Meditations of the day

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“Parables are told only because they are true, not because the actions of the characters in them can be recommended for imitation. Good Samaritans are regularly sued. Fathers who give parties for wayward sons are rightly rebuked, Employers who pay equal wages for unequal work have labor-relations problems. And any Shepherd who makes a practice of leaving ninety-nine sheep to chase after a lost one quickly goes out of the sheep-ranching business.

The parables are true only because they are like what God is like, not because they are models for us to copy. It is simply a fact that the one thing we dare not under any circumstances imitate is the only thing that can save us. The parables are, one and all, about the foolishness by which Grace raises the dead. They apply to no sensible process at all - only to the divine insanity that brings everything out of nothing.” ~ Robert Farrar Capon

 

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"Christianity is not a religion. Christianity is the proclamation of the end of religion, not of a new religion, or even of the best of all religions. If the cross is the sign of anything, it's the sign that God has gone out of the religion business and solved all of the world's problems without requiring a single human being to do a single religious thing. What the cross is actually a sign of is the fact that religion can't do a thing about the world's problems - that it never did work and it never will." ~Robert Farrar Capon

 

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"The greatest friend of truth is time, her greatest enemy is prejudice, and her constant companion is humility. ~Charles C. Colton

"Humility is the displacement of self by the enthronement of God." ~Andrew Murray

 

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"The heart of salvation is the Cross of Christ. The reason salvation is so easy to obtain is that it cost God so much. The Cross was the place where God and sinful man merged with a tremendous collision and where the way to life was opened. But all the cost and pain of the collision was absorbed by the heart of God." ~Oswald Chambers

 

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"Humility and human come from the Latin word, humus, dirt. A human being is someone taken out of the dirt. A humble person is one who recognizes that and even rejoices in it!" ~ Richard Rohr

 

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"Purification, not ruin, is the final outcome of the fire from above. It consumes that it may save. For if God is Love, by what then can His fires be kindled? They are, in fact, the very flame of love; and so we have the key to the words, Thy God is a consuming Fire, and Thy God is a merciful God." ~Thomas Allin

 

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"If you have heard that the heathen (who have never had an opportunity to hear of Jesus) will be tormented forever for not believing in Him, then you’ve heard that God is a failure. If you’ve heard that man’s puny will can withstand the omnipotent will of God, and that man’s will can paralyze God’s will, then you have heard that God is a failure." ~Eleanor Garrod

 

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"Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy. For if at the voice of entreaty love conquers displeasure, it is love asserting itself, not love yielding its claims. It is not love that grants a boon unwillingly; still less is it love that answers a prayer to the wrong and hurt of him who prays. Love is one, and love is changeless.

For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected--not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed." ~George MacDonald

 

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“Alone doesn’t usually do much to help folks wake up on the inside. What wakes people up the quickest is some kind of tragedy or grief.” ~ Michael Phillips

“I sat for a long time in silence. I didn’t get any more feelings that God was saying anything. Maybe He’d said all He had to say. If that was true, then I reckoned it was time I did what He’d told me to do—ask Him. God had had His say. Now it was my turn. I don’t suppose God keeps talking to someone who’s not paying attention to what He says. If you want Him to keep talking to you, I guess you’ve got to keep your half of the conversation going, and right now I figured that my half of the conversation was to do what He’d told me.” ~ Michael R. Phillips

 

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“To argue that God is 'trying His best' to save all mankind, but that the majority of men will not let Him save them, is to insist that the will of the Creator is impotent, and that the will of the creature is omnipotent.” ~A. W. Pink

 

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“Sin is cosmic treason. Sin is treason against a perfectly pure Sovereign. It is an act of supreme ingratitude toward the One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself. Have you ever considered the deeper implications of the slightest sin, of the most minute peccadillo? What are we saying to our Creator when we disobey Him at the slightest point? We are saying no to the righteousness of God. We are saying, 'God, Your law is not good. My judgement is better than Yours. Your authority does not apply to me. I am above and beyond Your jurisdiction. I have the right to do what I want to do, not what You command me to do.” ~R.C. Sproul

 

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