Thoughts
A man is free, free to create by his choices, free to will what he values most .
A world continually propped up and corrected by Divine interference is a world in which nothing important ever depended on human choice, and choice itself would soon cease to exist. This is true because of the certainty that one of the apparent alternatives before you would lead to no result, and therefore it was not really an alternative in the first place.
Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable.
Here is where the bible is greatly wronged. It nowhere claims to be regarded as the word, the way, the truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding. Revelation of God. It is Christ that “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” not the bible, save as leading to Him.
Rev 2:17, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.” The giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man. It is the divine judgement, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, “Come thou blessed”, spoken to the individual…The true name is the one which expresses the character, the nature, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man’s own symbol-his souls picture, in a word-the sign which belongs to him and no one else. Who can give a man this his own name? God alone. For no one else sees what the man is. It is only when the man becomes his name that the lord gives him the stone with the name upon it for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection the completeness, that determines the name: and God foresees that from the first because he made it so but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes cannot understand what blossom it is to bear and could not understand what the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man “is” the name. The name for the man must be the expression of Gods own idea of the man, that being He had in His thought when he began to make the child, and whom He kept in his thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success-to say, “In thee I am also well pleased.” The name is the one “which no man knoweth saving he that recieveth it.” Thus, not only has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God– he is to God a particular being, made after his own fashion and that of no one else. So we can worship God as no one else can. Here, there is no room for ambition. Ambition is the desire to be above one’s neighbor, and here there is no possibility of comparison with one’s neighbor–no one knows what the white stone contains except the man who receives it…Relative worth is not only unknown-to the children of the kingdom, it is unknowable. “God has cared to make me for himself ” says the victor with the white stone, “and has called me what I like best”.
Israel is small, and so are you. . . Israel was under captivity, and so were you. Every nation needs to be free, and so do you. Israel’s real-estate seems so insignificant, and so do you. Israel needs a savior, and so so do you. Only a miracle can deliver Israel, and so with you. Israel is surrounded by enemies , and so are you. Israel’s only hope is in GOD so is yours.
History has shown crimes of logic can be more catastrophic than crimes of passion. Ideas either govern the world or throw it into chaos. The real battle is in the area of ideas. Ideas are to be discussed not personalities. From ideas burst forth all external things: painting, music, buildings, the loves and hating of men in practice and the results of loving God or rebellion against God in the external world. The gospel is ideas–flaming ideas–as God has revealed them to us by Scripture. The battle is centrally in the world of thought; the Christian life always begins inside in our thought world. The spiritual battle that is loss or won is always in the thought world.
All men want knowledge but what good is any kind of knowledge if it does not make you more humbled by drawing you closer to God? I would rather feel compunction and humility than understand its definition.
“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
God has suffered much more for sin than any man ever will. If God is incapable of suffering in every respect then He is incapable of love.
God will use the things that we can’t boast about.
Because God is infinite he can treat each one of us as if we were the only one in the universe that exist. He does not give a part of Himself to one and another part of Himself to another. He can give some one all of himself without losing anything of who He is. When a man has God, whatever he may lose is as if he had actually lost nothing; for now he has it all in one; and he has it purely, legitimately, forever.
God holds the soul and regulates the stroke. Sometimes He makes the devil His hammer-man…Satan strikes to smash. God regulates the stroke, and turns his malice to our perfecting, and the devil sweats at the task of fashioning saints into the likeness of Christ.
God is like the sun–you cannot look at it, but without it you can see nothing else.
All truth is God’s truth.
There is evil in the world. If there is evil, there must be good. If there is good and evil, there must be a moral law on which to judge between good and evil. If there is a moral law, there must be a moral law giver –this points to God. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to believe that he exists. You cannot upset existing things unless you believe in something outside of them, something positive and divine.
The Christian go’s through life from love of self, to love of God, to love of self for God.
Though experience is an excellent teacher, its lessons are often costly, especially when they come too late.
In man, there is still a recollection, a memory, of his original righteousness. He does not know that; he cannot put it like that; he does not believe the Bible, he does not believe in theology. Nevertheless, it is a fact. There is in man a factor called conscience. Oh, how many a man wished he had not got one; but he has it, and it will not go away; and it will go on speaking, and pulling. It is an influence in his life that will never leave him. What is it? It is the Memory, the partial recollection of his original righteousness, of what he once was.
Man knows in his heart of hearts that he was meant for something better. He has a sense of justice, of right and wrong of good and evil. He has a sense of God! He does not like it but he has it; and it disturbs him.
An opinion is a preference in a continuum of options, but a conviction is that which is rooted in your conscience. You cannot alter a conviction without changing that which is essentially you.
Intellect is to emotion, as our bones are to our bodies.
A good beginning does not guarantee a good ending. King Saul had a good beginning but not a good ending. It is not how many failures you have but what you do with failure that makes or breaks you. Failure is never fatal in Grace.
