Delighting in God

• A Defective Perception Of Cod
• A High And Lofty Perception Of God
• Our Perception Of Cod And The Church
• Our Perception Of Cod Determines Our Fellowship With Cod
• Our Perception of Cod Navigates Our Prayer Life
• Our Perception Of God Determines Everything
• Our Perception of God in Creation
• Our Perception Of God’s Goodness
• Our Perception Of God’s Grace
• Our Perception Of God’s Mercy
• Our Perception Of God’s Perfection
• Reasons For A Faulty Perception Of God
• Restoring Our Perception of God
• The Basis Of Our Perception Of God
• The Effect Of Our Perception Of Cod
• The Perception of Our Fullness in Jesus Christ
• The Perception Of Our Relationship With God
• The Reality Of Our Perception Of God

Reasons For A Faulty Perception Of God

O God, we often fall into the trap of assuming we are right with Thee when the reality is, we are far from Thee. Stir up our hearts that we will not be content with where we are or what we have, but that our contentment will be focused only on thee. Amen.

Our perception of God is so crucial that great pains must be taken to make sure it is deeply rooted in the foundation of God’s Word. It is quite easy to get sidetracked and try to update God’s Word.

Several things need to be dealt with if we are going to keep our perception of God where it needs to be. There are certain things that we do that are detrimental to our spiritual progress. Let me outline a few of die mistakes we make that hinder our progress.

I think the first mistake is assuming that because it is in the Bible, it is in us.

Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God

Someone in a prayer meeting gets up and gives a testimony: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

Because he quotes Scripture and believes in the Scriptures, he assumes that what the Scripture says is a reality in his own life. But the man who gives this kind of testimony may not have much in his life that really supports and substantiates this testi¬mony. Because you believe it does not mean it is a reality in your life. We assume that if it is in the Bible, it is in us.

For myself, if it is not in the Bible, I do not want it in me. It can, however, be in the Bible and never get in me at all. Because our Bible teachers often lead us down this road, we assume that if we read it in the Bible, it is in us, whether or not we have appropriated it.

It will not take five minutes in the actual presence of the Lord Jesus Christ to bring tears to our eyes when we realize what we missed while here on earth. We will see how we were betrayed by those who pretended to be teaching us but left us hanging high and dry.

The Lord meant that we should be the happiest, fullest, most overflowing people in the world.

We can have everything the Bible tells us we can have, but we cannot assume that we have it because the Bible says it. We must come to the point of personally experiencing everything that the Bible is teaching us.

Knowing the first step is important, but it is only the first step, and we must persevere unto perfection; that is, experiencing what God wants us to experience in the Lord Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Another mistake that hinders our perception of God is just plain spiritual laziness. That sounds harsh, but I have seen it all around, even in my own life. Physical laziness is one thing, but spiritual laziness is something we never really deal with in our lives.

We can make ourselves do physical exercise to compensate for physical laziness, but it is almost impossible to make ourselves do some intellectual exercise. The average church today is geared to the level of a home for backward children.

The pastor does not dare rise into high theology, because his poor backward sheep cannot follow him. It is hard to get people to think, but it is harder still to get them to thirst.

We can encourage people to exercise physically, and they will see immediate results if they work hard enough. And we can get a few to exercise intellectually. But when it comes to making people spiritually thirsty, it takes the Holy Spirit to do that.

I have discovered that the frustrating aspect of preaching and teaching is that the preacher and teacher cannot do the work of change for people. It must be a work of the Holy Spirit within the heart of the believer. I can encourage people to read books, but I cannot talk people into a hunger and thirst for the things of God. It takes the Holy Spirit to do that.

Another mistake that hinders and compromises our perception of God is our love of the world. By this, I mean that we accept the prevailing standard in the world to be “normal.”

Say a child is born in a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients. It sounds ridiculous but bear with me. That child is born there, lives there, grows up there, and accepts the situation he is in as normal—he does not know any better.

Everyone has a cough, everyone holds his chest, everyone carries a little bag to spit in, and everyone has to take five naps a day and live on a special diet. If you are brought up in that environment, you think it is normal and you adjust your whole life to that normality.

So it is possible to be brought up in a church today, accept the low, weak, anemic, worn-out type of Christianity there, believe it is New Testament Christianity, and expect nothing better—that there’s nothing more to look for.

When the world is our model for normality, we become adjusted to the rid V standards. When we become adjusted to the ‘world’s standards, we are at odds with the Word’s standards. Everything seems normal, and nobody suspects that there is something more to be grasped as far as the Christian life is concerned.

Remember, it is the Holy Spirit who commands us to press on to perfection. This is a matter of daily spiritual discipline. I think another mistake we make that really affects our perception of God is our overall eagerness to be consoled, no matter what. Do we come to a point in the church where consolation is our God?

Some go to church looking for consolation. We are encouraged to go to church to find peace and consolation. But the church is not a place to find consolation; it is a place to hear the gospel preached so you can find salvation.

A big difference exists between being consoled and being saved. A man can find consolation and end up finally in hell. A man can be under blistering, terrifying conviction, get converted, and go finally to heaven.

We demand that our preachers console us all the time. We want to be consoled and comforted as though we were little boys and girls. Personally, I want to know the worst about myself now so I can do something about it while there is still time. If I do not know what is wrong, I will never be able to correct it, which will have an adverse effect on my life.

Another drastic mistake, which I will touch on later in this book, is an unwillingness to die in the flesh.

I wrote some articles for a Christian magazine on the subject of the Holy Spirit. The theme of those articles had to do with our deeper life and our relationship with the Holy Spirit. This series of articles created two reactions, different from night to day.

The series consisted of four articles, and when the last of the articles was published, I received a very long letter from a well-known Bible expositor. In that letter, he said that after he read my article, he was distressed because he felt I was leading people astray.

Did I not know, he said, that everyone who was a believer had the Holy Spirit, and did I not know that the command to be filled with the Spirit was not something ever intended for us to obey, but rather an ideal set before us?

It was only something to keep us moving, but the idea that God should ever fill anybody with the Holy Spirit just could not be. He included some other items in that letter.

I laid the letter aside and never replied to it. You cannot change the thinking of some people. Then I received another letter from the same person informing me that he had been disappointed in not getting a reply. “I want a reply,” he demanded.

So I replied:

Dear brother, I did not mean to be discourteous in not replying to your letter, but there are some things too scared to expose to the unsympathetic gaze of a man who believes as you do.

Second, I hope you will not think me uncharitable if I say that if God’s people were as eager to be filled with the Holy Spirit as they are to prove that you cannot be, the church might come out of her doldrums.

He wrote again with a copy of my letter enclosed and said he was sending this letter and one of his own to the editor of the magazine, demanding equal space to answer me. He just was not going to let it alone, that anybody could be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Letters like that can be depressing, but then I got another letter from the editor of that magazine.

He was riding the train out of Chicago and happened to sit beside a fine-looking young fellow, perhaps in his late twenties, and he got into a conversation. After introductions, the young man said, “I have heard about that magazine.” They discussed many things and finally got around to discussing the articles I had written on the Holy Spirit.

“I have been reading those articles on the deeper life,” he said, “and I do not know, but I am just sick. I do not think I am even converted. It is awful. I have suffered, and I have gone through so much, and I just do not know. I want to be filled with the Holy Spirit. This is an awful state that I am in.”

My friend arrived at his station and got off, so they parted ways. Some months went by and they met again on the train, and the young man remembered my friend. This time my friend noticed that the gloom was all gone. The young man’s face was shining like the morning sun after the rain.

After their introductory greeting, my friend said, “The last time I saw you, you had a long face. You were in misery.”

“Yes,” he said, “but do you know what? God met me. God met me! Now I want to tell you about something. I want you to pray for me; I have a decision to make. I was just in Europe under the auspices of the World Council of Churches, and I saw the poor sheep looking so poorly.

I gave a speech at this great convention, and I was bubbling over with God. I do not know why I said it, but I closed my speech by saying, ‘Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed?’ I sat down and some old preachers came around and said, ‘Young fellow, thank God you dared to say that. We believe it but are afraid to say it.’”

Then he said to my friend, “I want you to pray for me. I have to make up my mind whether I can stay in that denomination any longer or not.”

Two people, the same series of articles on the Holy Spirit, and two completely different responses. One man was red-hot and determined to prove that you cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Another man, out of a dead denomination, got so blistering hot under conviction that he found God without anyone to help him and dared to shock the gathering of the World Council of Churches.

This is the difference between a hungry man and one who is satisfied. Now, the question that I must ask, not only of myself, but of you as a reader is this: Are you satisfied, or are you hungry?

The answer to that one question will point you in one direction or another. And the answer to that question and the follow-through of that question will greatly determine your perception of God.

If you are hungry enough to do something about it, you will have climbed high on the mountain of God. If you are satisfied, you will be the same mediocre weakling that you are right now. It is just a question of how badly you want to know God.

Thy Way, Not Mine, O Lord

Thy way; not mine, O Lord
However dark it be!
Lead me by Thine own hand,
Choose the path for me.

Smooth let it be or rough,
It will be still the best;
Winding or straight, it matters not,
Right onward to Thy rest.

I dare not choose my lot;
I would not, if I might;
Choose Thou for me, my God;
So I shall walk aright.

The kingdom that I seek
Is Thine: so let the way
That leads to it being Thine,
Otherwise, I must surely stray.

Take Thou my cup, and it
With joy or sorrow fill,
As best to Thee may seem;
Choose Thou my good and ill.

Choose Thou for me, my friends,
My sickness or my health;
Choose Thou my cares for me,
My poverty or wealth.

Not mine, not mine the choice In things both great or small;
Be Thou my guide, my strength,
My wisdom, and my all. –Horatius Bonar (1808-1889)

 

The Perception Of Our Relationship With God

Dear Lord Jesus, I long to know Thee, and fellowship with Thee, and draw near unto the mystery of Thy Majesty: Open up my heart to see what Thou wouldst want me to see as far as my relationship with Thee goes. Fill my heart with wondrous expectation rooted in the heart of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Before we go any further, we need to look at who Christ is and what His relationship is to the redeemed company that we call the church. Who is this Christ? How do I relate to this Christ?

All of this needs to be answered in a way that will draw me into the heart of God. It is one thing to have a lot of information about God, but it is another thing to bask in the warmth and reality of His presence.

Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God

Our relationship with God can be condensed, rather imperfectly, into three words: centrality, “basically,” and preeminence. These three words, if understood in the context of Scripture, will bring great enlightenment into the heart of the believer. We are part of Christ, but I believe it goes much deeper than that.

Jesus Christ Is Central

The old devotional writers used to emphasize that Christ is to the church what the soul is to the body. You know what the soul is to the body; it is that which gives it life, and when the soul flees the body, it cannot keep the body alive.

When the soul is gone, then the embalmer takes over, and in the church of Christ—any church, anywhere, of any denomination, whatever it may call itself—as long as Christ is there, imparting life to that redeemed company, you have the church. Christ is central in His church. He holds it together, and in Him, it appears.

Jesus Christ Is Basic

The next word is basically. I do not think there is such a word; I made it up. But if there is not such a word, there ought to be. What I mean is that Jesus Christ is basic to the church. He is underneath it, and the whole redeemed company rests on the Lord Jesus Christ. I think I might be able to go around the world and simply cry, “Christ is enough.”

It is always the additions, or the additives, as we say now, that weaken the church.

Remember that God has declared that His Son, Christ, is sufficient. He is the way, the truth, and the life; He is wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. He is the wisdom of God and the power of God that gathers onto himself all things, and in Him all things consist so that we do not want Jesus Christ plus something else, or Jesus Christ and something else.

We must never put an end after Christ, waiting for something else, or Christ with a dash, leading to something else. We must preach Christ, for Christ is enough.

We of the evangelical faith—which is, I believe and have always believed, to be the faith of our fathers and the biblical faith should not put Christ plus science or Christ plus philosophy or Christ plus psychology or Christ plus education or Christ plus anything else, but Christ alone.

These other things may have their place and be used, just as you can throw sand into vats where they are making glass and it will all melt. We can use all these things, but we are not leaning on any of them. We are resting on Him who is basic to the faith of our fathers.

Christ Is Preeminent

Then we have the word preeminent—that Christ might be preeminent and placed above all things. Let us think of Jesus Christ above all things, underneath all things, outside of all things, and inside of all things. He is above all things but not pushed up.

He is beneath all things but not pressed down. He is outside of all things but not excluded, and inside but not confined. He is above all presiding, beneath all upholding, outside of all-embracing, and inside of all buildings.

