| Devotional | Growing Faith and Increasing Capacity
To receive in a measure more in keeping with God's liberality five things are necessary. The first is faith. We must be convinced that God is kind, generous, goodhearted and ready to bestow His blessings upon His people with the bounty of a king. To have faith we must immerse ourselves in the Scriptures. And faith must be exercised if it is to be ...read |
| Devotional | Growing in Experiential Union
God, being perfect, has capacity for perfect friendship. Man, being imperfect, can never quite know perfection in anything, least of all in his relation to the incomprehensible Godhead. Perfection lies on God?s side, but on man?s side there are weakness of purpose, lack of desire, small faith and numerous other impediments. These make for a friends ...read |
| Devotional | Growing Numbers Do Not Guarantee Increasing Quality
The question of numbers and their relation to success or failure in the work of the Lord is one that disturbs most Christians more than a little.
. . . There are Christians, for instance, who dismiss the whole matter as being beneath them.
. . .They prefer to sit around the Lord's Table in a select and tight little circle, admiring the deep ...read |
| Devotional | Growing Oaks or Ears of Popcorn
The church must claim again her ancient dowry of everlastingness. She must begin again to deal with ages and millenniums rather then with days and years. She must not count numbers but test foundations. She must work for permanence rather than for appearance. Her children must seek those enduring things that have been touched with immortality. The ...read |
| Devotional | Growing Up in Christ
The true Christian is a saint in embryo. The heavenly genes are in him and the Holy Spirit is working to bring him on into a spiritual development that accords with the nature of the heavenly Father from whom he received the deposit of divine life. Yet he is here in this mortal body subject to weakness and temptation, and his warfare with the flesh ...read |
| Devotional | Growing Up into Christ
By "instant Christianity" I mean the kind found almost everywhere in gospel circles and which is born of the notion that we may discharge our total obligation to our own souls by one act of faith, or at most by two, and be relieved thereafter of all anxiety about our spiritual condition. We are saints by calling, our teachers keep telling us, and ...read |
| Devotional | GUIDANCE IS BY THE SPIRIT
We can always trust the moving and the leading of the Holy Spirit in our lives and experiences, but we cannot always trust our human leanings and our fleshly and carnal desires. That calls for another word of balance. We know that the emotional life is a proper and noble part of our total personality. But by its very nature, it is of secondary impo ...read |
| Devotional | Harmonious Living
This brief list does not at all exhaust the number of infirmities we are likely to find in the Christian assembly. Who has not had to bear lovingly with a brother (or sister) who is afflicted with logorrhea, the incurable propensity to talk without pause or punctuation? That the talk is "religious" does not make it the less painful. And the unsta ...read |
| Devotional | He Became Poor that We Might Become Rich
The announcement of the birth of Christ came as a sunburst of joy to a world where grief and pain are known to all and joy comes rarely and never tarries long.
The joy the angel brought to the awe-struck shepherds was not to be a disembodied wisp of religious emotion, swelling and ebbing like the sound of an aeolian harp in the rising and fallin ...read |
| Devotional | He Leadeth Me
Except for those things that are specifically commanded or forbidden, it is God's will that we be free to exercise our own intelligent choice. The shepherd will lead the sheep but he does not wish to decide which tuft of grass the sheep shall nibble each moment of the day. In almost everything touching our common life on earth God is pleased when ...read |
| Devotional | Hearing the Voice of God
. . . There are two questions before us. The first question is: How many of us are willing to hear the voice of God? Jesus said, Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophet ...read |
| Devotional | Heart Health Food or Just Tasty Snacks
Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous English sage, once said that one of the surest evidences of intellectual immaturity is the desire to startle people. Yet there are Christians who have been fed upon the odd, the strange and the curious so long and so exclusively that they have become wholly unfitted spiritually to receive or to appreciate sound doctri ...read |
| Devotional | Heart Hunger
In nature everything moves in the direction of its hungers. In the spiritual world it is not otherwise. We gravitate toward our inward longings, provided of course that those longings are strong enough to move us. Impotent dreaming will not do. The religious urge that is not followed by a corresponding act of the will in the direction of that urge ...read |
| Devotional | Heart Perception
There is a deeply spiritual and thoroughly mystical quality in New Testament religion that we cannot afford to ignore if we would be Christians in fact as well as in name.
I think it well to let our worshiping hearts decide our theological questions. After the purity of the text has been established and the mind assured that the translation is tr ...read |
| Devotional | Heart-Matters
It will probably be found at last that there is no sin except sin of the mind. It is the carnal mind that is enmity against God, that is not subject to the law of God, neither can be. It should, however, be remembered that when the Bible speaks of the mind it does not refer to the intellect alone. The whole personality is included in the concept; t ...read |
| Devotional | Heart-Seekers
The amount of loafing practiced by the average Christian in spiritual things would ruin a concert pianist if he allowed himself to do the same thing in the field of music. The idle puttering around that we see in church circles would end the career of a big league pitcher in one week. No scientist could solve his exacting problem if he took as litt ...read |
| Devotional | Helping or Hindering New Believers
The happiest man in the world," said a well-known preacher some time ago, "is the new convert before he has met too many Bible teachers and seen too many church members." . . . The first half of our opening quotation, then, is so true as to need no verification. "The happiest man in the world is a new convert." But it is the last half that dis ...read |
| Devotional | HERE FOR OUR TIME
Just as those who lived in the past had the privilege of being God's people of faith then, so do we in our own day! It is good to come to the understanding that while God wants us to be holy and Spirit-filled, He does not expect us to look like Abraham or to play the harp like David or to have the same spiritual insights given to Paul. All of the ...read |
| Devotional | HIS CROSS IS MY CROSS
To take Jesus Christ into your life without reservation is to accept His friends as your friends and to know that His enemies will be your enemies! It means that we accept His rejection as our rejection. We knowingly accept His cross as our cross. If you then find yourself in an area where Christ has no friends, you will be friendless-except for th ...read |
| Devotional | Holding Unswervingly to Hope
In the dealings of God with men, hope has held a noble place. The expectation that Messiah would come cheered Israel in her years of victory and kept her from despairing in her periods of captivity and dispersal. Those who feared the Lord have often had rough going.
They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword: Th ...read |
A.W. Tozer