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.
Controversy does not rise in those blessed with certainties
People who are afraid of hell want religion; people who are going through hell want GOD.
How little I have gained; how vast the unattained! We are but infants in comparison to what we hope to be.
Though experience is an excellent teacher, its lessons are often costly, especially when they come too late.
Independence depends on dependence on GOD!
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Where money is an idol, to be poor is a sin.
An opened mind like an open mouth should have a purpose and should be closed upon something solid, otherwise it could end up like a city sewer, rejecting nothing. Don’t fall into the trap of intellectualism and forget the splendor and power of simplicity. Jesus never said education shall set you free
To believe in the non-existence of God would be the same as looking into the mirror and seeing nothing there would be nothing to conform to no reference point to tell me who I am what my heritage is or what my destiny is.
Love never fails. It does not mean that love always gets the object of its desire, but if you love you will never be a failure, and in the end you will always be more than a conqueror.
Truthfulness in the heart precedes truth in the objective realm. “Intent is prior to content.” Intellectual deception always follows moral rejection.
Patience is more than endurance, It is concentrated strength; it is a form of hope built on the fact that God is love.
You cannot upset existing things unless you believe in something outside of them, something positive and divine.
You always kneel to light a fire. Thank God for prayer.
Though experience is an excellent teacher, its lessons are often costly, especially when they come too late.
An opinion is a preference in a continuum of options, but a conviction is that which is rooted in your conscience. You cannot alter a conviction without changing that which is essentially you.
Intellect is to emotion, as our clothes are to our bodies.
A good beginning does not guarantee a good ending. King Saul had a good beginning but not a good ending. It is not how many failures you have but what you do with failure that makes or breaks you. Failure is never fatal in Grace.
Controversy does not rise in those blessed with certainties
People who are afraid of hell want religion; people who are going through hell want GOD.
The universe was made for the world; the world was made for the body and the body was made for the spirit, and the spirit was made for God. The spirit that it might be brought into subjection to God, the body that it might be brought into subjection to the spirit, and the spirit that it might be brought into subjection to God.
An opened mind like an open mouth should have a purpose and should be closed upon something solid, otherwise it could end up like a city sewer, rejecting nothing. Don’t fall into the trap of intellectualism and forget the splendor and power of simplicity. Jesus never said education shall set you free.
There is the person that we think we are , the person that we think other people think we are , the person that others think I am and the person God knows I am.
Character is what we are; reputation is what people think we are. The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts. What you hold in your thoughts is what you bring into the world.
The quality of your spiritual life depends upon the quality of your thoughts. You are today where your thoughts about God have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts about God will take you. The reason there are so few good talkers about God in public is that there are so few thinkers about God in private. Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.
Thoughts are to the soul what bones are to the body
Reexamine all you have been told…
Dismiss what insults your Soul.
The direction of a man’s thought about God is always the decisive factor in his personality. His whole outer life will be determined by the inward inclination of his mind. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities– it is quacks and cranks who do that. The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see.
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
I am very glad that our fashionable fiction seems to be full of a return to paganism, for it may possibly be the first step of a return to Christianity. Neo-pagans have sometimes forgotten, when they set out to do everything the old pagans did, that the final thing the old pagans did was to get christened.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
Remember-fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
Impartiality and tolerance are just pompous names for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
Among many of the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
Habits are nearly always selfish.
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid or worse.
How can a moral wrong be a civil right? To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does, he is certainly a selfish fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he can’t be free to choose what he wants to be , he is not a free man any more than a dog.
Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Modern life has not transformed humanity for the better in the way the great prophets of modernity imagined it would. Instead it had nearly resulted in the abolition of that creature who was once understood to me only a little lower than the angels , rather than just a little higher than the apes. Thus, in sex, no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink
The people who march for reform are always right about what is wrong. But they are generally wrong about what is right.
There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.
The true Christian soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him
How quickly religious revolutions grow old– and worse still, respectable.
Once you abolish God, the government becomes the god.
If you have no absolutes by which to judge society then society becomes absolute.
The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
Love means loving the unlovable – or it is no virtue at all.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man
“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable, so it is not that we don’t have enough scoundrels to curse; it’s that we don’t have enough good men to curse them.”
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
The decay of our modern society is praised by our modern artists as worms praise the decay of a corpse.
.It seems to me that the purpose of the modern education system is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
Though the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to describe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens into imbecility.
The modern mind set says, “Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like.”
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
The human race has been playing at children’s games from the beginning and will probably do it till the end–which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up spiritually.
Getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
The object of opening the mind–as of opening the mouth– is to close it again on something solid.or you just become an open sewer accepting anything
The soul is liable to great volcanic processes. There come to it tragic and tremendous hours when all its depths are broken up, all its landmarks shattered, and all its streams turned rudely back. For weal or for woe everything is suddenly and strangely changed. Amidst the crash of ruin and the loss of all, the soul sobs out its pitiful lament. ‘Everything has gone!’ it cries. ‘I can never be the same again! I can never get over it!’ But Time is a great healer. His touch is so gentle that the poor patient is not conscious of its pressure. The days pass, and the weeks, and the months, and the years. Like the trees that start from the rocky faces, and the ferns that creep out of every cranny in the ruined horizon, new interests steal imperceptibly into life. There come new faces, new loves, new thoughts, and new sympathies. The heart responds to fresh influences and bravely declines to die. And whilst the days that are dead are embalmed in costliest spices, and lie in the most holy place of the temple of memory, the soul discovers with surprise that it has surmounted the cruel shock of earlier shipwreck, and can once more greet the sea.” — F.W.Boreham
Real gold fears no fire.
I have this minute in my control. It is all I really do have to work with. It is as magnificent or drab or vile as the thoughts, which fill it. Our most common sin is empty minutes.
The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.
People who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives on something that they think worth spending their God given energy on and when one day the pressures of reality cause the bubble of superficiality burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted.
God’s supervision is so blessedly true that at any given moment, whatever we may face we can say, “for this cause I came into this hour.
The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people down or enjoying putting them in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the diabolical self. The diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.
Satan has not declared peace with the church but the church acts as if he had.
God made this world simple, man’s complex problems are of his own demising.
A man is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot loose.
For many of us, a denominational tag becomes less important. We simply wish to be world Christians.
God challenges His people to invest vigorously in tomorrow. Christians are to be active agents of a loving “divine imperialism” throughout the planet. The boredom and futility of ritualism are replaced with the consuming responsibility of leadership.
We must never underestimate the potential of youth. Throughout history God has called the young to rise up and change the world through the gospel.
We cannot expect God to pour out His blessing unless we are willing to become involved in some kind of redemptive service. Whatever form our service might take, at it’s heart will be world evangelism- bringing all the nations by all means to know Christ.
The gospel is good news only if it arrives on time.
Some people out of their own character construct a Christianity, which consists entirely of a personal relationship to Jesus Christ and has virtually nothing to do with the church. Others make a grudging concession to the need for church membership, but out of their cynicism add that they have given up the ecclesiastical institution as hopeless. Now it is understandable, even inevitable, that we are critical of many of the church’s inherited structures and traditions. Every church in every place at every time is in need of reform and renewal. But we need to be careful or we despise the people who Christ laid down His life for, and end up blind to his work in history. We may safely say that God has not abandoned his church, however displeased with it he may be. He is still building and refining it and if we claim to have His heart we should too. And if God has not abandoned it, how can we?
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.
We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
We must adjust to an ever-changing road…while holding onto our unchanging principles
In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins…not through strength, but through persistence
Wisdom is knowing which path to take next…integrity is taking it
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow
The people who get on in this world and are effective for Christ and eternity are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them
One of the greatest discoveries of any Christian is that God created every human being with the power and knowledge that he can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
Remember the battle is always attitudes and ideas no matter where you go those two things are always happening
Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”
The Currents that determine our dreams and shape our lives, flow from the attitudes and ideas that we nurture every day”. Especially the ones that we hold towards God
Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and wrong…because sometime in your life you will have been all of these.”
The sea of change can pull you in many directions. It is our responsibility to follow Christ and be responsible to Him in doing that He will light the way and take care of you…before the competition does.
Quality only happens when we care enough to do our very best.”
Dare to Soar (Eagle). Your attitude almost always determines your altitude in life
Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Choose your words, for they become actions. Understand your actions, for they become habits. Study your habits, for they will become your character. Develop your character, for it becomes your destiny.”
We make our choices; then our choices turn around and make us it is no joke when the bible tells is that we will reap what we sow
Some people dream of success, while others wake up and work hard at it.
Sometimes there is no next time, no second chance, no time out. Sometimes…it’s now or never; our time is short, do what you must do for Christ now or you will look back with regret what could have been had you just been wise.
Successful is the person who has lived well, laughed often and loved much, who has gained the respect of children, who leaves the world better than they found it, who has never lacked appreciation for the earth’s beauty, who never fails to look for the best in others or give the best of themselves
If there is no design existing beforehand, and no goal existing already, how are we to know whether any entirely new thing is a good thing or not? All attempted answers to this question are evasions of the question. We may say that man must judge by his best moral standards; but that is to admit that there are standards by which we can judge the standards. We may say that he must follow where the best light leads him; but that is to admit that there is a difference between light and darkness, which cannot change. And why should it not change if everything else changes?.