We are committed to Jesus Christ, our Lord, alone. Our relationship with Christ is all that matters, really. I believe that a true Christian faith is an attachment to the person of Christ in total commitment to Him.

Several things are involved in this attachment to the person of Jesus Christ.

There is an intellectual attachment. To follow Jesus Christ forward in complete commitment, total commitment means there has to be an intellectual attachment to Christ; that is, we cannot run on our feelings or wisps of poetic notions about Christ.

We have a good many bogus Christs among us these days, and I believe that as followers of the Lamb, we are obligated to point out these bogus Christs, show them up for what they are, and then point to the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

We must warn people today that if they have an imaginary Christ and are satisfied with an imaginary Christ, then they must be satisfied with an imaginary salvation. That seems to be the bottom line with us.

Our salvation is no better than our perception of Christ. If that perception is flawed, our salvation is also flawed.

In our world today, there are many Christs, many Lords, and many Gods. We have a knack for dreaming up a God of our imagination that satisfies us at the time. However, our message is that there is only one Christ and those who follow Christ have an attachment to Him that is an intellectual attachment, that is, they know Christ theologically.

There is the romantic Christ of the female novelist, the sentimental Christ of the half-converted cowboy, the philosophical Christ of the academic egghead, the cozy Christ of the effemi¬nate poet, and the muscular Christ of the all-American athlete.

We have these kinds of Christ, but there is only one Christ, and God has said about Him that He is His Son.

The Athanasian Creed says that “Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man: God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; a man of substance of His mother, born in the world; perfect God and perfect man, subsisting of a reasonable soul and human flesh; equal to the Father as touching His divinity, and inferior to the Father as touching.

His manhood, who, although He is God and man, yet He is not two, but one Christ.” This is the Christ we adore, and we must have knowledge of this; that is, we must have the Christ of Christian theology.

I would never have anything to do with any book or any movement or any religion or any emphasis that does not begin with Christ, go out from Christ, and return to Christ again—the Christ of God, the Christ of the Bible, the Christ of Christian theology, the historic Christ of the Scriptures.

He is the One, so we must have an intellectual attachment to Christ. You cannot simply let your heart run out to Christ with some kind of warm feelings about Him and not be sure of who He is. This is the essence of heresy. We must believe in the Christ of God; we must believe in who God said He is.

Volitional Attachment To Christ

Then there is the volitional attachment to Christ. If I am going to follow Christ forward in complete and total commitment, I must do it by my will. A person is in bad shape and is making a grave mistake when he tries to live on impulse, inspiration, and feelings.

The man who lives on his feelings is not doing very well and is not going to be able to last very long. The old devotional writers used to tell of “the dark night of the soul.” There is a place where the Christian goes through darkness, where there is heaviness.

Some believe that God is going to take us off to heaven all wrapped up in cellophane, looking like we ought to be hanging on the Christmas tree. God is going to take us to heaven after He has purged us disciplined us taken us through the fire and made us strong. Thank God that faith brings feeling, as they used to sing:

O Happy Day, That Fixed My Choice

O happy day; that fixed my choice
On Thee, my Savior and my God!
Well, may this glowing heart rejoice,
And tell its raptures all abroad.

O happy bond, that seals my vows
To Him who merits all my love!
Let cheerful anthems fill His house,
While to that sacred shrine, I move.

Now rest, my long-divided heart,
Fixed on this blissful center, rest.
Here have I found a nobler part;
Here heavenly pleasures fill my breast.

High heaven, that heard the solemn vow,
That vow renewed shall daily hear,
Till in life’s latest hour I bow
And bless in death a bond so dear. –Philip Doddridge(1702-1751)

People are afraid to pray those words now. I believe that just as Daniel determined that he would not eat of the king’s meat, and just as Jesus set His face like a flint, and just as Paul said, “This one thing I do,” I believe true followers of Christ must be people whose wills have been sanctified, not men and women without wills.

I never believed that when we teach the deeper life, we are to say that God destroys our will. A man would be of no good in the world, and you would have to put him in traction to hold him up. If you have no will, you have no purpose.

The beautiful thing is that God unites our will with His will, and our will becomes strong, and His will merges us with God so that we hardly know if it is our will or God’s will that is working at any given moment.

Our Exclusive Attachment To Christ

Our attachment to the person of Christ must exclude everything that is contrary to Christ. There is a polarity in the Christian life, and this polarization begins at the very threshold of that life.

We live in a time when we are trying to be 100 percent positive. But the Scriptures say that God loves righteousness and hates iniquity. It also says that Christ himself is higher than the highest heavens, separate from sinners. If He had to hate in order to love, so do you and I.

We are told today to be positive. People often write to tell me that I am negative and encourage me to go positive. To be positive 100 percent of the time would be as futile and as useless and, thank God, as fatal as to inhale steadily all your life without exhaling.

The human body requires that you inhale to get oxygen and exhale to get rid of the poisons. So the church of Christ must inhale and exhale. When she inhales, she must exhale, and when the church of Christ inhales the Holy Spirit, she must exhale everything contrary to Him.

Some churches wonder why the Holy Spirit has not been around since last Christmas. The reason is they have not exhaled. They have not gotten rid of the old businesses in there. I do not believe that any man is able to love until he is able to hate.

I do not think any man can love God unless he hates the devil. I do not think he can love righteousness unless he hates sin. The Scriptures leave us with the opinion, with the belief, that in order to accept, there are some things we need to reject.

In order to own, you must repudiate some things. In order to affirm, there are some things you must deny. In order to say yes, you have to be able to say no. The man who does not have the courage or the intestinal fortitude to roar a thundering no to some things can never say yes and make it mean anything.

I, for my part, have come to the conclusion that I cannot get along with everybody. The idea of soft-handed pastors with a saintly flush on their faces, trying to get along with every¬body, will not do. In an effort to please everybody, we succeed in pleasing nobody.

We are tempted to try to keep from offending anybody. I do not want to water down Christianity. I want to be able to say no and mean it. I want to be able to say no to the wrong things and yes to the right things.

An Inclusive Attachment To Christ

This is the inhaling, you see. All that Christ is and does and says and promises and commands, and all the glories that circle around His head, and all the offices He holds, and all the shining beauty of the various facets of His infinite nature, all that He is, all that He has said, all that He has promised, I take that all. I include it all.

I am joining Christ and identifying with Him. So I accept His friends as my friends. I love all the people of God. I believe God has His children everywhere, and all God’s children have wings, so I love them all.

I accept God’s friends as my friends. And in turn, I accept His enemies as my enemies. An old bishop once said that the Lord has His treasures in earthen vessels, and some of those vessels are a bit cracked. I need to be willing to own the friends of the Lord, wherever they are and whoever they are. His friends are my friends, and His enemies are my enemies.

What would be a good definition of a Christian? A good definition of a Christian is someone who is back from the dead. I think Paul was one of the oddest and strangest, and one of the most glorious, of anyone who ever lived.

Paul gave us a text that seems to be a little odd: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live” (Galatians 2:20). How did Paul get that way? He is dead and then he is alive. Is he dead or is he alive? He goes on to say, “And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Paul is contradicting himself, and yet with all the contradiction, there is a marvelous and glorious truth.

A Christian is one who was crucified and yet is alive, being joined to Jesus Christ. All members of the body of Christ are joined to His body and share in some measure in that hypostatic union of God and man.

We are united with Him, so when He died on the cross and rose from the dead, we also rose from the dead. When He went to the right hand of God the Father, we went to the right hand of God the Father.

If any man is in Christ, he seeks those things that are above. And as it is written, we sit in the heavenly places, which means that we are really where He is, and we are members of His great mystical body.

Our Irrevocable Attachment To Christ

By this, I mean that the Lord does not want any experimenters. Someone wrote a book once called Try Jesus. All this experimentation—I do not believe in it.

A young man came to an old saint and asked him, “What does it mean to be crucified with Christ?”

After thinking for a moment, the old saint said, “To be crucified means three things. First, the man who is crucified is facing in only one direction. You cannot turn around to see what is going on behind you. You stopped looking back and looked straight ahead.

The man on the cross is looking in only one direction, and that is the direction of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, in the direction of biblical revelation, of angels, and edifying of the church, the direction of sanctification and the Spirit-filled life. He is looking only in one direction.”

Then the old man thought for a moment and said, “One thing more about a man on a cross; he is not going back. The man going out to die on a cross does not say to his wife, ‘Good-bye, honey. I will be in shortly after five.’ He is not coming back.

When you go out to die on a cross, you say goodbye to your friends, you kiss your friends goodbye, and you are not coming back.” I think if we would teach more of this and stop trying to make the Christian life so easy that it is contemptible, we would have more converts that would last.

Get a man to know he is joining Christ and is finished as far as this world is concerned, and he is not going back, and he has to take a cross on the shoulder.

“Another thing about the man on a cross,” said the man, “he has no further plans of his own. Someone else has made his plans for him. On the way up the hill, he does not see a friend and says to him, ‘Well, Henry, next Saturday afternoon at about three we’ll go fishing up by the lake.’ He is not going fishing. He is finished. He is going out to die; he has no plans at all.”

We are busy-beaver Christians with all our plans. Even though some plans are done in the name of the Lord and evan¬gelical Christianity, they are as carnal as goats. It depends on who is making your plans for you.

It is beautiful to say, “I am crucified with Christ” and know that Christ is making your plans. Twenty minutes on your knees in silence before God will sometimes teach you more than you can learn out of books and teach you more than you can learn even in the church. God will give you your plans and lay them before you.

We could cut down our time of debating and discussing if we would spend more time waiting on God. We are to be joined to Christ intellectually, volitionally, and exclusively so that we become expendable and do not go back.

Forward!

Christ, our mighty Captain, leads against the foe,
We will never falter when He bids us go;
Tho’ His righteous purpose we may never know,
Yet well follow all the way;

Refrain:

Forward! Forward! ’tis the Lord’s command;
Forward! Forward! to the promised land;
Forward! Forward! let the chorus ring:
We are sure to win with Christ, our King!

Satan’s fearful onslaughts cannot make us yield;
While we trust in Christ, our buckler, and our shield;
Pressing ever on—the Spirit’s sword we wield,
And we follow all the way.

Let our glorious banner ever be unfurled;
From its mighty stronghold evil shall be hurled;
Christ, our mighty Captain, overcomes the world,
And we follow all the way.

Fierce the battle rages—but ’twill not be long,
When triumphant, shall we join the blessed throng,
Joyfully uniting in the victor’s song—
If we follow all the way. –Carrie E. Breck(1855-1934)

 

Our Perception Of God Determines Everything

Our Father; which art in heaven, how wondrous the world as seen through Ttiine eyes. The more we come to know Theey the more we begin to understand the creative world around us and above us.

Thou hast built the world to honor Thee in every possible way. Every aspect of the world reveals something of Thy character and nature. May I discover more of that perception today through Jesus Christ. Amen.

When our perception of God has been damaged or compromised, everything around us falls into confusion and turmoil. Nothing seems to make sense, and everything seems to be at odds with one another. This, as I have pointed out, is a result of man’s downfall in the Garden of Eden. The whole created world was affected by this.

“For we know,” Paul writes, “that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). It is not possible for us to know what this world was like prior to the curse of sin.

Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God

One day we shall experience that, but until then, we are laboring under this terrible curse affecting all humanity and all creation. By getting to know God, I begin to understand how things are supposed to be.

By nature, I would be considered by many a pessimist. I can look around and see everything that is wrong. When I begin to understand God, my pessimism begins to change to optimism.

My nature has been corrupted by depravity, but my new nature in Christ elevates me above the depravity level and introduces me to the glory level. I begin to see the world through divine eyes. The divine perspective, if you please, has affected everything in my life.

In my younger days, I had a deep appreciation for classical music. I enjoyed listening to it and could identify all the major classical musicians. I had great times debating who was the best classical musician and composer.

Those days are behind me now. It is not because I have grown older; it is because I have grown nearer to God. All of the beauty of that secular music and the brilliance of the composers began to fade in comparison to a simple hymn.

I readily admit most hymns cannot compare in brilliance to the great classical composers. Most hymns have flaws in the areas of composition and music. The hymn writers are not in the same class as the great composers of classical music. I get that.

However, as my relationship with God has deepened and I have gotten closer to God, something has changed within me. I no longer look at music in the same way. I am not looking for brilliance in music or composition anymore. My appreciation of hymnody has grown.

