| Devotional | Listening to God before We Speak for Him
Holy men of soberer and quieter times than ours knew well the power of silence. David said, I was dumb with silence, I held my peace, even from good; and my sorrow was stirred. My heart was hot within me; while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue. There is a tip here for God's modern prophets. The heart seldom gets hot while ...read |
| Devotional | Live by the Spirit
Actually the purest saint at the moment of his greatest strength is as weak as he was before his conversion. What has happened is that he has switched from his little human battery to the infinite power of God. He has quite literally exchanged weakness for strength, but the strength is not his; it flows into him from God as long as he abides in Chr ...read |
| Devotional | LIVE FOR GOD'S GLORY
It may be difficult for the average Christian to get hold of the idea that his daily labors can be performed as acts of worship acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. We must practice living to the glory of God actually and determinedly. By one act of consecration of our total selves to God we can make every subsequent act express that consecration. By ...read |
| Devotional | Living as Good Samaritans
The testimony of the true follower of Christ might well be something like this: The world's pleasures and the world's treasures henceforth have no appeal for me. I reckon myself crucified to the world and the world crucified to me. But the multitudes that were so dear to Christ shall not be less dear to me. If I cannot prevent their moral suicide ...read |
| Devotional | Living as Light in the World
Whether or not the Christian should separate himself from the world is not open to debate. The question has been settled for him by the Sacred Scriptures, an authority from which there can be no appeal. The New Testament is very plain: "They are not of the world," said our Lord, "even as I am not of the world." James wrote, "Ye adulterers and ...read |
| Devotional | Living as Relatives to Humankind
We human beings were made for each other, and what any of us is doing at any time cannot be a matter of indifference to the rest of us. On the human plane all men are brothers. The Son of Man never denied this sweet tie with humankind. Over a stubborn and sinful Jerusalem He frankly shed tears and, in the hour of death, prayed for men who were so b ...read |
| Devotional | Living by Faith in the Night
To do His supreme work of grace within you He will take from your heart everything you love most. Everything you trust in will go from you. Piles of ashes will lie where your most precious treasures used to be. . . . All this God will accomplish at the expense of the common pleasures that have up to that time supported your life and made it zestful ...read |
| Devotional | Living Christs Ethics Requires His Power
The ethics of Jesus must be imposed upon society, we are told, then all inequalities will vanish; the division of humanity into rich and poor, great and small, privileged and underprivileged will be no more. Under the benign influence of Christs ethics of love, greed and war will disappear from the earth and the dream of universal brotherhood be re ...read |
| Devotional | Living in Joy and Peace
There are areas in our lives where in our effort to be right we may go wrong, so wrong as to lead to spiritual deformity. To be specific let me name a few: 4. When we seek to be serious and become somber. The saints have always been serious, but gloominess is a defect of character and should never be equated with godliness. Religious melancholy may ...read |
| Devotional | Living that Grieves the Spirit
It is almost certain that sin is the cause of the rut, the circular grave in which so many people find themselves. Since only sin offends God, and sin is extremely deceitful, it can be present doing its deadly work while the people may not be aware of it at all until it is called to their attention. There are several kinds of sin that cause the rut ...read |
| Devotional | Living With Eternity's Values In View
The spiritual man habitually makes eternity-judgments instead of time-judgments. By faith he rises above the tug of earth and the flow of time and learns to think and feel as one who has already left the world and gone to join the innumerable company of angels and the general assembly and Church of the First-born which are written in heaven. Such a ...read |
| Devotional | Livng for the Will of God
The temptation to gear our lives to social consequences is frightfully strong in a world like ours, but it must be overcome all the way down the line. The Christian businessman when faced with a moral choice must never ask, ?How much will this cost me?? The moment he regards consequences, he dethrones Christ as Lord of his life. His only concern sh ...read |
| Devotional | Looking at God
Among Christians of all ages and of varying shades of doctrinal emphasis there has been fairly full agreement on one thing: They all believed that it was important that the Christian with serious spiritual aspirations should learn to meditate long and often on God. Let a Christian insist upon rising above the poor average of current religious exper ...read |
| Devotional | Looking Beyond the Created World to the Creator
To persons brought up in the Judaeo-Christian tradition the thought that anyone should actually worship nature seems absurd, but we have only to step across into almost any of the cultures we call pagan to learn that such worship has been and still is common enough. Indeed there is scarcely a natural object anywhere that has not been worshiped by s ...read |
| Devotional | LORD OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
In the midst of all the confusions of our day, it is important that we find out that Jesus Christ is the Lord of all righteousness and the Lord of all wisdom. Righteousness is not a word easily acceptable to lost men and women in a lost world. Outside of the Word of God, there is no book or treatise that can give us a satisfying answer about righte ...read |
| Devotional | Lord, Give Me Yourself
Absalom dwelt two full years in Jerusalem and saw not the king's face, though the king was his own father. Are there not many in the kingdom of God who have no awareness of God, who seem not to know that they have the right to sit at the King's table and commune with the King? This is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is a hard and ...read |
| Devotional | Lost but Not Abandoned
. . . The Advent established:. . .
Third, God indeed spoke by the prophets. The priests and scribes who were versed in the Scriptures could inform the troubled Herod that the Christ was to be born in Bethlehem of Judaea. And thereafter the Old Testament came alive in Christ. It was as if Moses and David and Isaiah and Jeremiah and all the minor ...read |
| Devotional | Love Expressed in Obedience
Our Lord told His disciples that love and obedience were organically united, that the keeping of His sayings would prove that we loved Him and the failure or refusal to keep them would prove that we did not. This is the true test of love, and we will be wise to face up to it. The commandments of Christ occupy in the New Testament a place of importa ...read |
| Devotional | Love Expressed in Obedience
No matter what I write here, thousands of pastors will continue to call their people to prayer in the forlorn hope that God will finally relent and send revival if only His people wear themselves out in intercession. To such people God must indeed appear to be a hard taskmaster, for the years pass and the young get old and the aged die and still no ...read |
| Devotional | LOVE WITHOUT MEASURE
I once wrote something about how God loves us and how dear we are to Him. I was not sure I should put it down on paper-but God knows what I meant. I wrote: "The only eccentricity that I can discover in the heart of God is the fact that a God such as He is should love sinners such as we are!" On this earth a mother will love the son who has betray ...read |
A.W. Tozer