh, I can explain that away."
"Have I entered into the
glorious privilege of being crucified with Christ until all that is left is the
life of Christ in my flesh and blood?"
"Jesus Christ carries on
intercession for us in heaven; the Holy Ghost carries on intercession in us on
earth; and we the saints have to carry on intercession for all men."
"God makes us pure by His
sovereign grace, but we have something to look after, this bodily life by which
we come in contact with other people and with other points of view."
"Never allow anything to
deflect you from insight into Jesus Christ. It is the test of whether you are
spiritual or not. To be unspiritual means that other things have a growing
fascination for you."
"A practical way of keeping
personal purity unsullied in relation to other people is to say to yourself -
That man, that woman, perfect in Christ Jesus! That friend, that relative,
perfect in Christ Jesus!"
"The one passion of Paul's
life was to proclaim the Gospel of God. He welcomed heart-breaks,
disillusionments, tribulation, for one reason only, because these things kept
him in unmoved devotion to the Gospel of God."
"Being saved and seeing Jesus
are not the same thing. Many are partakers of God's grace who have never seen
Jesus. When once you have seen Jesus, you can never be the same, other things
do not appeal as they used to do."
"Until we know Jesus, God is
merely a concept, and we can't have faith in Him. But once we hear Jesus say,
"He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 14:9) we immediately
have something that is real, and our faith is limitless."
"God has one destined end for
mankind - holiness! His one aim is the production of saints. God is not an
eternal blessing-machine for men. He did not come to save men out of pity. He
came to save men because He had created them to be holy."
"Prayer is often a temptation
to bank on a miracle of God instead of on a moral issue, i.e., it is much
easier to ask God to do my work than it is to do it myself. Until we are
disciplined properly, we will always be inclined to bank on God's miracles and
refuse to do the moral thing ourselves. It is our job, and it will never be
done unless we do it."
"The Cross was a superb
triumph in which the foundations of hell were shaken. There is nothing more
certain in Time or Eternity than what Jesus Christ did on the Cross: He
switched the whole of the human race back into a right relationship with God.
He made Redemption the basis of human life, that is, He made a way for every
son of man to get into communion with God."
"Readiness for God means that
we are ready to do the tiniest little thing or the great big thing, it makes no
difference. We have no choice in what we want to do, whatever God's programme
may be we are there, ready. When any duty presents itself we hear God's voice
as Our Lord heard His Father's voice, and we are ready for it with all the
alertness of our love for Him."
"If the Spirit of God detects
anything in you that is wrong, He does not ask you to put it right; He asks you
to accept the light, and He will put it right. A child of the light confesses
instantly and stands bared before God; a child of the darkness says - "Oh,
I can explain that away." When once the light breaks and the conviction of
wrong comes, be a child of the light, and confess, and God will deal with what
is wrong; if you vindicate yourself, you prove yourself to be a child of the
darkness."
"Paul's realization of how
Jesus Christ had dealt with him is the secret of his determination to serve
others. "I was before a perjurer, a blasphemer, an injurious person"
- no matter how men may treat me, they will never treat me with the spite and
hatred with which I treated Jesus Christ. When we realize that Jesus Christ has
served us to the end of our meanness, our selfishness, and sin, nothing that we
meet with from others can exhaust our determination to serve men for His sake."
Origin: preach the Gospel &
Daily Christian quote