I think my attraction to hymns has to do with why and how that hymn came about. I know that the great hymn writers did not write to impress the listening audience, but out of a heart deeply worshiping God. The worship aspect has attracted me.

In the classical compositions, I was worshiping the composition. Now the great hymns of the church have brought me to the place of lifting myself into the presence of God. A hymn is not a hymn unless it lifts me into that rarefied atmosphere of adoring wonder and worship of God.

I may be able to appreciate secular music, but as I have grown in Christ, it does not have the same effect on me as it once did. My heart is stirred to levels of adoration that no secular piece of music can give me when I am reflecting upon one of the grand hymns of the church.

I believe that is why the Twenty-third Psalm is so beautiful— because it honors God. And I think that goes with the whole Bible itself. This book I hold in my hand is a shining, beautiful book.

It is lovely no matter whether it is bound in the cheapest of paper or in the most expensive leather, whether it is printed on plain paper or the finest Indian paper available; nevertheless, it is a beautiful book.

When it comes to the Bible, I have grown a little weary of the battle about translations: which translation is better, which is more accurate, which is more scholarly. I have in my library every translation of the Bible available today.

I love the Bible, and in spite of all of these translations—and many are wonder¬ful—I find myself gravitating back to the good old King James Version. This is not because it is any better as far as a translation is concerned, but there is something in this Bible that stirs my heart and lifts me above the intellectual realm into the realm of adoration.

If after reading and meditating on the Bible, I have not encountered the Living Word, I have truly read in vain. In my reading of God’s Word, I need to persist until I pierce the darkness and come into the light of His presence.

As I meditate on the Word of God, my heart is stirred, and my concept of the Bible is a direct result of my growing appreciation of God. The more I know God, the more I understand His character and nature. The more I delve into the attributes of God and the more I meditate upon His Word, the more I begin to appreciate everything around me.

My relationship with God through Jesus Christ has given me new glasses from which I can look upon the world in deep appreciation and see what God intends for me to see.

I think Christianity is the most beautiful thing in the world.

I think the Bible is the most beautiful book in the world. I think a good hymnbook is the most awesome, wonderful, beautiful thing in the world. And I think the face of an old saint is more beautiful than all the composite beauty of all the bathing beauties.

As we move toward God, all things become more beautiful, and as we move away from God, they become uglier. This is why theology is a beautiful thing. Theology is simply the study of God. It is the mind’s reasoning about God. It is the mind kneeling before God in meditative worship of God.

This kind of theology can be beautiful if it begins in God and ends in God. That is the secret. I know there are those so-called theologians who have spun theology into some technical compos¬ite of religious matters. Let them be as they are. My concept of theology is God.

I want to know God. The more I know God, the more my heart is filled with worship and adoration. As I grow nearer to God, I discover the beauty of all things pertaining to God. I believe worship is admiring the beauty associated with God.

If our theology is not full of beauty, it is simply because it is not full of God. Nothing about God is ugly. The closer we get to God, the more we appreciate what beauty is all about. When we begin moving away from God, we begin to experience the ugliness that is in the world.

This affects our concept of heaven and hell and even the earth. Some of the things being published today about heaven are so off-center with the Word of God, that I wonder where they come up with those ideas. Heaven is not a fictional place of fantasy and folklore; neither is hell.

Our Concept Of Heaven

Heaven is the place of supreme beauty because perfection is there. The perfect God, the God of unqualified beauty—He is there, and heaven is going to be beautiful. Our problem today is we are too satisfied with Earth.

After all, with a split-level house, a TV, and two cars, why would you want to go to heaven? There is no good reason for going to heaven if everything is so nice down here. Nobody chases you and comes at midnight and puts you in jail. Nobody comes and locks up your church and persecutes you. We have it too nice down here. We have it all fixed up.

Henry Ford Thomas Edison and others fixed it all up for us so we can be born in a hospital and go home, never get off the sidewalk and live our lifetime on concrete, and die in the hospital and be taken to Memorial Park, and packed away among the artificial green grass.

It is a beautiful place we live in, you know if you see it from above eye view. It is quite a beautiful place, this world; why should you want to go to heaven?

We sing about heaven an awful lot, not because we expect to get there ahead of the rest, but just because we think heaven must be a wonderful place if Jesus Christ is there. The beautiful One, the Lord of glory, the One altogether lovely—if He is there, it must be a wonderful place.

I am convinced that the average Christian needs to rethink their concept of heaven. Much of their idea of heaven has come from the world, the best things of the world are projected upward into a place called heaven. Nothing could be more discouraging if you think it through carefully.

Heaven is not the best the world has to offer. Heaven is the best God has to offer. The more we begin to know God and understand His character and nature, the more we will begin to understand what heaven is all about.

A lot of literature has been published concerning heaven and what people think it will be like. It is amazing that someone who will live a life of depravity here on earth expects to go to heaven when they die.

Their life is filled with the ugliness of the world, but somehow they believe they will go zooming off to heaven when they die. After all, everybody goes to heaven. At least that is what they are told.

I think we need to see what the Bible has to say about heaven and not what somebody out in the world has to say about it.

If a person, for example, was going on a vacation, they would get as much information about their vacation destination as possible. They would want to see brochures and maps and literature to understand a little bit about what to expect when they get there. I think the same needs to be true concerning heaven.

What Is Heaven All About?

If you could imagine the most beautiful thing here on earth, it has no comparison to the beauty of heaven. We need to understand that earth, this world about us, is under the curse of sin. Heaven will be absolutely free from all aspects of sin.

That is difficult for us who have groaned under the weight of depravity to appreciate.

As Christians, we need to cultivate a more heavenly mind. It is easy to get so caught up with the world around us that we fail to look and see the beauty of our Lord.

The hymn writer Samuel Stennett wrote of the essence of this in his hymn:

On Jordan’s stormy banks, I stand,
And cast a wistful eye
To Canada fair and happy land,
Where my possessions lie.

Stennett understood how stormy this world really was and that there was nothing here for him. Can we appreciate the beauty of heaven? In the midst of all the “stormy banks” do we take the time to “cast a wistful eye” to that “fair and happy land”?

Ah, the beauty of heaven is beyond our ability to describe or even appreciate now.

I refuse to read a book written by someone who knows more about heaven than the Bible tells us. If we get our information about heaven from sources other than the Bible, we are not going to get a view of heaven as God has it. There is so much about heaven that we do not know.

For example, I do not know where heaven is. Sometimes people look up into the air as though heaven were above them. Perhaps it is—I do not know. Not knowing where heaven is is not as important as knowing that heaven is my destination.

The technology of our generation has advanced to such a point that we can send rockets up into the air for thousands of miles. Some wonder if maybe we are now getting closer to heaven.

I do not know where heaven is, but I do know that you cannot get there on the most sophisticated technological rocket man could ever create. Man does not have the capacity to build his own pathway into heaven. Remember the Tower of Babel? For one thing, he does not know where heaven is. For another thing, what would it take to get to heaven?

With all of man’s ingenuity, he has yet to build the doorway into heaven. “I am the way,” Jesus said to His disciples, The truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). If we are going to get into God’s heaven, it is going to be by Gods way.

For me, I want nothing at all to do with man’s heaven man’s idea of heaven, or man’s perception of heaven. I have seen what man has done here on earth, and I do not want any of it to get into heaven.

Heaven is God’s domain, and it has all about it the beauty of God’s nature. Heaven is a reflection of all the attributes of God and His nature and character. It is a place where God is most comfortable and a place where God’s people will find peace and tranquility.

What we see here on earth is nothing compared to what we will see in heaven. After all, what does the world really have to offer us? We are here for only a short time anyway. The best the world has to offer is temporary.

The world tries to tempt us with gadgets and products that will bring us satisfaction, but it does so only temporarily. What God has for us is something that will last for all eternity.

Our Concept Of Hell

Once we get a slight understanding—which is as much as we can do—of heaven, we need to turn our attention to hell. We do not like to talk about hell anymore. We would much rather talk about heaven. I know I would, but the truth of the matter is, there is indeed a hell to avoid. Our problem today is we do not have a realistic view of hell.

There is nothing beautiful about hell as there is about heaven. In hell, we find only monstrous moral deformity and depravity and monstrous ugliness. Some wonder about the fire of hell.

The Bible is clear concerning the fire in hell and the lake of fire. But just for a moment, forget about the fire. Hell has such an ugliness about it that it is reported by anyone who looks into it.

The Bible clearly declares hell was made for the devil and his demons. Hell is not a place for man. The man was created for heaven.

But when sin came into the world and tarnished the image of God within man, he became disqualified for heaven. The only place that could receive him following his death was hell.

When people say a man is lost, that lostness will never be more in view than when that person actually goes to hell. He will be in a place in which he is out of place. Nothing in hell will do anything for the person in hell.

Think for a moment of a place where there is no beauty, no perfection of wisdom, no understanding of God’s nature—a place of ugliness beyond anything we know here on earth. Think of the ugliest place on earth, the most morally depraved place on earth, and it is nothing compared to the ugliness of hell.

William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, was a very passive Christian until he had a vision of hell. That vision so stirred him that he spent the rest of his life rescuing as many people as possible from that awful and terrible destination.

If we only understood what hell was all about, we would become the fiercest evangelists of our generation.

Our Concept Of The Earth

After we have seen the contrast between heaven and hell, we need to correct our perception of earth.

Heaven is a place of utter beauty, whereas hell is a place of utter depravity. Earth now falls halfway between heaven and hell. There are aspects of Earth that are simply beautiful. There are also aspects of the earth that are absolutely ugly.

To understand the contradiction here on earth, we need to get a good view of heaven and hell. We need to see that here on earth is the great battleground between heaven and hell. If I am not careful, I am tempted to believe that hell is winning.

It is easy to see the ugliness permeating through our world today. The depravity of man is raging in our generation like never before. The ability of man to be wicked, hateful, and murderous is a picture of earth’s ugliness.

We see what man is capable of and how sin rules the day, making this world a dreadful place to live. Regardless of what governments try to do, the sinful nature is on a rampage and will not cease until the end of time.

In contrast to this is the beauty of the earth. There are some things that reflect the beauty of our Creator. Redeemed men and women are reflecting into their communities the beauty of our Lord in a way that gives testimony to God’s grace. The beauty of godly living can be seen as a contrast to the depravity in our world today.

What is the responsibility of the church today? The first obligation that lies in current Christianity is to go back to God and get to know God as He is revealed in the Scriptures: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

He is terrible and wonderful and beautiful and lovely and just and severe and kind and holy and pure. You cannot joke with or fool with or pal around with God. He is the awesome God of our fathers whose almighty hand leads forth in beauty all the starry band.

The first duty of every minister of the gospel is to bring God back to the church—not the intellectual God of the academics, not the palsy God of the gospelers, not the chairman of the board, but the God who reveals himself in the Scriptures and who revealed himself supremely in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That God must be recaptured—that perception of God must be recaptured. We must bring God back again into our fellow¬ship, the triune God. We must cease to fool with little things, all the little things that we are doing, forgetting that we have one awful loss: the loss of our perception of a majestic God who is worthy to be worshiped.

God made us in His image and never meant for us to mirror anything less than himself. He never meant for us to have a homemade perception of God. There are two kinds of idolatry. It may be overt idolatry, where men make an idol and kneel before it.

That is at least honest. But there is another kind of idolatry, and it is the idolatry of the mind. It is thinking of the God you want and then worshiping what you think God should be.

If I wanted to worship a God that was not God, I would worship a buzzard or something else, like they do in some countries of the world, and be honest about it, instead of trying to reach up and pull the mighty God down to my own cheap perception of Him.

I think the schools ought to do something about it. I think the pulpits ought to do something about it. I think publishers ought to do something about it. I think our hymn writers ought to do something about it. Our musicians ought to do something about it.

We ought to get out of the wallow and look away to the stars, and walk out and listen for the awesome sweet voice that charmed Isaiah and David and all the saints down through the years.

Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven

Praise, my soul, the King of heaven;
To His feet thy tribute brings.
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,
Evermore His praises sing:
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Praise the everlasting King

Praise Him for grace and favor
To our fathers in distress.
Praise Him still the same as ever
Slow to chide, and swift to bless.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Glorious in His faithfulness.

Featherlike, God tends and spares us;
Well, our feeble frame He knows.
Mother-like, God gently bears us,
Rescues us from all our foes.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Widely yet His mercy flows.

