Jacob Moore > Recent Status Updates

Take care how you treat young piety. Be tender of it. Believe that children can be saved as much as yourselves. When you see the young heart brought to the Savior, don't stand by and speak harshly, mistrusting every thing. It is better sometimes to be deceived than to be the means of ruining one. God send his people a more firm belief that little buds of grace are worthy of all care.

O! Thou little-souled man, who hast no love for any unless he conform to thine own sect, thou knowest little of Christ, for if thou livedst near to him, thou wouldst have a large heart.

Both the rocks were most eminent types of our blessed Lord Jesus Chrisr, who, being smitten, gives forth water for the refreshing of his people, and who follows them all the desert through with his refreshing floods.

Don't be afraid, child of God. "Resist the devil and he will flee from you;" and even though he may cast you to the ground, remember that the righteous falleth many times, but he riseth up again; and so shalt thou, and the designs of the enemy shall be frustrated, as it is written, "Thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee."

The old enemy has been troubling me very much lately; but I told him that he must not say anything to me about my sins, he must go to my Master, for I had transferred the whole concern to him, bad debts and all.

So we learned the dance that cripples the human spirit, step by step, we who were white and we who were black, day by day, hour by hour, year by year until the movements were reflexes and made for the rest of our lives without thinking... Something was wrong with a world that tells you that love is good and people are important and then forces you to deny love and to humiliate people.

If your bodies are to dwell in heaven, I beseech you take care of them. I do not mean to take care of what you eat and drink, and wherewithal you shall be clothed; but I mean, take care that you do not let your bodies be polluted by sin... If these eyes are to see the King in his beauty, ever let this be your prayer; "Turn off my eyes from beholding vanities."

Take heed-- your strength is vanity, your power is a delusion, your might is a lie -- for however much you may boast in what you can do, it shall pass away; when you come to the real contest with death, you shall find that you have no strength to grapple with it.

Flowers, what are they? They are but thoughts of God solidified, God's beautiful thoughts put into shape. Storms, what are they? They are God's terrible thoughts written out that we may read them. Thunders, what are they? They are God's powerful emotions, just opened out that men may hear them.
. The world is a thought in God's eye... and every thing in the majestic temple that he has made has a meaning.

As visible words of the gospel, the sacraments therefore, & not ungodly images so rampant in our culture, ought to inform our purpose & morality. Baptism & Communion will not permit us to live however we want in attempts to find purpose & fulfillment. They teach us that to live a worthwhile & satisfying life is to live in the Son & be like the Son, to be a baptized & communing person, a person of the water & blood.

Didymua the Blind: The baptismal pool is the workshop of the Trinity for the salvation of all faithful people... The church becomes the mother of all by the Holy Spirit while remaining a Virgin.

Very well, you do not expect that God has made one man to say every thing. Certainly not. One class of men defend one class of truths, and another, another. I bless God there are so many denominations. If there were not men who differed a little in their creeds, we should never get so much gospel as we do.

The swaggering suitors clustered around,
milling round him,
welcome words on their lips,
and murder in their hearts.

There is all the difference between fate & Providence... Fate is a blind thing; it is the avalanche crushing the village down below & destroying thousands. Providence is not an avalanche; it is a rolling river, rippling at first like a rill down the sides of a mountain, followed by minor streams, till it rolls in the broad ocean of everlasting love, for the good of the human race.

It's light work for the gods who rule the skies
to exalt a mortal man or bring him low.

Luther says, "the devil can not bear singing." That is about the truth; he does not like music. It was so in Saul's days ... when David played on his harp, the evil spirit went away from him... If we begin to sing we shall remove our fears... Singing is the best thing to purge ourselves of evil thoughts. Keep your mouth full of songs, and you will often keep your heart full of praises.

I do not ask whether you are Churchmen, or whether you are Methodists, or Independents, or Baptists, if you do but know this watchword-- "Your righteousness is of me, saith the Lord." I can forgive all those other minor things, if you can sing--

"Jesus, thy blood & righteousness,
My beauty are, my glorious dress."

We would be wise, I believe, to embrace a sacramental piety. Sacramental piety takes hold of the gifts of God & is grounded in the sacraments ... such a piety requires that we we understand and enact what baptism & Communion portray & confirm. A sacramental piety is a way of life that holds fast to God's gifts ... & springs from understanding what it means to be baptized sons who commune with God & his children.

Calvin provocatively states, "The sacraments bring the clearest promises; & they have this characteristic over & above the word because they represent them for us as painted in a picture from life." Moreover, through the sacraments, "God attests his good will & love towards us more expressly than by the word." They make God's word "more evident" & "more certain."

Sin is not our nature, but its derangement.

154: The Father, unless he were God, could not have been the Father; & the Son could not have been the Son, unless he were God. Therefore we say deity in an absolute sense exists of itself; we confess the Son, since he is God, exists of himself, but not in respect to his Person; indeed, since he is the Son, he exists from the Father. His essence is without beginning; while the beginning of his person is God himself.

I reassured dead Achilles, but he broke out, protesting,
"No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man--
Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive --
than rule down here over all the breathless dead."

166: Apart from Christ, there can be only a "fleeting knowledge of God" that quickly turns to the vinegar of idiolatry & superstition, however much "one proclaims at the top of their lungs that the Creator of heaven & earth is God."

If you have endeavored to get holiness before Christ, you have begun at the wrong end, you have sought the flower before you have the root, and are foolish for your pains. Ishmaels, tremble before him now! If others of you be Isaacs, may you ever remember that you are children of the promise. Stand fast. Be not entangled by the yoke of bondage, for you are not under the law, but under grace.

O, beloved! Is it not sweet to reflect that our holy things are now really holy; that though sin is mixed with them all, and we think them defiled, yet they are not, for the blood has washed out every stain; and the service this day is as holy in God's sight as the service of the cherubim, and is acceptable as the psalms of the glorified; we have washed our worship in the blood of the Lamb, and it is accepted.

Ares strode right in:
"Quick, my darling, come, let's be off to bed
And lose ourselves in love! Your husbands away --
and her heart raced with joy to sleep with War
and off they went to bed and down they lay--
and down around them came those cunning chains.

This sounds a lot like the Proverbs! Just fascinating to hear the prose and be struck by the similarity.

It is great wisdom to make death our every day companion. So we ought often to lay our souls in death; to make death a familiar thing; to talk with it every day. We can shut our ears to the voice of God in mirth; but in "the house of mourning," we can hear every whisper. If you get an invitation to a funeral, do not disdain to go there, O son of God, for the Holy Ghost will so reveal Jesus beside the mourner.

The belly's a shameless dog, there's nothing worse.
Always insisting, pressing, it never lets us forget--
destroyed as I am, my heart racked with sadness,
sick with anguish, still it keeps me demanding,
"Eat, drink!" It blots out all the memory
of my pain, commanding, "Fill me up!"

How Calvin viewed the doctrines of election & predestination pastorally is evident in his sermon on Ephesians... Though he did not refuse to preach the doctrine of reprobation, he presented the election to salvation aa good news for sinners & a source of enocuragement to believers... Christians may have confidence they have been awakened to faith, & shall be kept in the same grace which elected them from eternity.