Quote of the Day

Sometimes a person comes to his minister and says, ‘I am a poor specimen of Christianity. I have no patience at all. Would you please pray for me that I might have patience?’ A minister who knows the Word of God well might begin to pray at that moment, ‘Lord, please send tribulation into this person’s life,’ because the way we develop perseverance of patience is through suffering. Therefore, if misfortune enters your life, God may be using it to develop character in you that in days to come he will use to bring glory to his name. 

D. Martyn Lloyd Jones

Quote of the Day

Jesus qualified His prayer:  "If it is Your will…."  Jesus did not "name it and claim it."…...I am astonished that, in light of the clear biblical record, anyone would have the audacity to suggest that it is wrong for the afflicted in body or soul to couch their prayers for deliverance in terms of "If it be Thy will…."  We are told that when affliction comes, God always wills healing, that He has nothing to do with suffering, and that all that we must do is claim the answer we seek by faith.  We are exhorted to claim God's yes before He speaks it.

Away with such distortions of biblical faith!  They are conceived in the mind of the Tempter, who would seduce us into exchanging faith for magic.  No amount of pious verbiage can transform such falsehood into sound doctrine.  We must accept the fact that God sometimes says no.  Sometimes He calls us to suffer and die even if we want to claim the contrary..

R. C. Sproul

Quote of the Day

February 14th.  Stonewall Jackson to his wife:  Your delightful letter of six pages received a welcome reception this evening.  I am thankful to see that our kind Heavenly Father is again restoring mother to health.  I felt uneasy about her, and thought that Joseph had better make a visit home.  I have made the restoration of mother's health a subject of prayer; but then we know that our dear ones are mortal, and that God does not always answer prayer according to our erring feelings.  I think that if, when we see ourselves in a glass, we should consider that all of us that is visible must turn to corruption and dust, we would learn more justly to appreciate the relative importance of the body that perishes and the soul that is immortal.

Quote of the Day

I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts. Its easy to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence – easier sometimes than to wait patiently.

Quote of the Day

If and when a horror turns up you will then be given Grace to help you. I don't think one is usually given it in advance. "Give us our daily bread" (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too; the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day and hour by hour.

C. S. Lewis

Quote of the Day

One word stands out from all others as the key to knowing God, to having his peace and assurance in your heart; it is OBEDIENCE.

To OBEY God's will was like food to Jesus, refreshing His mind, body and spirit. 'My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me.'

Obedience to God's will is the secret of spiritual knowledge and insight. It is not willingness to know, but willingness to DO (obey) God's will that brings certainty.

'If any man will do (obey) His Will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of Myself.'

OBEDIENCE IS THE SECRET OF GUIDANCE. Every Christian should live a God-guided life. If you are not guided by God, you will be guided by something else.

The Christian that doesn't know this sense of guidance in his life is missing something vital.

Take OBEDIENCE with you into your prayer hour, for you will know as much of God, and only as much of God, as you are willing to put into practice.

Eric Liddell

Quote of the Day

O God, I have tasted Your goodness,

and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more.

I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace.

I am ashamed of my lack of desire.

O God, the Triune God,

I want to want You;

I long to be filled with longing;

I thirst to be made more thirsty still.

Show me Your glory, I pray,

so I may know You indeed.

Begin in mercy a new work of love within me…

Give me grace to rise and follow You up from this misty lowland

where I have wandered so long.

  

A. W. Tozer

Quote of the Day

I do not perfectly understand what you say about prayer, but it reminds me of Mrs.----'s expressing surprise at my praying.  She said she did not, because Christ was all round her.   But it is no less a fact that Christ Himself spent hours in prayer, using language when He did so.  

Elizabeth Prentiss

Quote of the Day

No amount of tears can atone for sin.  No number of good deeds can make amends for wrong we have done against God.  No quantity of prayer or personal devotion can extenuate our guilt or cover it in any way.  Even everlasting burning in hell will not purify the soul from sin.

John Macarthur

Quote of the Day

Does it make sense to pray for guidance about the future if we are not obeying in the thing that lies before us today? How many momentous events in Scripture depended on one person's seemingly small act of obedience! Rest assured: Do what God tells you to do now, and, depend upon it, you will be shown what to do next. 