Angels, help us to adore Him;
Ye behold Him face to face;
Sun and moon, bow down before Him,
Dwellers are all in time and space.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Praise with us the God of grace. –Henry F. Lyte(1793-1847)

 

Our Perception Of God Determines Our Fellowship With God

My heart, O God, is drawn in ways beyond my comprehension. The more I know Thee, the more I love Thee; and the more I love Thee, the more I desire Thee. Create in me a pure heart, and make my heart the dwelling place of Thy presence, and let me never drift away from that aspect of my fellowship with Thee.

Draw me nearer, O God; draw me nearer to Thyself in the perfection of Thy revelation. Amen.

As I begin to understand the perfection of God and how He manifests it in my life, it brings me to the point of experiencing the manifest presence of God. This is the basis of my fellowship with God. God’s presence is all around us, but it is the manifest presence of God, that mysterium tremendum, that is the basis of my fellowship with Him.

“Search me, O God,” David the psalmist wrote, “and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24).

Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God

Whatever the cause, David wanted to be led by God “in the way everlasting.” In order to do that, some major changes had to take place in the heart of David, and David was willing to make those changes.

I talked about hell. Hell, basically, is for those who are unlike God. Moral dissimilarity creates hell, a moral dissimilarity to God. It is the supreme purpose of God to bring us into alignment with His character.

After all, we were created in the image of God, and whatever that means, there is something in us that relates to something in God, and our fellowship depends upon discovering that “something.”

Whatever in my life is unlike God and contrary to the holiness of God must be eliminated from my life. That is why David said, “Search me, O God, and know my heart.” David understood that he could not know his own heart, and if he could not know his own heart, how much less can people like you and me?

This is the work of God and must be unhindered by our lack of knowledge of what God is doing. The person who needs to know everything and understand everything will prohibit God from doing what only God can do.

Where does our fellowship with God begin? That question needs to be answered. It is all boiled down into one theological word: reconciliation. Because of our being out of sorts with God, we need to be reconciled with God on His terms.

We do not set the terms for this reconciliation. Many people like to set their own terms, hoping that God will meet them halfway. The problem is God will never meet us halfway. It is God’s way or no way.

And God’s way is personified for us in the Lord Jesus Christ. Our reconciliation through Jesus Christ is based upon three acts. These are acts that God has laid down to bring us into full reconciliation with Him.

Atonement is the first act. This was what Jesus Christ did on the cross for us. It was a work that only He could do, and the work that He did for us. Atonement was fully made there on the cross when Jesus died for us.

The second act would be justification. Again, Jesus Christ accomplished this on the cross. Some look at this as the legal aspect of our atonement. Jesus brought to us a finished work fully acceptable to God. Our responsibility is to accept it for ourselves

The last act would be regeneration. This is where we come into the picture. All that Jesus Christ did on the cross would have been of no use, no value unless it had an impact upon man’s nature.

What Jesus Christ did on the cross, which brought about our regeneration, was the only thing that could bring us back into full fellowship with God. This regeneration brings into us the divine nature.

The only thing that God can accept in us is His Son. And through the work of reconciliation, God has brought man to that point where he can have fellowship with God. Apart from this work, fellowship with God is not possible.

Often in a prayer meeting, someone will pray for God to “come near to us.” So many Christians have a serious problem along this line, believing that God is far away. Somehow, through some kind of means, they think we need to get God’s attention and draw Him to us. If we pray long enough, if we get enough people to pray, then we entice God to draw near to us.

This is to misunderstand the whole concept of the nearness of God. God is as close to you right now as He ever was and ever will be. This is, of course, one of the attributes of God, omnipresence, which simply means that God is present everywhere.

There is no place where God is not. God is as close to one thing as He is to another. And this is something hard for us to comprehend. We are trying to understand God and His attributes through our limited abilities. God has no limitation whatsoever about anything.

Keep in mind that no matter where you are or what you are doing, God is near. He does not have to be enticed or bribed to come near to us. He is already closer than we could ever imagine.

This problem of God’s nearness is especially true for those Christians who have a sense of what I will call “divine remote¬ness.” Somehow, they do not believe that God is where they are. Somehow or other, God is far removed from where they are.

Because they cannot feel the connection with God, they do not believe God is near. Therefore, they have to yell and scream and try to get God’s attention, as though He were off somewhere doing something else. For many who call themselves Christians, a sense of emptiness in their hearts dominates.

With Elijah in the Old Testament, it was only after all the other noise had spent itself that he was able to hear that still, small, most mighty voice of God speaking to him. Our trouble today is we cannot get still enough to hear that still, small voice.

In order to have fellowship with this God, that fellowship has to be on His terms and not ours. God has already outlined the terms of fellowship with Him, and none of these terms is negotiable. He is the One who puts down the principles for this fellowship, not us.

How many Christians are attempting to keep up a relationship with God that is not actually established upon the character and nature of God? For some reason, they have taken the relationships that they have with one another and projected them onto God. This will never do.

My relationship and fellowship with another brother or sister in the Lord depend upon my physical being there. It depends upon my actually seeing them and they’re seeing me, and my hearing them talk and they’re hearing me talk.

When they are not around, I do not know what they are saying, and they do not know what I am saying. In some ways, we have projected this onto God. If we cannot see God, then God cannot see us. If we cannot feel Him here, then He is not here.

And if He is not here, then He does not know or understand what my situation is. How many times have we tried to explain to God the difficulties we are in and how He can help us out?

How frustrating it is to try to get hold of God, and nothing seems to work. My prayer life seems to be empty. The heavens seem to have a brass ceiling that nothing can penetrate. This describes many Christians today whose perception of God is not really based upon what God has revealed to us about himself.

We have based our Christianity upon a misunderstanding of the Bible’s truth. We have head knowledge, but no heart knowledge, of what Christianity is all about. We can explain Christianity, but we are not able, to live it from our hearts.

The difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge is that the heart can actually experience God, the presence of God, while the head cannot.

As I think about this subject, one question begs to ask: How many Christians really have experienced God? How many have gotten beyond simply believing that God exists and experienced the presence of God?

It is one thing to know about God, but it is another thing to know God in personal experience. The great delight of our Father, which art in heaven, is for us to experience Him in a way that He deserves.

I am rather passionate about reading the Bible. I firmly believe in the importance of spending time alone with God in the written Word, and I encourage others to spend as much time in the Word of God as possible. I have discovered that when I spend time in the Word of God, I will experience the Living Word.

If I have not experienced the Living Word, I have not really read the Bible. The Bible is not a textbook so I can answer questions on a quiz somewhere. The Bible cannot be compared to any other book in the world.

When I come to the Bible, and when I spend time reading and meditating upon the Scriptures, I am entering a world where God is dominant and desires to reveal himself to the worshiping heart.

As I get into the Word of God, it begins to reveal God to me. And as that divine illumination takes place under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I then begin to see God for who He really is—not some caricature somebody has drawn to explain God to me.

The great secret of the Christian life is to begin experiencing God as He desires me to experience Him. God’s greatest delight is to bring me into His presence.

I am afraid that for all practical purposes, we have only theological Christians in the church today, not deeply spiritual Christians. We have wonderful head knowledge of the Bible and can give “a reason to everyone who asks us about the hope within us,” but it does not go further than that.

As I get to know God, I begin to experience aspects of God that whet my appetite for more of God. I can never have enough of God. A growing yearning to be near God begins to develop, and I begin to recognize that God is within me, and I want to experience this God who is within me.

I yearn for a manifesta¬tion of the presence of God, a degree of fellowship with Him that goes beyond mere head knowledge. This is not something we can explain. If we could explain it to everybody’s satisfaction, it would not be God.

God is much more than we can explain or boil down to human understanding. God can be experienced only in the heart, which creates an atmosphere of praise worship, and adoration.

The prevailing condition among Christians today, as I see it, is that there is a sense of God’s absence among us. Many believe in God. Many worship God and even sing about Him. But it is almost as if He is not there. This has brought Christianity down below any other religion in the world.

Believe me when I say that Christianity is not like any other religion. Christianity begins with God and envelops the human heart that has been redeemed and comes back once again to the heart of God.

The apostle Paul makes this clear when he writes:

If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

Colossians 3:1-3

This is the posture of the Christian. We are seeking those things that are above. We are not being hindered by the world around us, but we are setting our affections on things above. We are looking up for our redemption, which is in Jesus Christ.

The reality of Jesus Christ is the basis of our daily fellowship with God. If we just acknowledge that there is a God somewhere that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that one day when we die, we are going to go to heaven, we have not really grasped the dynamics of fellowship with God.

My fellowship with God is much more than “one day I am going to die and go to heaven.” My fellowship with God is experiencing the manifest presence of God in my day-to-day living—not just a Sunday morning experience that cannot be replicated throughout the week. The dynamics of our worship is an everyday experience, or it is not true worship and we do not understand who God really is.

As our fellowship with God grows day by day, the Holy Spirit unfolds to us the reality of the Christian life. The qualities of Jesus Christ are becoming our qualities. What He is, we are becoming. I am not talking about His deity.

I am talking about the holiness of His perfection. Jesus Christ did not die on the cross merely so that one day we can go to heaven, which certainly is our hope; it is much deeper than that.

Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead on the third day, ascended into heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost to give us His character and His nature to be a testimony to the world around us.

Our testimony is not that we have cleaned up our life. Any religion can do that. Our testimony is that we are like Christ, and people around us will begin to experience Jesus Christ as they begin to understand us.

Now, what are those qualities of Jesus? As we peruse the Scriptures, these qualities of His perfection are unveiled to us. These qualities include holiness, unselfishness, love, kindness, forgiveness, zeal, humility, and heavenly-mindedness.

As we study the life of Jesus, we begin to see these qualities, and that these qualities are part of our Christian experience. Day by day, I am becoming more Christ-like in my life.

The more like Jesus Christ I become, the more intimate is my fellowship with Him. Those things in my life that are contrary to Him need to be crucified and put out of my life so that I may go on in the fullness of spiritual perfection.

A great many are disconcerted by the term spiritual perfection. They make excuses for themselves, saying that nobody is perfect. But there is Someone who is perfect. That perfect One is Jesus Christ.

As we pursue Him in daily fellowship and in the perfection of His character and nature, we begin to become more and more like Him. The more we become like Him, the more our fellowship with Him takes on the reality that Jesus Christ desires in all of us.

Out in the world, we cannot find anything that will help us in our fellowship with God. We must decisively turn our backs on the world and walk in the shadow of the cross. Whatever it costs us is worth the fellowship we enjoy this side of glory.

Draw Me Nearer

lam Thirty O Lordy I have heard Thy voice,
And it told Thy love to me;
But I long to rise in the arms of faith
And be closer drawn to Thee.

Refrain:

Draw me nearer; nearer blessed Lordy
To the cross where Thou hast died;
Draw me nearer; nearer; nearer blessed Lord,
To Thy precious bleeding side.

Consecrate me now to Thy service, Lord,
By the power of grace divine;
Let my soul look up with a steadfast hope,
And my will be lost in Thine.

Oh, the pure delight of a single hour
That before Thy throne I spend.
When I kneel in prayer, and with Thee, my God,
I commune as friend with friend!

There are depths of love that L cannot know
Till I cross the narrow sea;
There are heights of joy that I may not reach
Till L rest in peace with Thee. –Frances J. Crosby(1820-1915)

Our Perception Of God’s Perfection

I long for Thee, O God, in all Thy perfection. My mind cannot comprehend the wonders of Thy perfection, and I stagger trying to understand Thee. What my mind cannot grasp, my heart can in full wonder and adoration. Fill my heart with Thyself. The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this mind of mine. Amen.

God makes the greatest demand on our intelligence and imagination and powers of reason, requiring us to picture a mode of being we are not familiar with, a mode of being wholly beyond ourselves, a mode of being unlike anything we have ever known.

We must keep in mind one thing: All I say about God is still not God, because theology, at its finest moment, can do no more than tell us about God. To know about God and to know God are two absolutely different things. Most people confuse knowing about God with knowing God, and this, in my opinion, is at the core of many of our problems in the evangelical church today.

Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God

Let me say that if you ever know God, you are going to have to enter in by the new birth, by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, and by the revelation of the Spirit. There must be revelation and illumination.

You have to have the truth revealed to you, but until there is illumination of that truth, it does not do you any good. Only the Holy Spirit can make us know God. That is why when we speak of the Holy Spirit, we ought not to speak apologetically, and nobody ought to be ashamed to preach about the Holy Spirit or be afraid to talk about Him, for the reason that only He can make us know.

