word of the day:

firmament.

John Donne favourites - prose

"He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the ways of fortune, or understanding, of conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penury's, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons."

"What a death is this life! what a resurrection in this death! For though this world be a sea, yet (which is most strange) our Harbor is larger than the sea; Heaven infinitely larger than this world."

"God hath not made a week without a Sabbath; no temptation, without an issue; God inflicts no calamity, no cloud, no eclipse, without light, to see ease in it, if the patient will look upon that which God hath done to him, in other cases, or to that which God hath done to others, at other times...God brings us to humiliation, but not to desperation."

"The whole frame of the world is the Theatre, and every creature the stage, the medium, the glass in which we may see God."

"The whole frame of nature is the Theatre, the whole Volume of creatures is the glass, and the light of nature, reason, is our light, which is another Circumstance."

"Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification; and as without this, without holiness, no man shall see God, though he pore whole nights upon the Bible; so without that, without humility, no man shall hear God speak to his soul, though he hear three two hours' Sermons every day."

"As I live saith the Lord, I would have no sinner die."

"That soul, that is accustomed to direct herself to God, upon every occasion, that, as a flower at Sun-rising, conceives a sense of God, in every beam of his, and spreads and dilates itself towards him, in a thankfulness, in every small blessing that he sheds upon her; that soul, that as a flower at the Suns declining, contracts and gathers in, and shuts up her self, as though she had received a blow, when soever she hears her Savior wounded by an oath, or blasphemy, or execration; that soul, who, whatsoever string be strucken in her, base or treble, her high or her low estate, is ever tun'd toward God, that soul prays sometimes when it does not know what it prays."

Oswald today

The whole thing merits posting.

"THE DISCIPLINE OF DIFFICULTY"


"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." John 16:33

"An average view of the Christian life is that it means deliverance from trouble. It is deliverance in trouble, which is very different. "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High . . . there shall no evil befall thee" - no plague can come nigh the place where you are at one with God.

If you are a child of God, there certainly will be troubles to meet, but Jesus says do not be surprised when they come. "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world, there is nothing for you to fear." Men who before they were saved would scorn to talk about troubles, often become "fushionless" after being born again because they have a wrong idea of a saint.

God does not give us overcoming life: He gives us life as we overcome. The strain is the strength. If there is no strain, there is no strength. Are you asking God to give you life and liberty and joy? He cannot, unless you will accept the strain. Immediately you face the strain, you will get the strength. Overcome your own timidity and take the step, and God will give you to eat of the tree of life and you will get nourishment. If you spend yourself out physically, you become exhausted; but spend yourself spiritually, and you get more strength. God never gives strength for to-morrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of the minute. The temptation is to face difficulties from a common-sense standpoint. The saint is hilarious when he is crushed with difficulties because the thing is so ludicrously impossible to anyone but God."

wow.

hmm.

When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neightbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces on the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.


This is from The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis.

What would it mean to be "a great warrior on [God's] side" ?

lovers so less wild

I'm very blog-ey this week, first of all.

Thought of the day: why do I go to anything and everything besides God to fill the lonely void inside of me? It's only after I've clicked on every facebook link and searched for fulfillment from every meaningless thing that I think to go to the one Person that can actually meet that need in me! Duh, Elsa!

I'm getting back to the place where I want it to be just Him and me, no one else. Ironically, as my life has become more simple with the summer, it has become more cluttered with meaningless things that I somehow fill my days with.

He is the last place I go to, the last Name I call. I can read about Him all I like, but it is somehow much harder to me to sit down and just talk to Him. It's easier to relate to Him as a vending machine or an ATM then as a Person, as THE Person.

Why?

Another mystery of my fallen self, I guess.

But thankfully, He's always there when I stroll, meander, or run back to Him. No lectures, no condemnations, just delight.

And thankfully, each time I get in that place of loneliness again, it becomes easier to choose Him first.

"Take my self and I will be
Ever, only, all for Thee"

Ever

Only

All

for Him.

I want that now more than anything else.

New Men

from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"Already the new men are dotted here and there all over the earth. Some, as I have admitted, are still hardly recognizable, but others can be recognized. Every now and then one meets them. Their very voices and faces are different than ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They are, I say, recognizable; but you must know what to look for.

They will not be very like the idea of 'religious people' which you have formed from your general reading. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less...They will usually seem to have a lot of time; you will wonder where it comes from. When you have recognized one of them, you will recognize the next one much more easily. And I strongly suspect (but how should I know?) that they recognize one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of color, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun."

convicting.

from the Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer

"A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapters, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting of listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar...

Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image. The flesh whimpers against the rigor of God's inexorable sentence and begs like Agag for a little mercy, a little indulgence of its carnal ways. It is no use. We can get a right start only by accepting God as He is and learning to love Him for what He is. As we go on to know Him better we shall find it a source of unspeakable joy that God is just what He is. Some of the most rapturous moments we know will be those we spend in reverent admiration of the Godhead. In those holy moments the very thought of change in Him will be too painful to endure."