Quote of the Day

Soon after I stopped feeling this intense love and presence of God, I started grasping for things that normally brought that passion back.  I would drive almost an hour away to find churches with great worship bands and speakers……I knew on some level that there was something off about the way I was approaching this, but I felt like I needed to do whatever it took to get that feeling back.  And then one day it struck me:  my faith had stopped being about God and had become about how I felt.  That was really selfish of me.  It shouldn't have mattered how I felt if I trusted that God was real.  At that point the best thing for someone like me was to remove those feelings so that my faith would once again become about God, not myself. ….the end result was that I began learning how  to center my life around God with or without the feelings that I once had…….To make Christianity purely about feelings is to make it about ourselves rather than God.  God doesn't promise to constantly flood us with intense emotion…From the earliest days of the church, Christians have based their closeness to God on theology - on what they knew about God from Scripture - rather than feelings.  Many of the first Christians shed blood for believing in God.  If anyone had the right to feel distant from God, wouldn’t it be the people suffering for his sake? Instead, the early disciples rejoiced at the chance to suffer for Christ (Acts 5:41)."

From the book: Short Answers to Big Questions about God, the Bible and Christianity

by Clinton E. Arnold and Jeff Arnold

Quote of the Day

Every Christian who falls into sin is a fool.  If a Christian feels he is in a state of defeat, it is because he is being controlled by his subjective feelings, instead of by an understanding of the truth.  Deliverance from this condition, therefore, depends upon a total change in approach:  Christians are to look not at themselves and their problems but at what God had done for them; their need is not the ‘hospital’ but the ‘barracks” where they will forget their own troubles and ills, and learn to fight in the army. 

We must get rid of that notion of the clinic and the hospital; and we must look at these things more in terms of God and His glory, and the great campaign which He inaugurated through the Son of His love, and which He is going to bring to a triumphant conclusion.

 

Martin Lloyd-Jones

Quote of the Day

On Psalm 42:

… the first thing we have to learn is what the Psalmist learned—we must take ourselves in hand. This man was not content just to lie down and commiserate with himself. He does something about it, he takes himself in hand. But he does something which is more important still, that is he talks to himself. This man turns to himself and says: “Why are thou cast down O my soul, why art thou disquieted within me?” He is talking to himself, he is addressing himself. “But”, says someone, “is that not the one thing we should not do since our great trouble is that we spend too much time with ourselves? Surely it contradicts what you have already said. You warned us against morbidity and introspection, and now you tell us that we have to talk to ourselves!”

How do we reconcile the two things? In this way. I say that we must talk to ourselves instead of allowing “ourselves” to talk to us! Do you realize what this means?

I suggest that the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this: that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self.

Am I trying to be delibrately paradoxical? Far from it. This is the very essence of wisdom in this matter. Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment was this: instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says,: “Self, listen for moment, I will speak to you.” Do you know what I mean? If you do not, you have had but little experience.

  

Martyn-Lloyd Jones