Theology can teach us about God, and that is what this book is all about.

One problem in describing God is that we use ourselves as a pattern, push that up into the heavens, and say that is what God is like. God is bigger than we are, of course. But He is one size and we are another size, so we begin to think of God in terms of our limitations.

When we try to describe God this way, we end up with a caricature of God, a God that is not worthy of our worship. Too many people are worshiping the God of their own imaginations.

If we are really going to understand God, we need to see Him in light of infinity. I mean by that, God is infinite in every aspect of himself. What I mean about the infinitude of God is that God knows no limit, and right there is where we stop.

The human mind can go a long way, but it cannot go all the way to limitlessness. But God is limitless, boundless, and has no end. This defies every definition we could ever come up with. There is no end to anything in God, and He has no bounds.

The vast ocean has a boundary, but God has no boundary. Whatever God is, He is without limit or bounds, and whatever God has, He has without limit or measure. These are words that can be used only about something created, and God is the Uncreated One.

When we come to describe God, we sometimes use words carelessly. We often say that something is unlimited. A company’s wealth is unlimited, an athlete has unlimited energy, and an artist takes unlimited pains to do his painting.

The danger of taking the word unlimited and pulling it down into our sphere is that we then associate it. God and His unlimitedness with our understanding of unlimited.

Take the word measureless, for example. Measureless is a word we can use only of God. Anytime you have some kind of measurement, it has to do with created things giving an account of themselves. But it cannot be applied to God.

In our description of God, we cannot use imperfections, because God does not have limitations or imperfections of any sort. God is in a category all by himself. Everything we describe by limitations is contingent and relative, whereas God is self-existent, an absolute.

Therefore, He is a boundless ocean; and none can bound Him, and none can fathom Him, and none can describe how far out He goes in infinite distance in all that He is.

The measure applies to created things and can never be associated with God. We have liquid measurements and measurements of energy and sound measurements. We have measures of light.

We say a bulb is so piany watts, and we have numbers for pluralities: ones, twos, fives, and some tens. We can even measure intelligence. We measure our brain and our ability to do things, but when we do that, we are imperfect, small, and limited—not infinite.

God cannot be measured and cannot be weighed, for He is not composed of matter. You cannot figure God in distance, for God fills all distance. You cannot measure God, for God has no extension in space. You cannot measure the energy of God the sound God makes the light He gives off, or anything else in their absolute pluralities. God is one—one God, we praise Thee.

None of these words or concepts can touch God or describe Him. They describe only imperfect things that God has made, not God himself. They are the way we see the work of God’s hands. It is His fingerprint in creation.

Look on the work of God’s hands and you will see it. You see a mountain or a man and you have size there. Size is a relative thing. A man weighing two hundred pounds is nothing compared to a mountain.

But with God, there are no sizes, no degrees, no measurements, and no pluralities, because God is just God.

Frederick Faber once wrote a hymn about the infinity of God (“The Greatness of God”)- Nobody ever sings it, but he wrote it and got it out of his system. I have read it and it has blessed me.

O Majesty unspeakable dread!
Wert Thou less mighty than Thou art,
Thou went O Lord! Too great for our belief
Too little for our heart.

I hear people say, “We have a big God.” I really do not like that, because I do not think we ought to pull God down to our level. I think God is too holy, too infinite, too high, too wonderful, too glorious to even think of Him like that.

If God were just a big God, He would be so big He would scare us, but He would be too little for us to worship. I could not worship a God who was just an oversized man. I could not even worship a God who was a huge man. If God were simply a huge man, then I could say, “He’s bigger than I am, but here I am.” This great God is infinite, and so I have no greatness apart from God.

But greatness, which is infinite makes room
For all things in its lap to lie;
We should be crushed by a magnificence
Short of infinity.

We share in what is infinite: ’tis ours,
For we and it alike are Thine;
What I enjoy, great God! by right of Thee
Is more than doubly mine.

Thus doth Thy grandeur make us grand ourselves;
‘Tis goodness bids us fear;
Thy greatness makes us brave as children are,
When those they love are near. –Frederick Faber(1814-1863)

God is infinite, and because God is infinite, you and I can be bold and brave in the universe, just the same as the little boy who is brave when his father is around.

How could I stand myself if I did not believe in the infinite God? How could I endure myself if I did not know that God is eternal? How could I endure the passing of my years if I did not know that I had been baptized into the heart of the One who knows no years, who is the Ancient of Days, who had no beginning and can have no end?

How could I accept my weakness if I did not know that I had been baptized into the heart of the One who has infinite strength? So this is our God, and this is the God we adore.

God is what He is without limit. He knows no extent, He knows no measure, and if there is a point where God is not, it would mean that God is not really who He says He is. There is a limit to great countries and a limit to great wealth, but there is no place where you can put a boundary and say, “God, do not overflow this.”

God speaks to the sea, and says, “This far, and no farther.” But who can speak to God and say, “This far and no farther”? Who dares tell God what He can do or cannot do?

If you are thinking of a limit, you are not thinking about God. But if you think and think and think, out and out, and up and up, and try to think as far out as God and then you break down—do not let it worry you.

Saint Augustine had his troubles with it. So did Paul David and Isaiah. No human being can think infinitude. Nobody can think it; you must believe it. You must believe it in your heart.

I cannot take you by the hand and lead you into the kingdom of God. I can only point you to the Lamb of God, and then it is between God and you. In the same way, I cannot by any means describe the infinitude of God. I can only point with wonder, amazement, and awestruck admiration and say, “Behold God.” After that, it is you and God.

What does all this mean to us? If God is infinite—and all theologians believe this, the Bible teaches it, and we sing about it—what does it mean to us now? Is it simply a lesson in theology that will be examined one day? No, not that. If this is true—and it is true—then certain things about God are true.

If God is infinite, then His love is infinite. There is a love closer than the love of a mother, and that is the love of God. A mother’s love goes so far, but “there is a limit to it. A mother can die and her love dies with her, but God cannot die, and because He cannot die, His love never dies.

Right here someone will say, “Did not Jesus die, and do we not sing, ‘When Christ the mighty Maker died, for man the creature s sin?”

Yes. The second person of the Trinity took upon himself the form of a man and died for our sins, but the eternal God remained alive and raised Him from the dead. Deity never died, but the man called Jesus, who was both God and man, died for our sins. No contradiction there.

No confusion at all. God cannot die. God is the immortal who has only immortality dwelling in light, which no man can approach. So the love of God is infinite. You can be certain of this.

The love of people is not infinite. It is an awful thing to fall in love and then fall back out of love. I always think how shocking it is when in a divorce situation a person will say, “I no longer love him.” She once did, but no longer. Love did not last.

We sometimes hear about mothers who forsake their children, so even the finest love that the world knows can fail. The love of a father, mother, sister, or wife has limits; but the love of God has none because God is infinite, and anything God has is limitless. There is one thing you can be sure about: There is no limit to the love of God.

Some believe in the complete salvation of the universe. They believe that when Christ died, He died for everyone, including the devil and demons. That is universalism, which I do not go along with. But as far as the love of God is concerned, the love of God is infinite enough to take in all of heaven and hell too. God, in His infinite planning,” planned that only those who repent and believe shall be saved.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind. –Frederick W. Faber(1814-1863)

Recently I was praying and thinking about how vast the grace of God is compared with our human sin. It is a peculiar contradiction. For example, if you do not think your sin is big, then the Lord cannot save you.

If you think your sin is bigger than God, then He cannot save you. You have to realize that to you, your sin is big; but God is infinite, and therefore God is bigger than all your sin. Where sin abounds, the grace of God does much more abound.

When God says “more,” referring to himself, we must extend our imagination into borderline infinity. When God says “much more” and puts a qualifying word behind it, what can you do but kneel and say, “My Lord and my God, how grace does much more abound”?

When you have your medicine that has no limit to cure a disease, which has a limit, you can be sure the patient is going to get well. When the infinite, limitless grace of God attacks the finite limit of sin in a man, that sin has no chance.

If we will only repent and turn from it, God will pulverize it and whirl it into immensity, where it can never be known again while eternity rolls on eternity.

That is what happened to my sin. That is what happens to the sin of everyone who believes. I am not making a fuss with the devil; I will let God handle him.

God is the only one who can. But I would like, in a sneaky way, to have the devil know that Jesus Christ our Lord is infinite, and His blood is infinite, and the purchase of His blood is infinite; and if all the sands of the seashore and all the stars in the sky were human beings, and if every corpuscle in the bloodstream of every human being in the world was a human being, and they had all sinned as bad as Judas did, still the grace of God, being infinite and limitless, would have no limit.

As Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf expressed:

Lord, I believe, were sinners more
Then sands upon the ocean shore,
For all Thou hast the ransom given,
Purchased for all peace, life, and heaven.

God could send a team of angels to count my sins, and in ten years or so, they could have them all added up and say, “Here’s the total,” and it would string clear across the room. The angel might say, “I guess he is doomed.”

But God would say, “No, look at My grace. It extends, not across the room, but from eternity past to eternity to come.” We sing of the infinite grace of our loving God, and it is proper and correct that we should.

This concept of infinitude also applies to the atonement, when Christ died for us.

When Jesus Christ died on the cross, it was enough. Personally, I am glad to have had enough of something. When Jesus died on the cross, it took Him only six hours. But because it was infinity dying, the man who died was the Deity who could not die. Bfit because God counted the infinity there, to Him it was enough.

I believe Jesus died for everyone, and when He died on the cross, He not only died for the elect, but He died for every human being who was ever born in the world or ever will be born. I believe He died for every baby who died at birth and for every man and woman who lived to be one hundred or more. I believe He died for all.

We can go around the world telling people that Jesus Christ died for them.

No man who has ever lived has been too much of a sinner to go beyond the infinite atonement of Jesus Christ. If every man were a sinner as bad as Judas Iscariot, the atonement of Jesus Christ would still cover him. If someone had only told Judas and he had repented, there might have been a Saint Judas today.

Another description we have in this regard has to do with the patience of Jesus—the infinite patience of Jesus, the patience of God, with the power to save. He has infinite power to save and break the power of canceled sin. Paul Rader used to say, “You name it, and God will break it.” He was so right.

Jesus, Thy Blood, And Righteousness

Lord, I believe, were sinners more
Then sands upon the ocean shore.
For all Thou hast the ransom given,
Purchased for all peace, life, and heaven.

Lord, I believe the price is paid
For every soul, the atonement made;
And every soul Thy grace may prove,
Loved with an everlasting love.

Jesus, be endless praise to Thee,
Whose boundless mercy hath for me,
For me, and all Thine hands have made,
An everlasting ransom was paid.

Ah, give to all Thy servants, Lord,
With the power to speak Thy quickening Word,
That sinners to Thy wounds may flee,
And find eternal life in Thee.

Thou God of power., Thou God of love,
Let the whole world Thy mercy prove,
Now let Thy Word oer all prevail;
Now take the spoils of death and hell. –Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf(1700-1760)

Our Perception Of God’s Grace

Our Father, our hearts hunger for the fullness of Thy nature. We do not deserve to be in Thy presence, but Thou hast made it possible for us to come boldly to the throne of grace. That grace is wonderful in us. Although I may not fully compre¬hend Thy grace, I can benefit from it today. Amen.

One compromised aspect of God has to do with His grace. If our perception of God is compromised, everything about our understanding of God is also compromised. I think this matter of grace is one of the most important perceptions of God to fall under this category of misconception.

If we do not understand God, we will never understand His grace and its full impact on our lives. This is reflected in our hymnology. I have a collection of hymnals, and whenever I am visiting somewhere, I like to look through their hymnal.

Recently I looked through a rather modern hymnal and found the hymn “Amazing Grace,” written by John Newton. Whenever we think of grace, this hymn always comes to mind. I noticed in this hymnal that they had made a significant change. I certainly am not a fan of those who try to change a hymn in order to satisfy their own taste.

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The first line of this hymn goes, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!” This is the familiar version of that hymn. However, in this modern, up-to-date hymnal, the first line was changed: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a one like me.” Quite a significant change, in my opinion.

Some people tend not to quite grasp the idea that we are or were at one time, a wretch. It simply does not go down very easily. We are willing to say that we are not perfect, that we missed the mark, or that we are not really up to par. But we are not ready to say that in ourselves we are nothing more than a wretch.

Some people believe that God’s grace enables Him to put up with certain conditions that are not quite up to His standard. We have a different discernment of what grace is all about.