What modern man call’s personality has become the most impersonal thing in the world. Its pale and featureless face appears like a ghost at every corner and in every crowd. … Selfish individualism kills individuality, precisely because individualism has to be an ‘ism’ quite as much as Communism or Calvinism. The economic and ethical school, which calls itself individualist ended by threatening the world with the flattest and dullest spread of the commonplace. Men, instead of being themselves, set out to find a self to be: a sort of abstract money making self-identified with self-interest. But while the self was that of a man, the self-interest was generally that of a class or a trade or even an empire. So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became part of a communal mass of selfishness.
Hope is the oxygen of life, remove it and people will suffocate in despair.
There was a time when you could almost be afraid to call yourself a follower of Jesus Christ, because it meant so much.
Now you can do it with complete ease, because it means nothing at all.
Pray absolutely for those things you may pray for absolutely.
Pray conditionally for those things you may pray for conditionally.
For those things you can’t pray for – don’t.
You’ve got to have fire to set fire with. You’ve got to have life to propagate life with.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not for the well-meaning: it is for the desperate.
When the door opens we ought to press in, sacrificing our lives if needs be for God… of course it costs life. It is not an expedition of ease nor a picnic excursion to which we are called. It is going to cost many a life, and not lives only, but prayers and tears and blood. You have chosen the roughest road, but it leads straight to the hill-tops.
The cure for dullness in life is not brilliance but reality.
Actors speak of things imaginary as if they were real, while preachers too often speak of things real as if they were imaginary.
Beware of prayerless tears and beware of tearless prayers.
Gethsemane is where He died; the cross is only the evidence.
The Cross will bear those who bear the Cross.
The Christian is a man who can be certain about the ultimate even when he is most uncertain about the immediate.
There is no sin or selfishness which will sooner bring about a nation’s fall. If history teaches anything, it teaches that selfish indulgence is the surest way to national ruin. Society, in not condemning selfish living condemns itself.
The only right a Christian has is the right to give up his rights and fight for God’s rights
Pray hardest when it is hardest to pray.
I have now concentrated all my prayers into one, and that one prayer is this, that I may die to self, and live wholly to him.
First of the Christian graces – humility
Second of the Christian graces – humility
Third of the Christian graces – humility.
It is the heart that experiences God and not just the reason.
Where there is fear and love of God to keep the house, the enemy can find no way to enter.
I look not to win neighbor without wounds and blood.
Teach us, good Lord, to serve you more faithfully; to give of ourselves and not to count the cost; to fight for the higher glory and eternal things and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor and not to ask for any reward, save that of knowing that we do your will, O Lord our God.
If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.
Measure thy life by loss and not by gain.
Not by the wine drunk, but by the wine poured forth.
For love’s strength standeth in love’s sacrifice.
And He who suffers most has most to give.
The more we pay for any truth, the better is our bargain.
Prayer is the highest activity of the human soul, and therefore it is at the same time the ultimate test of a man’s true spiritual condition (there is nothing so much as prayer life that tells the truth about us as Christian people.) Everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer.
True peace is when the soul revolves around its center, Almighty God, craving for nothing but what God continually supplies. Since the soul is large enough to contain the infinite God, nothing less than Himself can satisfy or fill it.
Take your burdens, and troubles, and losses, and wrongs, if come they must and will, as your opportunities, knowing that God has girded you for greater things than these.
You find no difficulty in trusting the Lord with the management of the universe and all the outward creation, and can your case be any more difficult than these, that you need to be anxious about His management of it?
As in our daily walk we come nearer towards heaven, He will open to us more of heaven.
I have no home, until I am in the realized presence of God. This holy presence is my inward home, and, until I experience it, I am a homeless wanderer, a straying sheep in waste howling wilderness.
God always fills in all hearts all the room which is left Him there.
The soul which gives itself wholly and without reserve to God is filled with His own peace; and the closer we draw to our God, so much the stronger and more steadfast and tranquil shall we become.
Be persuaded, timid soul, that He has loved you too much to cease loving you.
The spirit of prayer is pressing forth of the soul out of this earthly life; it is a stretching with all its desire after the life of God, to be one life, one love, one spirit with Christ in God.
A low standard of prayer means a low standard of character and a low standard of service. Those alone labor effectively among men who impetuously fling themselves upward towards God.
Jesus said love your neighbor not fix your neighbor.
It is not obedience alone that the Lord will have , but obedience to the truth to the Light of the World, truth beheld and known.
Your neighbor is who ever is in reach of your influence.
He give you a chance to became a child again He can give you your simplicity again To a child everything and everyone around him is bigger than himself and he looks up not just to earthly things but to heavenly things with wonder. And life can be full, full of wonder and no longer limited.
We can’t talk to God strongly unless we have lived for God strongly.
Upon a life I did not live,
Upon a death I did not die,
Another’s life, Another’s death
I stake my whole eternity.
Jesus Is Worth Everything
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