Tuesday, November 30, 2010

"Our commitment to a life of prayer opens the doors for us to enter into the fullness of God's work in the earth. Being made sensitive to His presence, to His Voice, and to His ways while we are in His House, makes us ready and available to see His Hand at work in our world — bringing His kingdom all around us in the lives of our families, our friends — and even our foes." ---James Ryle

"The one concern of the devil is to keep Christians from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work and prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom, but he trembles when we pray." ---Samuel Chadwick

"God never gives us discernment in order that we may criticize, but that we may intercede." ---Oswald Chambers

Monday, November 29, 2010

"For the Christian soul there is a silver lining in every cloud; a blue patch in the darkest sky; a turn in the longest lane; a mountain view which shall compensate the steepest ascent. Wait on the Lord, and keep His way, and He shall exalt thee to inherit the land. The thing impossible shall be; because all things are possible to God." ---F. B. Meyer







"Beware of posing as a profound person; God became a baby." ---Oswald Chambers

"When you give someone your time, you are giving them a portion of your life that you'll never get back.  That is why the greatest gift you can give someone is your time.  The most desired gift of love is . . . focused attention.  Why is now the best time to express love?  Because you don't know how long you will have the opportunity.  Circumstances change.  People die.  Children grow up.  You have no guarantee of tomorrow.  If you want to express love, you had better do it now.  The best use of life is love.  The best expression of love is time.  The best time to love is now." ---Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Life

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

"God will not discipline us, we must discipline ourselves.  God will not bring every thought and imagination into captivity; we have to do it." ---Oswald Chambers

Monday, November 22, 2010

"We are designed with a great capacity for God; and sin and our individuality are the things that keep us from getting at God.  God delivers us from sin: we have to deliver our selves from individuality, i.e., to present our natural life to God and sacrifice it until it is transformed into a spiritual life by obedience." ---Oswald Chambers

"Rather than insisting that others respect us, we need to make sure that we are respecting others, holding others in the proper esteem.  We need to make sure that we demonstrate a respect for others simply because they are here, trying their best to be all they were created to be.  Those who truly live out that quality will make the best spouses, teammates, parents, friends, and business partners." ---Tony Dungy in Uncommon

"Love should be your top priority, primary objective, and greatest ambition.  Love is not a good part of your life; it's the most important part.  Love leaves a legacy.  How you treated other people, not your wealth or accomplishments, is the most enduring impact you can leave on earth.  In our final moments we all realize that relationships are what life is all about.  Wisdom is learning that truth sooner rather than later." ---Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Life

Friday, November 19, 2010

"The test of the life of a saint is not success, but faithfulness in human life as it actually is.  We will set up success in Christian work as the aim; the aim is to manifest the glory of God in human life, to live the life hid with Christ in God in human conditions.  Our human relationships are the actual conditions in which the ideal life of God is to be exhibited." ---Oswald Chambers

"If we were to take the idea of a militant company seriously, the church building would be primarily designed as a drill hall for the Christian task force.  It would be a place where Christian ambassadors in common life would come to be trained, to strengthen one another, and to find solitude when it is needed.  The building might reasonably resemble the plan of a small college, with much emphasis upon the Christian library, the book store, the seminar rooms.  It would be equipped with sleeping accommodations for the constant stream of visiting recruits and with an easily accessble quiet room.  It would be armory, arsenal, barracks, and college, all in one." ---Elton Trueblood in The Company of the Committed

"None of us, not even Jesus, is self-explanatory.  We are all interrelated, and the key to every person is in somebody else.  Your physical life started in somebody else's womb.  Your salvation began in somebody else's heart.  Every one of us is the result of somebody else's caring.  God became a human person for us, taking all of our sins into himself.  Are we willing to carry other people in our heart?" ---Dennis Kinlaw in This Day With the Master

Thursday, November 18, 2010

"The tendency is to look for the marvellous in our experience; we mistake the sense of the heroic for being heroes.  It is one thing to go through a crisis grandly, but another thing to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight, no one paying the remotest attention to us." ---Oswald Chambers

"Worship is important, but it tends to be overemphasized in the contemporary church.  It is very easy for the emphasis on worship to become a throwback to the Temple rather than a pushing forward to the strategy of Christ as represented in the Valiant Seventy.  There is a tendency, for example, to forget that Christ rejected the idea of a shrine as a necessary physical center of religious experience.  This is the clear point of His unequivocal answer to the question of the Samaritan woman.  'The hour is coming,' He said, 'when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father' (John 4:21).  Worship for the follower of Christ, whatever its details, can never be a matter of place." ---Elton Trueblood in The Company of the Committed

"There is a beauty in community that the world longs to experience. When one is a part of a growing circle of true friends, he or she will experience acceptance of who they really are, affirmation of what God has given them to do, and accountability that keeps them on the right path. But there's more!  The Lord didn't simply fuse us together with one another, He joined us inseparably to Himself as well! And in so doing unleashed the power of heaven into each one of our lives. Now, He wants to release that very power through our lives to a world still in need of a Savior's redeeming love and grace.  In a day when confusion seems to be mounting a worldwide comeback, this could be our finest moment. ---James Ryle

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

"Most of us live on the borders of consciousness—consciously serving, consciously devoted to God.  All this is immature, it is not the real life yet.  The mature stage is the life of a child which is never conscious; we become so abandoned to God that the consciousness of being used never enters in.  A saint is never consciously a saint; a saint is consciously dependent on God." ---Oswald Chambers

"Life is all about love.  Learning to love unselfishly is not an easy task.  It runs counter to our self-centered nature.  That's why we're given a lifetime to learn it." ---Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Life

"I like spring, but it is too young.  I like summer, but it is too proud.  So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colors richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow . . . .  Its golden riches speak not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kingly wisdom of approaching age.  It knows the limitations of life and is content." ---Lin Yutang

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

"It takes imagination to believe a marriage will work, that you can master a language or learn a job skill.  When times were tough in the early years of our marriage, my wife and I imagined that we could make it and that better days were ahead.  Many a marriage has been saved by a woman's willingness to say, 'So what if my old man is not a handsome prince on a white charger, he is still my husband and, when I get through with him, he'll be somebody I can be proud to call my own.' " ---Walter Albritton in Lord, Please Deliver Me, I Beg You, from Another Live Manger Scene

"We can all see God in exceptional things, but it requires the culture of spiritual discipline to see God in every detail.  Never allow that the haphazard is anything less than God's appointed order, and be ready to discover the Divine designs anywhere." ---Oswald Chambers

" . . . a small fellowship.  We hear each other's stories.  We discover each other's glories.  We learn to walk with God together.  We pray for each other's healing.  We cover each other's back.  This small core fellowship is the essential ingredient for the Christian life.  Jesus modeled it for us for a reason.  Sure, he spoke to the masses.  But he lived in a little platoon, a small fellowship of friends and allies.  His followers took his example and lived this way, too." ---John Eldredge in Waking the Dead: The Glory of a Heart Fully Alive