Our British friends talk about the “gracious queen.” Or we might see a man who is very sympathetic, long-suffering, and generous, and we might look at him and say, “There’s a very gracious man.”

The problem is that we define grace from our standpoint. We believe the grace of God is that He tolerates sin because He loves us so much. That is the price of His love for us. This, however, is far from what the Bible teaches.

God’s grace is not something that we can use to manipulate God into some corner and get Him to do something we want Him to do against His will. God cannot be manipulated.

When we explore the concept of God’s grace, we cannot separate it from His other attributes. God does not lay aside one attribute in order to pick up another attribute. In God, there is a complete sense of oneness.

He is not like my watch that is put together, and all the parts synchronize and work together harmoniously. God’s grace is in complete conformity to every other attribute of God.

To understand this, I need to say that it is out of the goodness of God that grace comes. Mercy, as I have stated before, is God’s goodness confronting human guilt, and grace is God’s goodness confronting human demerit.

Prior to man’s fall in the Garden of Eden, God’s grace was not evident. Not that it was not there—it was just that there was no situation that brought that aspect of God’s character to light.

Once man fell into the cesspool of sin and became polluted, God’s grace came out like a shining contrast. Paul writes about this in Romans 5:20: “But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” Grace, like all God attributes, carries with it the “much more” aspect.

God was always gracious. He never has been less gracious than He is now, and He never will be more gracious than He is now. But until sin came into the world, God’s grace was not evident.

Now we can see this aspect of God, particularly in our own lives, when we realize what wretches we are in comparison to the holiness of God. Allow me to lay out some facts about grace that should encourage our hearts.

First, grace is God’s good pleasure.

Grace brings into favor one that has previously been in disfavor. It is the unchangeable grace of God, and it never ceases to be what it is. Throughout the Scriptures, grace and favor are inter-changeable words.

You will find the word favor occurring and you will find the word grace occurring, but if you look at it in the original languages, you will find they are the same word as originally given but translated as favor or grace, apparently at the whim of the translator.

Although there is three times as much material in the New

Testament about grace as there is in the Old Testament, there is four times as much about mercy in the Old Testament as there is in the New. It is virtually impossible to separate God’s grace from either the Old Testament or the New Testament. It permeates everything that has to do with God’s interaction with mankind.

The second fact about grace is that Christ is the only channel through which grace flows.

The Scriptures clearly declare, “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). Here we need to be careful that we do not misread this and find ourselves in a dismal swamp of misunderstanding.

Some people have taken this to mean that because it says the law was given by Moses but grace came by Jesus Christ, Moses knew only the law and Christ knows only grace.

This is to completely misunderstand grace. Grace was in the time of Moses, and the law was in the time of Christ. The Bible clearly declares that Christ came, born of a woman,
born under the law. In the Old Testament, it says that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Grace operated after the Ten Commandments were given, and grace operated before the Ten Commandments were given. Grace was operative back in the sixth chapter of Genesis, and Grace has been operating ever since. There is no ebb and flow of God’s grace. It is a steady stream.

How can it be otherwise? God must always act like himself and can never contradict any of His attributes.

When Scripture says that the law was given by Moses and grace and truth came by Jesus Christ, it does not mean that it came when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, because there is an awful lot said about grace before Jesus was born.

If the baby Jesus and Christ Jesus and the dying Lamb and the risen Lamb had brought grace into the world, then there would have been no grace before Mary’s baby was born in the manger in Bethlehem. Grace operated from the early days, and grace prevented God from slaying Adam and Eve when they sinned.

Noah found grace in God’s sight, and it was grace that saved the eight people from the flood. It was grace from the very beginning, all down through the years. Grace had no beginning, and it had no end.

So grace came by Jesus Christ, but grace did not come when Christ was born in Bethlehem. Grace had been in Jesus Christ from the beginning of the world. Christ was slain before the foundation of the world, as the Scriptures set forth for us, before the world was hurled into its orbit and populated by man. Grace had been in Jesus Christ and always was so.

Grace could not come by Moses because Moses was a sinner. Grace could not come by Abraham, for Abraham was a sinner. Grace could not come by David, for David was a sinner, a happy singing sinner, but a sinner nevertheless, and he needed grace himself.

God could not send grace through any of them. Grace could not come by Paul. Sometimes people almost make a god or a demi¬god out of the man Paul. He would be the last one in the world to allow this, and he objected to it whenever it came up.

Grace comes from Jesus Christ—always has and always will—and there is never any grace apart from Jesus Christ.

I should also include here what I will refer to as governmental grace.

This is grace that prevents God from destroying sinful men and women when they boast. The fact that sinful people can boast of their sin and continue in it is a demonstration of God’s grace. If God’s grace were not operative, that man or woman would be struck dead in their tracks.

God’s grace prevented Him from slaying the heinous and brutal dictators down through the years who were responsible for murdering millions of people. Sometimes we do not think of grace in this fashion.

If God did not operate by this governmental grace, very few people would be alive today. This grace saves countries like the United States from destruction. In that sense, grace is for everybody, and everybody profits by the grace of God.

That is a demonstration of the good favor of God, the kindness of God, the goodness of God, the long-suffering of God. Let me quickly point out this is not a saving grace. This grace keeps God from destroying the sinner.

Then, of course, there is a saving grace.

Saving grace is another matter, and it is a narrower matter and comes to us only through Jesus Christ. God’s grace keeps Him from destroying people, but on the other hand, the saving grace of God brings people into fellowship with Him.

This is the grace we think of—the amazing grace of God that saves a wretch like Rqe.

Grace is also the kindness of God’s heart.

As a young person, I used to hear people say about a person that he was a kindhearted man. Well, God is a kindhearted God. He is a God of goodwill and cordiality and is that way all through. God is what He is all the time, all the way through without any upsurge or downsurge.

You can look at God from any direction; He is always the same, and He is the same all the way through, always, toward all people, forever. You will never run into any meanness in God or resentment or ill will. God never fluctuates in His feelings as man fluctuates. We can be good-hearted one day and the next day mean as a cat. Not so with God.

Through the years, I have met good Christians, and they go to heaven by the same grace that gets me to heaven. I have noticed they were all right as long as everything was going their way.

They seemed to be very good and cordial, and then they shocked me by pouting. They were not all the same, all the way through, all the time. There was resentfulness and ill will, but there is none of this in God.

God has no present ill will toward anybody anywhere in the universe. No one can “get under God’s skin,” as we say about ourselves. We can put up with somebody for only so long, but then they get under our skin. This is not in the character of God at all.

Just as the holiness of God requires that heaven be empty of all iniquity, those who are iniquitous do not receive the favor of God through Jesus Christ. They must be cast out finally because they cannot be permitted to pollute heaven with their unholy presence. God will never allow anybody to compromise His holiness, and God’s grace goes on to affect each situation.

One final fact about grace is that God’s grace is infinite.

Everything God has and is, is infinite. Infinite means “boundless, without end.” This is hard to grasp for us who are so limited in what we do. God has no beginning and no end, and nothing in God has been created. We, who have been created, cannot fully comprehend the nature of uncreated.

I believe in God’s boundlessness and that there is no border anywhere in God. For man, it is a simple matter of going out and floating around the earth and coming down again on our rockets.

It is a nice engineering feat, and nice work if you can get it and do something adventurous and all that. But it does not shake my belief in the great God Almighty. You can get in that same little rocket, ride out until the stars are burned out, and still, you have not reached the boundaries of God Almighty. God contains all space all matter and all creation.

The Bible talks about God sitting on the circle of the earth: “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in” (Isaiah 40:22). All creation is but dust in the balance and nothing before God.

Simply try to compare God’s grace with our needs. No matter what our need is, it does not measure against the amazing grace of God. God was always a gracious God, but until sin came into the world, it was never manifested and nobody knew it.

As we meditate on God’s grace, we are affected by the overwhelming plenitude of goodness and kindness on the part of God. If every mosquito in all the swamplands of the world were a sinner, every star in heaven a sinner, and every grain of sand by the seashore a sinner, the grace of God could swallow it all without effort, for where sin abounds, grace doth much more abound.

Philosophically, theologically, practically, and experientially, I am a believer in the grace of God. My life is a testimony of God’s amazing grace. God’s goodness and faithfulness are demonstrated in everyone’s life. The worse off you are, the more the favor of God will shine in your life.

Amazing Grace

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found;
Was blind, but now, I see.

Was grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
His grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my/ hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

And when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess within the veil
A life of joy and peace.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We have no fewer days to sing God’s praise
Then when we’d first begun. –John Newton (1725-1807)

 

Our Perception Of God’s Mercy

O Lord, Thou knowest that we are not worthy to come before Thy presence, before the mystery of which angels stand in wonder. Deal with us, not according to our deserts, but according to Thy infinite mercy, by the Holy Spirit, for Christ’s sake. Amen.

The Scriptures abound with the truth that God is a merciful God. Mercy is something that God is; it is a facet of His unitary being. As a diamond has many facets, so does God with regard to His attributes. God is one, and one facet of God’s character is mercy.

Both the Old and New Testaments declare the mercy of God. Sometimes we think there is more of God’s mercy in the New Testament. The odd thing is the Old Testament has more than four times as much to say about mercy as the New Testament— that is, it is oddly seen against a background of error, which we have been taught most of our lives.

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We have been taught that the Old Testament is a book of law, and the New Testament a book of grace. The Old Testament is a book of judgment, and the New Testament is a book of mercy.

If the God of the Old Testament is a God of thunder and judgment, in the New Testament He is a God of meekness and mercy. But the truth is, God is merciful and God’s mercy is perfect. His mercy is infinitely perfect.

It is impossible to separate the Old Testament from the New Testament. It takes the whole Bible to make the Word of God. Trying to isolate one part of the Bible from another part is to do great damage to the Word of God.

Trying to separate law from grace is a very dangerous thing and usually leads to heresy. There can be no law without grace, and no grace without law.

God’s infinite goodness is that God desires His creatures’ happiness. That desire in God, which has an irresistible urge to bestow blessedness, takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but does take pleasure in the pleasure of His people.

God suffers along with His friends and grieves over His foes. It is that in God which we call mercy that looks with compassion upon men and women who deserve judgment.

I deliberately use the words active and active, for I do not like the words passive and passivity and various forms of the word passive.

The mercy of God is not a passive thing, but active. God is compassionate, but He is actively compassionate.

Grieving over the sins of the world is not going to help the world very much. God is not that kind of a God. His mercy is active, not passive. He has pity upon mankind, but it is active pity. He stops in kindness to FJi’s inferiors.

We must be careful to understand that none of God’s attributes spring out of the need of man. All God’s attributes reveal His character in and of himself. Man, on the other hand, benefits from those attributes, and the great challenge of our lives is to connect with those attributes. The only way we can do that is through Jesus Christ.

Let me lay out a few truths concerning the mercy of God.

First of all, the mercy of God never had a beginning.

If you were to go down to the Mississippi River, you would see a river so wide you could not cross it without getting into a boat and paddling.

If you wanted to find the source, you would have to keep on paddling north until you got to a place where the river became a stream, where you could toss a pebble across, and where a cow could wade in and drink, way up in northern Minnesota. The Mississippi River has its beginnings there. The great broad river of the Mississippi has a source.

Never must we think of God’s mercy as being like that river, originating somewhere and then flowing out. It never began to be because it is an attribute of the uncreated God and therefore always was, and it has never been any more or less than it is now.

Sometimes we think that at one time, way back in the past, God was very wondrously merciful. He walked in the garden with Adam. He walked with Enoch, and then Enoch was no more because God took him.

When we read the Bible stories of God’s mercy, we say, “God must have been wonderfully merciful back there, but that was before the day of gas chambers and brutalities and all the stuff we have today. God is not as merciful anymore.”

To say that is to malign the name of God. Being infinitely merciful, God never can be any more merciful than He is now and never was any more merciful in the past. The God who told Noah to build the ark and save the race of humanity is the same God with whom we have to deal today.

God will never be any less merciful than He is now, because being infinite, He cannot cease to be infinite, and being perfect, He cannot have any imperfection. So the mercy of God is what God is because God is who He is.

God’s mercy cannot be affected by anything anyone does.

So many preachers and evangelists tell tearjerker stories, wanting the stream of mercy to flow out of the human eye, thinking that if we cry and beg, God will have mercy upon us. God will have mercy upon you if your heart is as hard as stone. If you were never to weep over your iniquity, God is still a merciful God.

