โRepentance is the vomit of the soul.โ
Thomas Brooks
โHas it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshippers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become “unity” conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship. Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified.โ
A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
โBeware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who as a heaven for every body, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and broad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.โ
J.C. Ryle
Darkness may throw a shadow over my outer vision, but there is no cloud that can keep the sunlight of hope from a trustful soul. One of the earliest resolves that I formed in my young and joyous heart was to leave all care to yesterday, and to believe that the morrow would bring its own peculiar joy. permalink
Fanny Crosby

โง Me & my lovely wife Sarah! โงย
Yayโฆ8 years today!! ๐ย
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Ephesians 5:25-27ย The Voice (VOICE)
Husbands, you must love your wives so deeply, purely, and sacrificially that we can understand it only when we compare it to the love the Anointed One has for His bride, the church. We know He gave Himself up completely to make her His own, washing her clean of all her impurity with water and the powerful presence of His word. He has given Himself so that He can present the church as His radiant bride, unstained, unwrinkled, and unblemishedโcompletely free from all impurityโholy and innocent before Him.
My Thoughts…
Each time our wedding anniversary comes round, i canโt believe how much our marriage has grown more and more fruitful. Our love keeps blossoming through every season and i thank God for Sarah who is not only my best friend, but my amazing wife! ๐ย
I thank God for sustaining our marriage in Purity and Truth.ย
I thank God for not leaving us alone to figure out what to do, but for giving us, teaching, correction, training and a perfect Holy example to followโฆto reflect the personal and intimate union between Christ and His Church. The mystery of marriage is its reflection of the oneness of Christ, the Husband, and His Church, the Bride of Christ.

There is no more lovely, friendly or charming relationship, communion or company, than a good marriage.
Martin Luther
โWhoever is truly humbled โ will not be easily angry, nor harsh or critical of others. He will be compassionate and tender to the infirmities of his fellow-sinners, knowing that if there is a difference โ it is grace alone which has made it! He knows that he has the seeds of every evil in his own heart. And under all trials and afflictions โ he will look to the hand of the Lord, and lay his mouth in the dust, acknowledging that he suffers much less than his iniquities have deserved.โ
John Newton, The Letters of John Newton
โWhy is it so hard to get people to study the Scriptures? Common sense tells us what revelation commands: ‘Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God’–‘Search the Scriptures’–‘Be ready to give to every one a reason of the hope that is in you.’ These are the words of the inspired writers, and these injunctions are confirmed by praising those who obey the admonition. And yet, for all that we have the Bible in our houses, we are ignorant of its contents. No wonder that so many Christians know so little about what Christ actually taught; no wonder that they are so mistaken about the faith that they profess.โ
William Wilberforce, Real Christianity
โWhen God brings us to salvation, the most remarkable thing we see is that he transforms our hungers. He changes not just what we do but what we want to do. This is the work of the Holy Spirit within us โ โfor it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purposeโ (Philippians 2:13).โ
Ravi Zacharias, The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives
โOptimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse ‘in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God’s own commitment, that the best is yet to come.โ
J.I. Packer
โThe gospel is preached in the ears of all men; it only comes with power to some. The power that is in the gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher otherwise men would be converters of souls. Nor does it lie in the preacherโs learning; otherwise it could consists of the wisdom of men. We might preach till our tongues rotted, till we should exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless there were mysterious power going with it โ the Holy Ghost changing the will of man. O Sirs! We might as well preach to stone walls as preach to humanity unless the Holy Ghost be with the word, to give it power to convert the soul.โ
Charles H. Spurgeon
โMade for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world … That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us.โ
N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
โWe now demand glamour and fast-flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals…The tragic results of this spirit all all about us: shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies…the glorification of men, trust is religious externalities….salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such of these are the symptoms of an evil disease.โย
A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
โTo be really Bible-believing Christians we need to practice, simultaneously, at each step of the way, two biblical principles.
One principle is that of the purity of the visible church. Scripture commands that we must do more than just talk about the purity of the visible church; we must actually practice it, even when it is costly.
The second principle is that of an observable love among all true Christians. In the flesh we can stress purity without love, or we can stess love without purity; we cannot stress both simultaneously. To do so we must look moment by moment to the work of Christ and to the Holy Spirit. Without that, a stress on purity becomes hard, proud, and legalistic; likewise without it a stress on love becomes sheer compromise.
