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The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the out working of that impulse is our following hard after Him; and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand: “Thy right hand upholdeth me.”
The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we Christians are in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word.
It is inherent in personality to be able to know other personalities, but full knowledge of one personality by another cannot be achieved in one encounter.
God is a Person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires and suffers as any other person may.
He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.
Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God.
Paul confessed the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after Christ. “That I may know Him,” was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything.
Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.
The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all.
We must put away all effort to impress, and come with the guileless candor of childhood. If we do this, without doubt God will quickly respond.
There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess.
The pronouns “my” and “mine” look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant.
They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease.
God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.
Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things.
“Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities.
actual spiritual experience the Presence
Faith enables our spiritual sense to function.
Where faith is defective the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things.
The worshipping heart does not create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration.
Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world but we doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word.
But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of God, shining around us.
At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The object of the Christian’s faith is unseen reality.
If we truly want to follow God we must seek to be other-worldly. This I say knowing well that that word
Obedience to the word of Christ will bring an inward revelation of the Godhead (John 14:21-23).
A word is a medium by which thoughts are expressed, and the application of term to the Eternal Son leads us to believe that self-expression is inherent in the Godhead, that God is forever seeking to speak Himself out to His creation. The whole Bible supports the idea. God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is by His nature continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking Voice.
The Word of God is quick and powerful. In the beginning He spoke to nothing, and it became something. Chaos heard it and became order, darkness heard it and became light. “And God said—and it was so.”
God did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a distance by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to persist across the years.
The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe.
“looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” From all this we learn that faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God.
A satisfactory spiritual life will begin with a complete change in relation between God and the sinner; not a judicial change merely, but a conscious and experienced change affecting the sinner’s whole nature.
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.
do not here refer to the act of justification by faith in Christ. I speak of a voluntary exalting of God to His proper station over us and a willing surrender of our whole being to the place of worshipful submission which the Creator-creature circumstance makes proper.
He spoke out of the fullness of His Godhead, and His words are very Truth itself.
It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it.