He cannot be anything else but merciful, and though everybody in the world might turn atheist, every human being turn into a beast, and all the world turn into devils, it would not change the mercy of God in the slightest.

God would still be as merciful as He is now. If Christ were to die a hundred times on the cross, it would not make God any more merciful than He is now, because God is as merciful as mercy can be. Being God, He will never be less merciful.

Nothing can increase, diminish, or alter the quality of God’s mercy.

The cross did not increase the mercy of God. Let us remember we ought to be good, sound Bible readers, and we ought to have our theology right. Let us remember that the mercy of God did not begin at Calvary. The mercy of God led to Calvary.

It was because God was merciful that Christ died on the cross. Christ did not die on the cross in order to make God merciful; God was already merciful, which is why Christ died. It was the mercy of God that brought Jesus to earth.

And when He came down, He came down and died because He was already as merciful as it is possible to be. God is merciful and the source of all mercy, and the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, so that nothing can make Him any more merciful than He has always been.

Let us not imagine falsely that Jesus Christ our Lord is up before the throne of an angry-faced God, pleading for His people. He is pleading all right, and He is praying there, and He is making intercession for us, but the God to whom He is making intercession is just as merciful now, no more and no less than He was before His Son died on the cross.

The cross did not make the mercy of God any more merciful, or the quality of that mercy any more perfect, or the amount of that mercy any greater. Neither does the intercession of Christ make Him more merciful.

Notice that the mercy of God operates in a certain way.

Whenever there is inequity, whenever there is immorality of any kind, the justice of God confronts it. That which is not moral is immoral. We have one sin; we call that immorality. All sin is immorality in that it is not morality. Jealousy, as well as that snide expression about somebody, is immorality.

That trimming on your income tax report is immorality. Losing your temper and yelling at your husband is immorality. Everything we do that is wrong is immorality. Immorality is inequity, injustice—that which is not just, right, and level.

Judgment is God’s justice confronting moral inequity, whereas mercy, is God’s goodness confronting human guilt and suffering. We are all recipients of God’s mercy.

We think we are not, but we are. There is not an atheist in the world who is not the recipient of God’s mercy right now. We have so much, and we live in such a way that if justice had its way unrestrained, without mercy, God would rain fire from the Rio Grande to the Hudson Bay.

All men and women are recipients of the mercy of God, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, and mercy postpones the execution, for God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

We need to notice one thing that distinguishes Christians from all other people and religions in the world: Mercy can be canceled or forgiven by the atonement when justice sees inequity. Death is a sentence meted out, but mercy brought Christ to the cross.

Justice and mercy see righteousness instead of iniquity, and when the just God looks down upon a sinner who has been covered by the atoning merits of Jesus’ blood, He sees not a sinner anymore, but a justified individual. That is the doctrine of justification by faith, the very foundation of redemption, and one of the great cornerstones of the church today.

When we see it like this, we wonder about one thing: Since God is perfect, self-contained, and self-sufficient, how can He suffer?—for God does suffer. He sent His Son to suffer, so I can only paraphrase the language of Frederick Faber: “How Thou canst suffer, O my God, and be the God Thou art, is darkness to my intellect but sunshine to my heart.”

I know that justice sentenced me to that. The soul that sinneth shall die, and I know that I should die and that hell should swallow me up. But I also know that Christ died on the cross for my sins. He went out there and in darkness did something I do not know. I am afraid of the man who is too smart about the atonement.

I am afraid of the man who can explain it too well, for surely it was the mystery of godliness. Surely what He did can never enter the mind of man or be fully understood. Surely what He did that awful, dark day, when it became as dark as a thousand midnights in the Cypress Swamp, we can never explain or understand intellectually.

Peter, who thought about this as much as you and I, lived with Jesus three years and saw Him go out and die on the cross, and saw Him after He had risen from the dead, said in an odd language, “Angels desire to look into these things.” The very angels in heaven desire to know about this.

I do not know about that atonement. I do not know what He did, but I know that whatever He did satisfied the heart of God forever. I know that whatever He did turned my iniquity into righteousness, turned my inequity into equity, and turned the sentence of death into a judgment of life.

I know it did that, so I can only stand before Him and say, “How Thou canst suffer, O my God, and be the God Thou art, is darkness to my intellect but sunshine to my heart.”

Do not ask your head about this. If you cannot think about it, get on your knees and say, “Thou knowest, O my Lord and my God.” Maybe someday in that bright tomorrow, maybe with clearer eyes and brighter vision, we will look upon the wonder of the atonement and know what it means.

Not all of the theologians who have ever lived can explain this. Together they can only stand before Him and say He gave Himself, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.

I do not understand the mystery of it. I know the joy and the sunshine of His effects upon me and those who know God.

The mercy of God is a moral and theological doctrine to me. The mercy of God is my life and my breath. Oh the mercy of God, that God is compassionate, that He stoops to have pity and mercy upon His people.

How approachable the mercy of God is, how accessible and how completely gracious God is, and how He has no pleasure in the death of anyone, particularly the wicked. He is the Father of mercies. He is very compassionate and full of tender mercy, and He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

This is the message we must tell the world. This is the witness we must give to the world. We need to go into the world and tell them who God really is.

We must go into the world and tell them that God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and full of loving-kindness and that He sent His Son to die for their sins. There is a door open. It is the door of mercy, and it is open wide for us.

The Mercy Of God Is An Ocean Divine

The mercy of God is an ocean of divine,
A boundless and fathomless flood;
Launch out in the deep, cut away the shoreline,
And be lost in the fullness of God.

Refrain:

Launch out, into the deep,
Oh, let the shoreline go;
Launch out, launch out in the ocean divine,
Out where the full tides flow.

But many; alas! only stand on the shore,
And gaze on the pee a so wide;
They never have ventured to its depths to explore,
Or to launch on the fathomless tide.

Others just venture away from the land,
And linger so near to the shore
That the surf and the slime that beat over the strand
Dash o’er them in floods evermore.

Oh, let us launch out on this ocean so broad,
Where floods of salvation overflow;
Oh, let us be lost in the mercy of God,
Till the depths of His fullness, we know. –Albert B. Simpson(1843-1919)

Our Perception Of God’s Goodness

Out of Thy goodness, O God! Thou has reached down and blessed me beyond my comprehension. My praise to Theey O Gody fills my heart with joy in expectation of good things from Thee. May my life be a testimony of Thy goodness. Amen.

What kind of God is God? What is He really like? If God were to come and be visible and physically present among us, how would we find Him to be? Granted, we can never come before His unapproachable light and expect our earthly intelligence to grasp it. But if we could, what kind of God would we find Him to be?

That question is one of the most important that any of us could ask, and our answer really defines who we are. In the history of the world, no nation has ever risen above its religion, and no religion has ever risen above its perception of God.

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Religion is high or low base or pure, depending upon what the believers believe their God to be like. The history of Christianity will demonstrate that Christianity at any given time is weak or powerful, dependent upon what kind of God it perceives Him to be.

If I could find out what you really perceive God to be like, I could prophesy your future without much trouble, for you are always going to move in the direction of your perception of God.

The most important thing for us to do is to constantly work on our perception of God.

One of the perceptions we have of God is that He is good, and that out of His goodness flows mercy. God is kindhearted and of goodwill. In other words, God is kind and cordial, and we might even say good-natured with a benevolent intention.

God is not kindhearted a little bit; He is infinitely kindhearted. He is not gracious and cordial a little bit or a great deal; He is perfectly and infinitely gracious and good. Whatever God is, He is completely and enthusiastically.

God is not some absentee engineer running His universe by remote control. God is present in perpetual, continual eagerness, applying His holy designs with all the fervor of His rapturous love.

God, being who He is, cannot be indifferent. It is impossible for God to be indifferent. Either God loves with a boundless, unremitting energy, or God hates with a consuming fire. God said certain people were neither hot nor cold—that is, they were in between, half-asleep, lukewarm, so He would spew them out of His mouth.

God cannot be halfway on a question; either He loves with an infinite, boundless, overwhelming, and enthusiastic energy of love, or He hates with an uncompromising fire of holy hatred.

In thinking about this, let me say that no one has any right to say that God has an obligation toward someone. God has no obligation toward anyone. He has no obligation to anything. When we think of the creation of the world, God, out of His own goodness, willed it into being.

The good, enthusiastic, kind-hearted God willed to create everybody and everything, and make the heavens and the earth, and hang the stars in their place. He willed to do it. He did it out of His own goodness.

He did not owe anybody anything. He did not do it to perfect himself, because He was perfect to start with; and there was no start per se, because when we say that God started, then we make a creature out of Him. God is uncreated, timeless, and contains time within His heart.

Let me ask you this: Why, when we sin, are we not destroyed? You can write as many books on the subject as you want, but I can give it to you in one sentence: Because God in His goodness willed to spare us, and that is the only answer.

If you pay a man to lecture ten times, an hour each lecture, on why God spared humanity, he cannot tell you one thing more. God spared us and did not send us immediately to hell because He in His goodness willed to spare us.

Also, why did He suffer and die in agony when He did not need to do it? The answer is His goodness. He loved us, and by His mercy and goodness, He died for us.

Why does God answer prayer? Because of His goodness. Why does God forgive sin? Because of His goodness. It is because God is kindhearted and gracious and of benevolent intention with all the enthusiasm of an infinitely powerful God. That is why He hears us and forgives us.

To understand this means that you cannot go to God and argue your good points because you do not have any. You cannot go to God and argue, “Oh God, please bless us—because of thugs and so,” and think that God will listen to you.

You cannot argue God into doing something that would be contrary to His nature. If we learn that God does everything out of goodness, without any price and without any obligation, we will find God very easy to approach and find Him very wondrously near. Out of His goodness, God has ordained means to help us, and all those means are because of His goodness.

If you are baptized, it is not the water that has done you any good. God, out of His goodness, has ordained that if you will be baptized, you will be obeying His Word, and He will bless you for your obedience. So it is with everything.

“O God,” the psalmist says, “in Thy mercy, hear my prayer.” It is an act of God’s mercy to hear my prayer, even if it is the holiest prayer ever prayed. Nobody could reach God, except God in His goodness has willed us to be able to reach Him.

I think we can save people a lot of work if they can only grasp this about God. I believe our praying would rise and become effective, if we would see that the only claim we have is something that we do not personally have at all. It is the goodness of God. And, of course, the goodness of God was made possible for us through His atonement.

Jesus Christ is the kindest man who ever lived in the world, and God is the kindest God. Jesus was the God-Man. The love of God, the mind of God, and the heart of God are kinder than you can imagine. If you were to concentrate on the word kind for one hundred years, you would not be able to truly grasp how kind God is.

He is so high that the archangels veil their faces before Him, but He is so good-natured and kindly disposed that He would pat the head of a little child, forgive a harlot on the street, and be merciful to Israel, to the church, and to all of us. Every¬thing comes out of the goodness and mercy of God.

Another important truth we need to grasp is that God is not revolted by our wretchedness. God has no regrets about anything He has made. God is not revolted because of anything that we are or have done. When God created everything, He pronounced it good.’All the sin in the entire universe could never take away from God that which He has established and called good.

I have not always been a kind man. Sometimes I have been sharp-tongued toward people and may have offended people, but God is not like that at all. I could never have been a nurse because dirty things make me gag.

God never gagged at anything He created and has never been revolted by the humblest thing. There is nothing in your body or in your soul that turns God away from you. God is never revolted by you or disgusted by you, no matter how sinful, how impure, or how odd you may be; He never turns away, because God is good.

Out of God’s goodness flows His mercy. Again, let me state that mercy is an attribute of God; it is not something that God has—it is something God is. If mercy were something God had, He might use it up or leave it somewhere and forget it, but mercy is what God is. If anybody should ask what kind of God your

God is, simply reply, “Our God is good.” And should they say, “Tell me more,” say, “Our God is merciful.” He not only has mercy, but He is mercy. It is something God is, and it is as eternal as God.

God’s goodness is a source of mercy, and God is of infinite goodness—that is, He desires His creature’s happiness. God desires that you be joyful. He will allow you to suffer if that suffering will make you holy because He wants you to be holy.

The trouble with this is we try to get happy right away, after suffering, whereas God wants us to be holy in order that our happiness might last. Unholy happiness cannot last; it can only spring up like a dandelion and perish tomorrow.

So God takes us through many fires and many trials, and it is not so important that we be happy right now. He is thinking about our enjoyment forever. This is part of the goodness and mercy of God.

God has an irresistible urge to bless people. He wants to bless you and your family your business and your church.

