Meditations of the day

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"God may thunder His commands from Mount Sinai and men may fear, yet remain at heart exactly as they were before. But let a man once see his God down in the arena as a Man, -- suffering, tempted, sweating, and agonized, finally dying a criminal's death - and he is a hard man indeed who is untouched." -J.B. Phillips-

"God in His providence has not allowed the survival of actual physical objects. But we have infinitely more than this, for instead of dead relics, however 'authentic' and well preserved, we have a living life-line, stretching unbroken to Christ Himself. We have all the comfort and security that comes from historic tradition, but instead of being given the sad nostalgia of looking at an object and saying, 'Look, how wonderful! This is what He touched then,' we are given an evergreen memorial [in communion] which says, 'This is what He touches now.'" -J.B. Phillips-

 

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“As George MacDonald was so fond of pointing out, not one word in the New Testament implies that vindictiveness and wrath are ultimate facts about God, or that Christ’s sacrifice was required in order to appease a vindictive God. A more accurate understanding would be that Christ’s death and resurrection was God’s sacrifice to us, the means whereby God changes our attitudes and reconciles us to himself; it is not a means whereby God’s attitude towards us is changed. God’s attitude remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. For God is love; that is the rock-bottom fact about God. But the history of organized religion, at least in the Western tradition, is a record of our human resistance to the proclamation that God is love, that his love extends to everyone, and that it is in no way conditioned upon human obedience or human faithfulness.” - Thomas Talbott (The Inescapable Love of God)-

 

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"Don't ever limit God. Remember He is the God of the impossible."

"All who have accomplished great things have had a great aim, have fixed their gaze on a goal which was high, one which sometimes seemed impossible." -Orison Swett Marden-

 

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“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.” – Eckhart Tolle-

 

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"While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done." -Helen Keller-

 

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"If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is self-abasement; fortitude without love is recklessness; generosity without love is extravagance; care without love is mere duty; fidelity without love is servitude. Every virtue is an expression of love. No virtue is really a virtue unless it is permeated, or informed, by love." ~Richard Rohr~

 

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"Love is what God is, love is why Jesus came, and love is why he continues to come, year after year to person after person...May you experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about, and may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins." -Rob Bell-

 

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"The Christian faith, simply stated, reminds us that our fundamental problem is not moral; rather, our fundamental problem is spiritual. It is not just that we are immoral, but that a moral life alone cannot bridge what separates us from God. Herein lies the cardinal difference between the moralizing religions and Jesus' offer to us. Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive." -Ravi Zacharias-

 

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" God has defeated Satan through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Through this overwhelming victory, God has also empowered you to overcome any temptation to sin and has provided sufficient resources for you to respond to any problem of life. By relying on God's power and being obedient to Him, you can be an overcomer in any situation." - John C. Broger-

" Who has a harder fight than he who is striving to overcome himself." - Thomas a Kempis-

" The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse." - Helen Keller-

 

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“There is...no easy answer to the evil and suffering problem and no easy road to its solution. But Christ tackled the matter radically and realistically by winning the allegiance of a few men and women to a new way of living...They were to be the spearhead of good against evil.” - J.B. Phillips (Your God is Too Small)

 

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"Prayer is not only asking, it is an attitude of heart that produces an atmosphere in which asking is perfectly natural, and Jesus says, “every one that asketh receiveth.” ~Oswald Chambers

"It is not the body’s posture, but the heart’s attitude that counts when we pray.' ~Billy Graham

 

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“The prophet who foresees that He shall deliver the needy, when he crieth; the poor also, and him that hath no helper; no less declares that He loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity, and that He cometh to judge the world with equity and the people with His truth. Some of His elect may think, that, because they are elect, He will not judge them. But because He is the Truth, He must judge all wrong, and judge it even more in those who know and are near Him, than in those who know Him not. For He reveals Him who said of old, You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore will I punish you for your iniquities." - Andrew Jukes-

 

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"Nine-tenths of difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. When one is truly in this state, it is usually but a little way to the knowledge of what His will is." - George Mueller-

"Who has a harder fight than he who is striving to overcome himself." - Thomas a Kempis-

"The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse." - Helen Keller-

 

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“Made 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.” ~ N.T. Wright,~

“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.”

 

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