Meditation:

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

…Matthew 6:14,15 (KJV)

We Christians must simplify our lives or lose untold treasures on earth and in eternity. Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. The need for solitude and quietness was never greater than it is today.

…A. W. Tozer (1897-1963)

The Gospel is not presented to mankind as an argument about religious principles. Nor is it offered as a philosophy of life. Christianity is a witness to certain facts — to events that have happened, to hopes that have been fulfilled, to realities that have been experienced, to a Person who has lived and died and been raised from the dead to reign for ever.

…Massey H. Shepherd, Jr. (1913- ), Far and Near

Some people are kind, polite, and sweet-spirited – until you try to sit in their pews.

Coincidence is when God chooses to remain anonymous.

“Dear Father: Bless the person reading this in whatever it is that You know they need.” Amen!

It has pleased God that divine verities should not enter the heart through the understanding, but the understanding through the heart.

…Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

A life devoted unto God, looking wholly unto Him in all our actions, and doing all things suitably to His glory, is so far from being dull and uncomfortable, that it creates new comforts in everything that we do.

… William Law (1686-1761)

One of Paul’s most important teachings… is the doctrine of what we call “justification by faith”.  It frequently appears to the non-Christian mind that this is an immoral or at least unmoral doctrine.  Paul appears to be saying that a man is justified before God, not by his goodness or badness, not by his good deeds or bad deeds, but by believing in a certain doctrine of Atonement.  Of course, when we come to examine the matter more closely, we can see that there is nothing unmoral in this teaching at all.  For if “faith” means using a God-given faculty to apprehend the unseen divine order, and means, moreover, involving oneself in that order by personal commitment, we can at once see how different that is from merely accepting a certain view of Christian redemption… That which man in every religion, every century, every country, was powerless to affect, God has achieved by the devastating humility of His action and suffering in Jesus Christ.  Now, accepting such an action as a fait accompli is only possible by this perceptive faculty of “faith”.  It requires not merely intellectual assent but a shifting of personal trust from the achievements of the self to the completely undeserved action of God.  To accept this teaching by mind and heart does, indeed, require a metanoia [“transformation”], a revolution in the outlook of both heart and mind.

… J. B. Phillips (1906-1982),
New Testament Christianity [1956]

Commemoration of Brigid, Abbess of Kildare, c.525

There is a cowardice in this age which is not Christian.  We shrink from the consequences of truth.  We look round and cling dependently.  We ask what men will think; what others will say; whether they will not stare in astonishment.  Perhaps they will; but he who is calculating that, will accomplish nothing in this life.  The Father — the Father which is with us and in us — what does He think?  God’s work cannot be done without a spirit of independence.  A man has got some way in the Christian life when he has learned to say, humbly yet majestically, “I dare to be alone.”

… F. W. Robertson