  

Elisabeth Elliot

Quote of the Day

In times of financial straitness Mr. Taylor more than once took occasion to remind his fellow-workers of this principle.  "The position of faith is incompatible with borrowing or going into debt, or forcing our way forward when the Lord closes the door before us," he wrote in November 1898.  "If we propose a certain extension for which the Lord sees the time has not come, or which is not in accordance with His will, how can He more clearly guide us than by withholding the means?  It would be a serious mistake, therefore, to refuse to listen to the Lord's 'No,' and by borrowing or going into debt do the thing to which He had objected by withholding the needed funds or facilities.  All the works we are engaged in is His rather than ours; and if the Master can afford to wait, surely the servant can also."

 

 

Hudson Taylor

Quote of the Day

…in prayer the goal of the work of Son and Spirit is to introduce us to the Father and to establish us in fellowship with him.  So it follows from the nature of the gospel and life of the God it reveals that Christian prayer is properly and characteristically addressed to the Father.  What it says could not be said from the Son and the Spirit, but what both Son and Spirit have taught it to say is 'Our Father.  IF we do not find that right and natural, we need to ask ourselves why.  There is a type of protestant prayer that concentrates in an unhealthy way on Jesus, and that can easily become familiar and sentimental, because it has forgotten who Jesus is - the only Son of and the only way to the Father.  There is a Jesuology that can lavish an all too human love on an all too human Jesus and banish God to such remote transcendence, that we are back with the idea that we have to cling to a loving Jesus to keep us  right with a remote and probably angry God.  There is equally a prayer that concentrates on the Holy Spirit and the gifts and blessings he can bestow in a way that forgets that these things matter only when we use them to witness to the Son and to serve the Father in amore effective obedience.  To pray to Jesus rather than through him, to the Spirit rather than in him, as the established habit of our prayer, is to betray a doubt about our relationship to the Father.

Prayer is through Christ….in John 16..."I do not say I will ask the Father on your behalf."  He will not go instead of us, we are to come ourselves because the way is open.  Yet it is immediately clear that our ability to do so is entirely dependent on Christ and our relationship to him.  We do not come by ourselves, but it is we ourselves who come through him.  The same idea of mediation is implied in Hebrews 4:16.  Because he has gone into the holiest of all as High Priest we can "approach the throne of grace with confidence"…….It was into all this that Christ initiated his disciples when he said, "When you pray, say Abba,"…

 Thomas Smail

From his book, "The Forgotten Father"

Quote of the Day

O Almighty and Everlasting God! How terrible is this world! Behold, it openeth its mouth to swallow me up, and I have so little trust in Thee!.....How weak is the flesh, and Satan how strong! If it is only in the strength of this world that I must put my trust, all is over!......My last hour is come, my condemnation has been pronounced!......O God! O God!......O God! do thou help me against the wisdom of the world! Do this; thou shouldest do this.....thou alone.....for this is not my work, but Thine. I have nothing to do here, nothing to contend for with these great ones of the world! I should desire to see my days flow on peaceful and happy. But the cause is Thine.....and it is a righteous and eternal cause. O Lord! help me! Faithful and unchangeable God! In no man do I place my trust. It would be vain! All that is of man is uncertain; all that cometh of man fails....O God! my God, hearest Thou me not?.....My God, art Thou dead?.....No! Thou canst not die! Thou hidest thyself only! Thou hast chosen me for this work. I know it well!.....Act, then, O God!......stand at my side, for the sake of thy well-beloved Jesus Christ, who is my defense, my shield, and my strong tower...................Lord! where stayest Thou?......O my God! where art Thou?,,,,,,Come! come! I am ready!.....I am ready to lay down my life for Thy truth.....patient as a lamb. For it is the cause of justice - it is Thine!.....I will never separate myself from Thee, neither now nor through eternity!.....And though the world should be filled with devils, - though my body, which is still the work of Thy hands, should be slain, be stretched upon the pavement, be cut in pieces.....reduced to ashes.....my soul is Thine!....Yes! Thy Word is my assurance of it. My soul belongs to Thee! It shall abide for ever with Thee.....Amen!....O God! help me!.....Amen!

Martin Luther

The second morning of Luther's appearance at the Diet of Worms.

Quote of the Day

While it is nice to have our problems solved and difficulties removed by others, it is not always best for us. Instead of continuing to answer your questions, I might be of more service if I put you in the way of answering them for yourself. That man is the greatest help to me who casts me back upon God and stimulates me to the study of his Word. 'Study', I say, for while there are many who read it daily, and use the concordance, scarcely any study it. The first requirment is, of course, a spirit of dependence upon the Lord(distrusting our own competency), yet prayer is not meant to encourage slothfulness, and is no substitute for the diligent use of whatever talents God has bestowed upon us...

 

A. W. Pink