Spiritually begins to have real meaning in our lives as we begin to exhibit simultaneously the holiness of God and the love of God. We never do this perfectly, but we must look to the living Christ to help us do it truly.โ
Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster
Godโs providence is not in baskets lowered from the sky, but through the hands and hearts of those who love Him.ย The lad without food and without shoes made the proper answer to the cruel minded woman who asked, โBut if God loved you wouldnโt He send you food and shoes?โย The boy replied, โGod told someone, but he forgot.โ
George A. Buttrick
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I am what I am, as Popeye used to say, but unlike Popeye I know I am not all I could be. In God”s hands he continues to shape my life, and he continues to use everything I’ve experienced to shape me. I seem to remember that Michael Angelo was once asked how he turned a lump of marble into a beautiful carving of a horse. “Simple,” he said, “you just chip away everything that doesn’t look like a horse.”
My prayer is that God will continue to chip away everything that doesn’t look like the life he wants for me. If it doesn’t look like a horse yet, that’s because it isn’t finished!
Brother Benโs Email sent to me this morning.
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โI fear me that the Christian church is far more likely to lose her integrity in these soft and silken days than in those rougher times. We must be awake now, for we traverse the enchanted ground, and are most likely to fall asleep to our own undoing, unless our faith in Jesus be a reality, and our love to Jesus a vehement flame. Many in these days of easy profession are likely to prove tares, and not wheat; hypocrites with fair masks on their faces, but not the true born children of the living God.โ
Charles H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Baby 1: And you, you believe in life after birth?
Baby 2: Absolutely. Itโs obvious that life after birth exists. We are here to become stronger and to get ready for whatever awaits us next.
Baby 1: This is absurd. There is nothing after birth! What would life look like outside the womb!
Baby 2: Well, there are many stories about the other side. Iโve heard there is a blaze of light there, an intense and profound feeling of joy with deep emotions, thousands of things to live forโฆ For example, Iโve heard that weโll eat with our mouth there.
Baby 1: Thatโs silly. We have an umbilical cord and that is how we eat. Everyone knows that we donโt use our mouth to eat! And, on top of that, no one has ever come back from the other world. Those stories are all coming from naive people. Life just ends at birth. Period. Thatโs the way it is and we must accept it.
Baby 2: Alright, then allow me to think differently. Thatโs for sure, I have no idea what life after birth looks like, and I canโt prove anything to you. But I like to believe that in the next world, weโll be able to see our mother and that she will take care of us.
Baby 1: โMotherโ? You mean that you believe in โMotherโ? Oh! So where is she?
Baby 2: Everywhere, donโt you see it! She is everywhere, all around us. We are part of her and itโs thanks to her that we are living right now. Without her, we wouldnโt be here.
Baby 1: This is ridiculous! Iโve never seen any mother so itโs obvious that she doesnโt exist.
Baby 2: I donโt agree. Thatโs your way of seeing things. Because sometimes when everything quiets down a little bit, we can hear her sing. We can feel her hugging our world! Iโm pretty sure that our life will start after birth.
โI think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests His power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God has placed itโHis Word. He alone has the power to change lives for eternity, and that power is focused on the Scriptures.โ
R.C. Sproul, The Prayer of the Lord
Here I sit in the middle of eternity.ย This wheelchair has helped me sit still.ย Iโve observed with curiosity the way we Christians grasp for the future, as if the present didnโt quite satisfy.ย How we, in spiritual fits and starts, scrape and scratch our way along, often missing the best of life while looking the other way, preoccupied with shaping our future.ย In my least consistent moments I too try to wrest the future out of his hands.ย Or worse, I sink back into the past and rest on long-ago laurelsย But God is most concerned with the choices I make now.ย God, standing silently and invisibly and presently with us in the middle of eternity, is interested in a certain kind of change.ย He brings us choices through which we never-endingly change, fresh and new into his likeness.
Joni Eareckson Tada
โChristian community is like the Christian’s sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.โ
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community
โAnd above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panellingโฆthe question should never be: โDo I like that kind of service?โ but โAre these doctrines true: Is holiness there? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to move to this door due to my pride, ormy mere taste, or my personal dislike for this particular door-keeper?โย
C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity
โWe are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.โ
Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God
“Faith is not a matter of reason. Some people teach that it is. They say that if only men and women would use their minds, they would be bound to become Christians; they can reason themselves into Christianity. But that is thoroughly unscriptural. They cannot because the natural man or woman’s reason is also fallen. Not only that, there are supernatural and miraculous elements in faith to which reason cannot attain.”
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, God The Holy Spirit
โThe central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lordโs work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.โ
Francis A. Schaeffer –ย No Little People
โWhen believers have a low view of God, everything focuses on meeting felt needs within the body of Christ. When the church adopts such a perspective, it often offers people nothing more than spiritual placebos. It centers on psychology, self-esteem, entertainment, and a myriad of other diversions to attempt to meet perceived and felt needs.โ
John MacArthur, Alone With God
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