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Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb.
For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.
Christian theology teaches the doctrine of prevenient grace, which briefly stated means this, that before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man.
We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.
Right now we are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart.
If we would find God amid all the religious externals we must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity. Now as always God discovers Himself to “babes” and hides Himself in thick darkness from the wise and the prudent.
and by those words made him richer than all his brethren, richer than all the kings and rajas who have ever lived in the world.
They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease.
“Whosoever will lose for my sake shall find.”
I only wanted to remove him from the temple of your heart that I might reign unchallenged there.
He had everything, but he possessed nothing. There is the spiritual secret.
Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.
No one need be poor, because, if he chooses, he can have Jesus for his own property and possession. No one need be downcast, for Jesus is the joy of heaven, and it is His joy to enter into sorrowful hearts.
We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Saviour passed when He suffered under Pontius Pilate.
Open my eyes that I may see; give me acute spiritual perception; enable me to taste Thee and know that Thou art good. Make heaven more real to me than any earthly thing has ever been. Amen.
It is important that we get still to wait on God. And it is best that we get alone, preferably with our Bible outspread before us.
The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort.
He knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring. He rests perfectly content to allow God to place His own values.
