Partakers Of His Sufferings 'Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings.'
1 Peter 4:13
If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a multitude of experiences that are not meant for you at all, they are meant to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to understand what transpires in other souls so that you will never be ...read
Personality 'That they may be one, even as we are one.'
John 17:22
Personality is that peculiar, incalculable thing that is meant when we speak of ourselves as distinct from everyone else. Our personality is always too big for us to grasp. An island in the sea may be but the top of a great mountain. Personality is like an island, we know nothing ab ...read
Placed In The Light 'If we walk in the light, as He is in the light the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.'
1 John 1:7
To mistake conscious freedom from sin for deliverance from sin by the Atonement is a great error. No man knows what sin is until he is born again. Sin is what Jesus Christ faced on Calvary. The evidence that I am deli ...read
Prayer Choice And Prayer Conflict 'When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and pray to thy Father which is in secret.'
Matthew 6:6
Jesus did not say - Dream about thy Father in secret, but pray to thy Father in secret. Prayer is an effort of will. After we have entered our secret place and have shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray; we cannot get ou ...read
Prayer In The Father's Hearing 'Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me.'
John 11:41
When the Son of God prays, He has only one consciousness, and that consciousness is of His Father. God always hears the prayers of His Son, and if the Son of God is formed in me the Father will always hear my prayers. I have to see that the Son of God is manifested in my mortal ...read
Prayer In The Father's Honour 'That holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.'
Luke 1:35
If the Son of God is born into my mortal flesh, is His holy innocence and simplicity and oneness with the Father getting a chance to manifest itself in me? What was true of the Virgin Mary in the historic introduction of God's Son into this earth is ...read
Prayer In The Father's House Wist ye not that I must be in My Father's house?" '
Luke 2:49
Our Lord's childhood was not immature man-hood; our Lord's childhood is an eternal fact. Am I a holy innocent child of God by identification with my Lord and Saviour? Do I look upon life as being in my Father's house? Is the Son of God living in His Father's house in m ...read
Programme Of Belief 'Believest thou this?'
John 11:26
Martha believed in the power at the disposal of Jesus Christ, she believed that if He had been present He could have healed her brother; she also believed that Jesus had a peculiar intimacy with God and that whatever He asked of God, God would do; but she needed a closer personal intimacy with Jesus. Ma ...read
Pull Yourself Together 'Yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness.'
Romans 6:13-22
I cannot save and sanctify myself; I cannot atone for sin; I cannot redeem the world; I can not make right what is wrong, pure what is impure, holy what is unholy. That is all the sovereign work of God. Have I faith in what Jesus Christ has done? He has made a ...read
Quench Not The Spirit 'Quench not the Spirit.'
1 Thessalonians 5:19
The voice of the Spirit is as gentle as a zephyr, so gentle that unless you are living in perfect communion with God, you never hear it. The checks of the Spirit come in the most extraordinarily gentle ways, and if you are not sensitive enough to detect His voice you will quench it, and your ...read
Readiness 'God called unto him and he said, Here am I'
Exodus 3:4
When God speaks, many of us are like men in a fog, we give no answer. Moses' reply revealed that he was somewhere. Readiness means a right relationship to God and a knowledge of where we are at present. We are so busy telling God where we would like to go. The man or woman who is ...read
Recall What God Remembers 'I remember ... the kindness of thy youth.'
Jeremiah 2:2
Am I as spontaneously kind to God as I used to be, or am I only expecting God to be kind to me? Am I full of the little things that cheer His heart over me, or am I whimpering because things are going hardly with me? There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what God prizes. It ...read
Receiving One's Self In The Fires Of Sorrow 'What shall I say? Father, save me, from this hour? But for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify Thy name.'
John 12:27-29
My attitude as a saint to sorrow and difficulty is not to ask that they may be prevented, but to ask that I may preserve the self God created me to be through every fire of sorrow. Our Lord received Hims ...read
Reconciliation 'For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.'
2 Corinthians 5:21
Sin is a fundamental relationship; it is not wrong doing, it is wrong being, deliberate and emphatic independence of God. The Christian religion bases everything on the positive, radical nature of sin. Othe ...read
Reconciling One's Self To The Fact Of Sin This is your hour, and the power of darkness." '
Luke 22:53
It is not being reconciled to the fact of sin that produces all the disasters in life. You may talk about the nobility of human nature, but there is something in human nature which will laugh in the face of every ideal you have. If you refuse to agree with the fact that there ...read
Redemption Creates The Need It Satisfies 'But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him.'
1 Corinthians 2:14
The Gospel of God creates a sense of need of the Gospel. Paul says - "If our gospel be hid, it is hid" - to those who are blackguards? No, "to them that are lost: in whom the god of this world hath blinded the mi ...read
Repentance 'For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation.'
2 Corinthians 7:10
Conviction of sin is best portrayed in the words -
"My sins, my sins, my Saviour,
How sad on Thee they fall."
Conviction of sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a man. It is the threshold of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ said that when ...read
Sacramental Service 'Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ... .'
Colossians 1:2
The Christian worker has to be a sacramental "go-between," to be so identified with his Lord and the reality of His Redemption that He can continually bring His creating life through him. It is not the strength o ...read
Sanctification 'This is the will of God, even your sanctification.'
1 Thessalonians 4:3
The Death Side. In sanctification God has to deal with us on the death side as well as on the life side. Many of us spend so much time in the place of death that we get sepulchral. There is always a battle royal before sanctification, always something that tugs wit ...read
Self-Consciousness Come unto Me." '
Matthew 11:28
God means us to live a fully-orbed life in Christ Jesus, but there are times when that life is attacked from the outside, and we tumble into a way of introspection which we thought had gone. Self-consciousness is the first thing that will upset the completeness of the life in God, and self-consciousness ...read
Oswald Chambers