God takes pleasure in the pleasure of His people. He suffers along with His friends, and He takes no pleasure in the suffering of His enemies.

Some of the monks of old used to beat their backs with whips and sleep in beds of spikes, thinking they could coax God into being more merciful. There is nothing you can do to increase God’s mercy. The mercy of God is as big as God, and God fills all space and overflows into a vacuity so that you cannot add anything to His grace and mercy.

Your coaxing cannot add anything to God’s mercy. You do not have to go to God and build a case for yourself, or throw up your hands and say, “God, be merciful unto me!” God will have mercy on you because God is merciful. That is the way God is. That is the way we can expect Him to be all the time—not part of the time, but all of the time.

God is the same good and merciful God at all times, without any change. If God could become less than himself and be imperfect, He would be no God at all. To be God and remain, God, He has to remain all that He is forever, and merciful is one thing that He is.

You can be sure you will never find God in a bad mood. You will never find God saying, “I am not going to be nice today. I am not going to bless them.”

Nothing that occurs or ever can occur can ever increase the mercy of God, diminish the mercy of God, or alter the quality of God’s mercy. William Shakespeare wrote:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

Some people believe that when Jesus came and was born in a manger and the angels sang, God became merciful. But it was the mercy of God that sent Jesus to Bethlehem’s manger. Someone else says, “When Jesus died on the cross, then God became merciful.” No, a thousand times no.

He died on the cross because God was already merciful, and nothing Jesus did when He came into the world made God any more merciful than He already was.

It was the mercy of God and the goodness of God that brought Him, and when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, He did not become any more merciful. God had been kind and loving all the time.

The same God who is merciful is also just and holy, and holiness cannot possibly have any fellowship with unholiness.

Justice, when it confronts human iniquity, demands judgment, but when mercy confronts human guilt and suffering, it wants to be merciful and can be, because Christ died. Christ came, died, rose, and lived in order that mercy might flow down like a fountain.

The cross is God’s channel. Jesus Christ’s dying and rising is the way mercy flows. It is the direction mercy takes, so all the poor sinner needs to do is step into the framework of the cross and believe in His Son. Turn your back on iniquity, and you will find that the mercy of God will confront your guilt and suffering and pronounce you clean

All of us are recipients of the mercy of God.

Mercy cannot cancel sin until there has been atonement for sin, but there has been atonement. Jesus Christ died, and what He did was absolutely complete. You do not have to know all about the atonement. You only have to know that Jesus Christ came down to die for you, and because of what He did, the mercy of God can flow to you like a river.

In dying, Jesus suffered a long time. I say again, I do not know how the perfect God could suffer. But I can bow my head and say, “Oh, Lord God, thou knowest.”

Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed

Alas! and did my Savior bleed,
And did my Sovereign die!
Would he devote that sacred head?
For sinners such as I?

Was it for crimes that I have done,
He groaned upon the tree.
Amazing pity! Grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well, might the sun in darkness hide,
And shut its glories in,
When God, the mighty maker, died
For his own creatures’ sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While his dear cross appears;
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt my eyes to tears.

But drops of tears can never repay
The debt of love I owe.
Here, Lord, I give myself away;
His all that I can do. –Isaac Watts(1674-1748)

 

A High And Lofty Perception Of God

Thine, O Lord, is the beauty, the glory; the victory, and the majesty All that is in the heaven and earth is Thine. Thine is the kingdom, O Lord. Wherever L looks, L sees Thy finger¬prints, and my heart sings forth Thy praise. Amen.

Although they do not mean to do it necessarily theologians have a way of hiding the truth behind big words and chasing people away. I have a little tip: You can understand anything any theologian can understand. Do not let them fool you.

The doctor may write his prescription in Latin, hit the layman on the head, and make him feel as if he is up against something big when he sees those Latin words, which he cannot even read. Theologians do the same thing. They talk about the divine transcendence and everybody runs out, buys a novel, and says, Til read what I can understand.”

We can understand theology as presented to us in the Bible. We can understand what God says in the Bible about himself, although we may never plumb the depths of understanding it intellectually.

Take divine transcendence, for example. It means that God is above, high up, and above all things. Supposedly, that contradicts His immanence, which means God is in every place and God is here. God’s omnipresence will comfort you better than your own breath.

God is so high up that He cannot even be conceived. I need to explain now what I mean by “so high up” or “far above.” I do not mean distant, because God does not care anything about distance. God is not high up in the astronomical sense; He is not high up in the sense that He is a ray of light beyond Mars.

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It is important that we think of God as being in His right character, so infinitely beyond everything that you and I know that we cannot explain it. Physical magnitude does not mean anything to God.

Never suppose that God is at the top of the ascending curve of life. That is a great mistake. In some people’s circle of life, they start with one creature and move their way up a little bit to the birds, and then they go all the way up to beasts and then all the way up to man.

Then they think they are on their way up to the archangels and then the burning cherubim, and then at the top of that circle of life is God. That is no way to think of God at all.

Would you be shocked to know that God is just as high above archangels as He is above a caterpillar? The gap that separates the archangel from the caterpillar is of finite depth. How quickly we are to think that the angel has a grade of life that is far higher than the caterpillar that crawls in the room?

They are alike in that they are creatures. There was a time when they were not, and then they were. The archangel with his broad wings spread and the tiny caterpillar inching its way along are both creatures of God.

But God is not a creature. He does not belong in the creature category. We must think of God as separate from, high above, way beyond, and other than. He is God, and there is nothing like God in the entire universe. Only God is God.

When we think of God as being high above, the substance of God is wholly above, and God can never pass over and cease to be God, and nothing that is not God can ever pass over and become God.

The idea that Jesus was a man who became God is not true. Jesus was God and man united in one being. There was never such a thing as man becoming God, and there never can be such a thing as God becoming a creature. That would be to bring God down and falsify the majesty of the deity.

This is the great God, the One you and I are called to serve. All of the things that are said or taught about God are only a portion of God and a small part of His ways. We have what is called the rational element, which is the part you can get hold of with your finite mind.

People would like to pull God down and make Him small so that they could have a God their size—though a little bigger, so He could help them when they are in trouble. That is the kind of God that is in evangelical circles today.

The God of the average evangelical church is too small. He is not the God of the heavens and of creation, but He is a homemade, handmade God pulled down to our level. Our God today is like an old uncle whom we want to keep on good terms, and when the time comes, He will make us rich or help us in some way in a business deal. We want to be able to use God for our purposes.

Let me say clearly: I would not bow my knees to that kind of a God. The God that can get me on my knees has to be infinitely higher than I am. He must be so high and lofty and glorious that I could join the angels, seraphim, and cherubim to cry, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabbath.”

He would have to be so mighty that He could put the world in His hand, and He would have to be bigger than the devil, greater and mightier than mountains, and grander than fire. He would have to be all that and much more to be a God I could worship.

The God whom I could think up with my head, I will never get down on my knees to worship—never.

I am an American, and I do not bow to people easily. I do not like the idea of classes, where some men are big shots and some are little shots, and the little shots get down on their knees before the big shots. That is not the way it should be in America, and that is not the way to do it as a Christian.

God made us all so that the humblest little child is just as valuable to God as a Christian with lots of money to write big checks and drive big cars. Let us keep ourselves as free as we can.

And remember, when it comes to God, we go down on our knees along with the mighty man and the potentate and the humble man. Let us not get big ideas about these important people and think that they are more important to God.

When we say, “I accept Jesus,” we are not doing Jesus any favor. Some evangelists make it out as though you will be doing Jesus a great favor if you come to Him. No, you do not do Jesus any favor when you give your heart to Him. And He does not lose anything when you refuse to give your heart to Him.

You hold off, and He loses nothing. Give, and He gains nothing. He already has the world without end. Multitudes of the redeemed and the four beasts at the altar and the living creatures all bow before Him and cry, “Holy, holy, holy, worthy is the Lamb that was slain.”

Let us not imagine we are doing Jesus a favor by testifying or witnessing. We are not doing Jesus a favor by giving our hearts to Him. Rather, He is doing us an infinite favor by accepting us and receiving us unto Himself. The mighty God looked at man and took upon Him flesh as man, and died and rose again.

Now we are set before this mighty Lord Jesus. So do not get too proud. It was Jesus who rose from the dead and said, “All power is given unto me in heaven and on earth,” and He is not going to, for one second, allow himself to be pawed and slobbered over by carnal men and women whose concept of love came from Hollywood.

I understand that certain Muslims who cannot read, if they see a paper lying on the ground and do not know what is written on it, put it up carefully on a shelf somewhere, where it is safe. They are afraid that the sacred name of Allah might be written on it.

They do not want to be guilty of trampling on that sacred name. They are more reverent than many Christians. They bow before Allah more than many Christians go before the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Do you know this awesome God? This God the philosophers have called the mysterium tremendum— the tremendous mystery, the awesome mystery. Before this mysterium tremendum,9 Jacob cried, “How dreadful is this place; this is the house of God.55 In the New Testament, Peter said, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am unclean.55 Abraham said, “I am but dust and ashes.

The job was speechless before God. Job was an orator and probably would have made a good politician or an evangelist. He could open his mouth and words would flow out like water out of a flask. But when God revealed himself to him, Job laid his hands on his mouth and said, “O God, I cannot speak.

Many people are not getting anyplace with God because they have never met that kind of God. Their God is a self-made God and carries with Him no mystery or majesty. I will never bow my knee to a self-made or handmade God. I bow my knee to that mysterium tremendum—that awesome majesty we call our Father, which art in heaven.

I have been teaching and preaching since I was nineteen years old, and I must confess that the older I get, the dumber I get. I know so little. People come and ask me things that I could answer by pointing them out in the Bible. However, honesty compels me to confess that I do not know very much anymore.

Once I knew a lot, or thought I did, but as I spend time before this tremendous God, I become more and more aware that I do not know very much anymore. And really, I believe it ought to work this way.

Nobody who is proud will ever be acceptable to the awesome presence of the most holy God. The God who knows all that can be known in one easy, effortless act, and knows all power, all spirits, all minds, all matter, all relationships, all energy, all history, and all the future—compared to this God, I know very little.

None of us knows very much, and the man who thinks he knows the most is the man who, according to Paul, knows the least. If we would just admit how utterly ignorant we are, we would begin to get somewhere with God.

God is not interested in your head. He is not interested in how many degrees you have. After I received my honorary degree, I did not preach any better, nor did I pray any better.

Degrees do not mean anything, and yet some people imagine that if they do not have a degree, they cannot get anywhere. Some of the simplest people in the world know God far better than a person with a Ph.D. does. Pray with your heart, and God will hear you.

Some people will come to the altar and pray and then go away disappointed. The reason is they have a controversy with God. They are holding out on God, fighting Him. Do not be fooled by this.- God is still the awesome God that sent fire on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and turned the people into ashes. He is still that God.

If you have a dispute with God, keep in mind two things: One, you cannot win, and two, God cannot lose. If you are fight¬ing God at any point, you have no chance of winning. My advice is, simply, to quit fighting, surrender, and say, “God, here I am.”

Throw yourself into the hands of God. You cannot win as long as you are resisting God, and God cannot lose because He is sovereign and is working according to a plan He established before the foundation of the world.

When it is all over, the crown will be on the head of Jesus, and His bride will walk with Him into the presence of the Father, with great joy. God will win in the end.

All those who fight will lose. Either God will win over you now, to your everlasting blessedness, or God will win over you later, to your everlasting loss and sorrow and shame. Stop fighting God and you will win peacefully, for God loves you, and Jesus died for you, and the Holy Spirit is anxious to apply the blood and break every fetter in your life and set you free. He cannot do it, however, while you resist Him.

Not I, But Christ

Not I, but Christ, be honored, loved, exalted;
Not I, but Christy be seen be known be heard;
Not I, but Christy in every look and action,
Not I, but Christy in every thought and word.

Not I, but Christy to gently soothe in sorrow;
Not I, but Christy to wipe the falling tear;
Not I, but Christy to lift the weary burden!
Not I, but Christy to hush away all fear.

Not I, but Christy in lowly, silent labor;
Not I, but Christ, in humble, earnest toil;
Christ, only Christ! no show, no ostentation!
Christ, none but Christ, the gatherer of the spoil.

Christ, only Christ; ere long will fill my vision;
Glory excelling, soon, full soon, I’ll see—
Christ, only Christ, my every wish fulfilling—
Christ, only Christ, my All in all to be. –A. B. Simpson(1843-1919)