Feast of Anselm, Abbot of Le Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, Teacher, 1109 For I seek not to understand in read more

Feast of Anselm, Abbot of Le Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, Teacher, 1109 For I seek not to understand in order that I may believe; but I believe in order that I may understand, for I believe for this reason: that unless I believe, I cannot understand.

In the Bible, faith is a mixture of trust and trustworthiness. To have complete confidence in God makes a man read more

In the Bible, faith is a mixture of trust and trustworthiness. To have complete confidence in God makes a man reliable. And, when someone never lets you down, you look instinctively for a deeper relationship.

We find not in the Gospel, that Christ hath anywhere provided for the uniformity of churches, but only for their read more

We find not in the Gospel, that Christ hath anywhere provided for the uniformity of churches, but only for their unity.

Holy Saturday Commemoration of Jack Winslow, Missionary, Evangelist, 1974 The progress of these terrors is plainly shown us in read more

Holy Saturday Commemoration of Jack Winslow, Missionary, Evangelist, 1974 The progress of these terrors is plainly shown us in our Lord's agony in the garden, when the reality of this eternal death so broke in upon Him, so awakened and stirred itself in Him, as to force great drops of blood to sweat from His body... His agony was His entrance into the last, eternal terrors of the lost soul, into the real horrors of that dreadful, eternal death which man unredeemed must have died into when he left this world. We are therefore not to consider our Lord's death upon the Cross as only the death of that mortal body which was nailed to it, but we are to look upon Him with wounded hearts, as being fixed and fastened in the state of that twofold death, which was due to the fallen nature, out of which He could not come till He could say, "It is finished; Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.".

If people gathered to a political meeting, and the chief speaker spoke to them only for some quarter of an read more

If people gathered to a political meeting, and the chief speaker spoke to them only for some quarter of an hour, they would be annoyed, would feel with some resentment that he had not taken them seriously, had dealt much too cavalierly with the question of the hour, an Ulster boundary, or such like. But the things of the soul are far more momentous, and to be asked to deal with huge, unfathomable facts like the Cross in a few minutes, means that people are not really interested in these things. This is, of course, a snippety age, with a snippety press, and snippety novels. But must we preachers follow and be snippety, too?

O father Abram, what these Christians are,
Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect
The thoughts of read more

O father Abram, what these Christians are,
Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect
The thoughts of others!

Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer read more

Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer is the intense, immediate desire for a certain blessing which seems to be absolutely necessary for the soul to have; the background of prayer is the quiet, earnest desire that the will of God, whatever it may be, should be done. What a picture is the perfect prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane! In front burns the strong desire to escape death and to live; but behind there stands, calm and strong, the craving of the whole life for the doing of the will of God... Leave out the foreground, let there be no expression of the will of him who prays, and there is left a pure submission which is almost fatalism. Leave out the background, let there be no acceptance of the will of God, and the prayer is only an expression of self-will, a petulant claiming of the uncorrected choice of him who prays. Only when the two are there together, the special desire resting on the universal submission, the universal submission opening into the special desire, is the picture perfect and the prayer complete.

Feast of Charles Simeon, Pastor, Teacher, 1836 You have your season, and you have but your season; neither read more

Feast of Charles Simeon, Pastor, Teacher, 1836 You have your season, and you have but your season; neither can you lie down in peace, until you have some persuasion that your work as well as your life is at an end.

Of all the spirits, I believe the spirit of judging is the worst, and it has had the rule of read more

Of all the spirits, I believe the spirit of judging is the worst, and it has had the rule of me, I cannot tell you how dreadfully and how long... This, I find has more hindered my progress in love and gentleness than all things else. I never knew what the words, "Judge not that ye be not judged," meant before; now they seem to me some of the most awful, necessary, and beautiful in the whole Word of God.