The Calm Delight

"When you have been busy all day long, and are not able to shake off the cares of business, you get warmed up by getting near to each other in your prayers. And, more than that, the united fires being placed together on the hearth, the fire-brands are made to burn with greater power. There is a kind of divine excitement that comes upon us sometimes at the prayer-meeting. I remember in one of our prayer-meetings where we fasted and prayed and an intense excitement was there, not fleshly, but deeply spiritual. How we felt ourselves bowed down at one time, and then lifted up again at another. I have sometimes sat side by side with a brother who has said, 'Can you bear this much longer? I feel it is too much for my physical frame.' Oh! the calm delight which springs from close communion with the invisible God!" - Charles Spurgeon

I asked the King

"I asked the King to remove a great burden from me. I couldn’t understand why He didn’t answer. He then showed me that what I asked Him to take away was exactly what He’d given me to make me more like Him." - Randy Alcorn, Edge of Eternity

Radical Confidence in God

"Christian discipline means…a progressive weakening of man’s instinctive self-confidence, and of the self-despair to which this leads, and the growth of radical confidence in God."

(C.K. Barrett in David Prior, The Suffering and the Glory, 31)

10 ?'s for Lent

1. Do You Thirst for God?
2. Are You Governed Increasingly by God's Word?
3. Are You More Loving?
4. Are You More Sensitive to God's Presence?
5. Do You Have a Growing Concern for the Spiritual and Temporal Needs of Others?
6. Do You Delight in the Bride of Christ?
7. Are the Spiritual Disciplines of the Christian Life Increasingly Important to You?
8. Do You Still Grieve Over Sin?
9. Are You a Quicker Forgiver?
10. Do You Yearn for Heaven and to Be With Jesus?

These questions come out of a book written by Donald Whitney. I am taking 4 days per question.

One remedy for a thousand evils

Beloved, let every church learn the value of its prayer-meetings ... When the pastor is gone, and when it has been difficult to find a suitable successor; when, it may be, there are splits and divisions; when death falls upon honored members, when poverty comes in, when there is a spiritual famine, and when the Holy Spirit appears to have withdrawn himself — then there is but one remedy for these and a thousand other evils, and that one remedy is contained in this short sentence, "Let us pray." - Charles Spurgeon

To love is to be vulnerable

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable." - C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

God's love conquers the world

"The love for equals is a human thing - of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.

The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing - the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.

The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing - to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.

And then there is the love for the enemy - love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world."

— Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat

Testing

Testing

“We need testing. God tests us. The test results will show whether we are choosing the way of awe and worship and obedience (which is to say, God), or whether, without being aware of it, we are reducing God to our understanding of him so that we can use him. Have we slipped into the habit of insisting that God do what we ask or want or need him to do, treating him as an idol designed for our satisfaction? Does God serve us or do we serve God? Do we require a God we can fully understand and control or are we willing to be obedient to what we do not understand and could never control? Is God a mystery of goodness whom we embrace and trust, or is God a formula for getting the most out of life on our terms? The test results will show whether we have been blithely assuming that God is pledged to give us whatever we want whenever we ask. Have we thought all along that God is there to serve us? The test will tell us. Do we want God in our own image or do we want a God who is beyond us and over us, who we trust will do for us what only God can do in the way that only God can do it--no strings attached… no reservations…no caveats… the whole hog? The test will tell us.” - Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way

Our Father is younger than we

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, 'Do it again;' and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we." - GK Chesterton

The Unrelenting Love of God in the life of C.S. Lewis

"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?" C.S. Lewis