| Devotional | Self-examaination
. . . Well, here are some suggestions which anyone can follow and which, I am convinced, will result in a wonderfully improved Christian life. . . .
6. Bring your life into accord with the Sermon on the Mount and such other New Testament Scriptures as are designed to instruct us in the way of righteousness. An honest man with an open Bible and a ...read |
| Devotional | Self-Examination
The philosopher Socrates said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." If a common philosopher could think that, how much more we Christians ought to listen to the Holy Spirit when He says, "Examine yourself." An unexamined Christian lies like an unattended garden. Let your garden go unattended for a few months, and you will not have roses an ...read |
| Devotional | Self-judging
All things else being equal, a Christian will make spiritual progress exactly in proportion to his ability to criticize himself.
Paul said, "But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment" (1 Corinthians 11:31). We escape the critical judgment of God by exercising critical self-judgment. It is as simple as that.
We often hear ...read |
| Devotional | Serious Repentance and Restitution
. . . Well, here are some suggestions which anyone can follow and which, I am convinced, will result in a wonderfully improved Christian life. . . .
3. Put yourself in the way of the blessing. It is a mistake to look for grace to visit us as a kind of benign magic, or to expect God's help to come as a windfall apart from conditions known and met ...read |
| Devotional | Setting Our Minds On Things Above
The notion that Christians should always be optimistic and congenial is heresy pure and simple. An ill-founded optimism may, under certain conditions, be extremely harmful. A Christian is not obliged to be either pessimistic or optimistic or glad or sad or positive or negative after a preconceived rule of philosophy. He should (and will if he is Sp ...read |
| Devotional | Setting Our Sails in the Will of God
In the kingdom of God what we will is accepted as what we are. If any man will, said our Lord, let him. God does not desire to destroy our wills, but to sanctify them. In that terrible, wonderful moment of surrender it may be that we feel that our will has been forever broken, but such is not the case. In His conquest of the soul God does not destr ...read |
| Devotional | SHARING GOD'S NATURE
Our heavenly Father disciplines us for our own good, "that we may share in His holiness." God's motives are always loving! I have known people who seemed to be terrified by God's loving desire that we should reflect His own holiness and goodness. As God's faithful children, we should be attracted to holiness, for holiness Godlikeness-likeness ...read |
| Devotional | Sharing the Good News
The impulse to share, to impart, normally accompanies any true encounter with God and spiritual things. The woman at the well, after her soul-inspiring meeting with Jesus, left her water pots, hurried into the city and tried to persuade her friends to come out and meet Him. Come, see a man, she said, which told me all things that ever I did: is not ...read |
| Devotional | Sharpening the Axe
I have never subscribed to the doctrine that we Christians should live in an intellectual vacuum, refusing to hear what the world has to say. A faith that must be "protected" is no faith at all. If I can retain my faith in Christ only by closing my mind against every criticism, I give proof positive that I am not well convinced of the soundness o ...read |
| Devotional | Showing Christ's Kindness
No observant man will attempt to deny that a vast amount of Christian money is being spent on those who do not need it, while the poor and the needy and such as have no helper must often go unnoticed and unhelped, even though they too are Christians and servants of our common Lord. (The modern church would appear to be as blind and partial as the w ...read |
| Devotional | Sincere Reverence, Joyful Informality and Genuine Humility
I also long in the tender mercies of Christ that among us there may be the following: . . . 3. A feeling of humble reverence. I am disapointed that we come to church without a sense of God or a feeling of humble reverence. There are false religions, strange religious cults and Christian cults that think they have God in a box someplace, and when th ...read |
| Devotional | Single-Faced
I also long in the tender mercies of Christ that among us there may be the following: . . . 6. A childlike candor. I love children because of their unbelievably beautiful candor. They look at you and say the most utterly simple things. If they were just a little older they would blush to the roots of their hair, but they are utterly and completely ...read |
| Devotional | Sin's Cure
Only God could reconstruct the world and allow for such reversals of fact; but anyone can tinker at it theoretically. Had Hitler, for instance, been a good and gentle man, six million Jews now dead would be living (making allowance for a certain few who would have died in the course of nature); had Stalin been a Christian, several million Russian f ...read |
| Devotional | Sneaky Superstition
Superstition is inherent in fallen human nature and I suppose there is no one entirely free from it.
There are two classes of men who appear to have come the nearest to getting deliverance from the bondage of superstition: the scientist who has developed a mentality that accepts nothing that cannot be proved and the philosophical skeptic who has ...read |
| Devotional | Someone Is There
Wherever faith has proved itself to be real, it has inevitably had upon it a sense of the "present" God. The holy Scriptures possess in marked degree this feeling of actual encounter with a real Person. The men and women of the Bible talked with God. They spoke to Him and heard Him speak in words they could understand. With Him they held person-to ...read |
| Devotional | Songs to Live By
Sometimes our hearts are strangely stubborn and will not soften or grow tender no matter how much praying we do. At such times, it is often found that the reading or singing of a good hymn will melt the ice jam and start the inward affections flowing. That is one of the uses of the hymnbook. Human emotions are curious and difficult to arouse, and t ...read |
| Devotional | Sound Conversion
I am convinced that many evangelicals are not truly and soundly converted. Among the evangelicals it is entirely possible to come into membership, to ooze in by osmosis, to leak through the cells of the church and never know what it means to be born of the Spirit and washed in the blood. A great deal that passes for the deeper life is nothing more ...read |
| Devotional | SPECTATOR CHRISTIANS
This we have heard: "I am a born again Christian and I am happy that my sins are forgiven and I go to church on Sunday because I like the fellowship!" We ask: "Do you not go to put yourself in the way of spiritual blessing?" The answer: "No, I am saved and I do not need anything!" We ask: "Have you offered to witness, to pray, to encourage, ...read |
| Devotional | Spirit Illumination
Hard, serious thought and the illumination of the Holy Spirit. 6. Then we must think. Human thought has its limitations, but where there is no thinking there is not likely to be any large deposit of truth in the mind. Evangelicals at the moment appear to be divided into two camps--those who trust the human intellect to the point of sheer rationalis ...read |
| Devotional | Spirit Taught
Always the decisive conflict in religion will be where important concepts are joined in opposition, concepts so vital that they are capable of saving or wrecking the Christian faith in any given generation. At this critical juncture in church history, the real conflict is between those who hold to an objective Christianity capable of being grasped ...read |
A.W. Tozer