| Devotional | Refiner's Fire
Slowly you will discover God?s love in your suffering. Your heart will begin to approve the whole thing. You will learn from yourself what all the schools in the world could not teach you--the healing action of faith without supporting pleasure. You will feel and understand the ministry of the night; its power to purify, to detach, to humble, to de ...read |
| Devotional | Reflecting on the Memoirs of Those Who Walked with God
. . . Why do the majority of present day Christians prefer shallow religious fiction? Or uninspired Bible talks that never get beyond the "first principles"? Or one-page daily devotions? Or watered-down Christian biography? . . .
. . . present day evangelical Christianity is not producing saints. The whole concept of religious experience has sh ...read |
| Devotional | Refusing to be Conformed to the Pattern of This World
Men are impressed with the message of the Church just as far and as long as she is different from themselves. When she seeks to be like them they no longer respect her. They believe (and rightly) that she is playing false to herself and to them. The moral jar that results when an indoctrinated son of Adam meets a son of heaven is one of the most wh ...read |
| Devotional | REJOICE-OR GRUMBLE
I think all of us meet Christian men and women who always seem to look on the gloomy side and are never able to do anything with life's problems but grumble about them! I meet them often and when I do, I wonder: "Can these people be reading and trusting the same Bible I have been reading?" The Apostle Peter wrote to the tempted, suffering and pe ...read |
| Devotional | Religion Deterioration
This is hard for people to face up to. Religion deteriorates just as fruit rots and just as people get old in spite of all they try to do at the drug stores. It is inevitable that we get old, and so it is with religion. It is built-in that we start to deteriorate shortly after God comes and blesses us. Look what happened to Israel. God called Israe ...read |
| Devotional | Religious Elitism
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.
On the question there are two opposing schools of thought. There are Christians, for instance, who dismiss the whole matter as being beneath them. These correspond to the lovers of high-brow music who f ...read |
| Devotional | Religious Word-Rationing
Most religious people have been guilty of multiplying words as substitutes for worthy deeds, and of all such the writer of these lines is probably the worst offender. But because we have offended is not sufficient reason for our going on to repeat the offense. It is better that we face the whole thing with self-effacing humility and try to correct ...read |
| Devotional | Remembering the Forgotten
Gospel churches which mostly begin with the lowly are usually not content till they attain some degree of wealth and social acceptance. Then they gradually fall into classes, determined largely by the wealth and education of the members. The individuals that comprise the top layer of these various classes go on to become pillars of the religious so ...read |
| Devotional | Remembering to Give Thanks
There is probably no such thing as a wholly thankless heart. Everyone at some time feels a sense of gratitude for benefits received. This seems to be instinctive, or if not instinctive then surely acquired at a very early age.
That a great many persons fail in the degree of their thankfulness we all know too well. Hardly anyone but has known rem ...read |
| Devotional | Renewal Prayer
The children of the world are sometimes wiser than the children of light. . . . We have been offered the face of God and the glory of Christ. We have been offered holiness and righteousness and indwelling by the Spirit. We can have our prayers answered and have hell fear us because we have a hold on God who invites us to draw on His omnipotence. W ...read |
| Devotional | Repellent Personalities
Sometimes we Christians are opposed and persecuted for reasons other than our godliness. We like to think it is our spirituality that irritates people, when in reality, it may be our personality.
True, the spirit of this world is opposed to the Spirit of God; he that is born after the flesh will persecute him that is born of the Spirit. But makin ...read |
| Devotional | Resisting Monotony By Means of Variety
Some of the purest souls have written of the dangers of continuous spiritual exercises uninterrupted by lowlier considerations. Von Hugel speaks of the ?neutral cost? of prayer and advises that we should sometimes break off thoughts of heavenly things and go for a walk or dig in the garden. We have all known the disappointment felt when returning t ...read |
| Devotional | RESOURCES THAT ENDURE
The people of this world have always fussed and argued over this world's resource-hope for life, health, financial prosperity, international peace and a set of favorable circumstances. These resources are good in their own way, but they have a fatal defect-they are uncertain and transitory! Today we have them; tomorrow they are gone. It is this wa ...read |
| Devotional | RESPONDING TO THE SPIRIT
Are we raising a whole generation of young men and women without any sensitivity to the voice of God's Holy Spirit? I am on record, and I will be as long as I live, that I would rather lose a leg and hobble along throughout the rest of my life than to lose my sensitivity to God and to His voice and to spiritual things! Oh, how I want to keep that ...read |
| Devotional | Responding to the Wake-Up Call
There is also spiritual sleep. Notice Ephesians 5:14: "Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead." This verse is often spoken to sinners, but it was not written to sinners. Ephesians was never written to sinners. It is not a message to sinners at all, but a message to one of the best churches in the New Testament. Yet the writer says, "Wake up, O s ...read |
| Devotional | RESPONSE TO THE WORD
Men and women who read and study the Scriptures for their literary beauty alone have missed the whole purpose for which they were given. God's Word is not to be enjoyed as one might "enjoy" a Beethoven symphony or a poem by Wordsworth. The reason: the Bible demands immediate action, faith, surrender, committal. Until it has secured these, it has ...read |
| Devotional | RESURRECTION POWER
Let us be confident, Christian brethren, that our power does not lie in the manger at Bethlehem nor in the relics of the Cross. True spiritual power resides in the victory of the mighty, resurrected Lord of glory, who could pronounce after spoiling death: "All power is given me in heaven and in earth." The power of the Christian believer lies in ...read |
| Devotional | RESURRECTION: A FACT
The resurrection of Christ and the fact of the empty tomb are not a part of this world's complex and continuing mythologies. This is not a Santa Claus tale-it is history and it is a reality! The true church of Jesus Christ is necessarily founded upon the belief and the truth that there was a real death, a real tomb and a real stone! But, thank Go ...read |
| Devotional | Reverent Worship
Many of our popular songs and choruses in praise of Christ are hollow and unconvincing. Some are even shocking in their amorous endearments, and strike a reverent soul as being a kind of flattery offered to One with whom neither composer nor singer is acquainted. The whole thing is in the mood of the love ditty, the only difference being the substi ...read |
| Devotional | Revival Conditions
Our mistake is that we want God to send revival on our terms. We want to get the power of God into our hands, to call it to us that it may work for us in promoting and furthering our kind of Christianity. We want still to be in charge, guiding the chariot through the religious sky in the direction we want it to go, shouting "Glory to God," it is ...read |
A.W. Tozer