He Who Loves Many

“He who loves one woman has loved them all. He who loves many, has loved none.”

He Giveth More Grace

He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater,
He sendeth more strength when the labors increase;
To added affliction He addeth His mercy;
To multiplied trials, His multiplied peace.

When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources,
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.

Fear not that thy need shall exceed His provision,
Our God ever yearns His resources to share;
Lean hard on the arm everlasting, availing;
The Father both thee and thy load will upbear.

His love has no limit; His grace has no measure.
His pow’r has no boundary known unto men;
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus,
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again!

Annie Johnson Flint

The Jury System

“Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. If it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Psalm 68:18 – “He led captivity captive.”

It is a glorious phrase – “He led captivity captive.”

The very triumphs of His foes, it means, He used for their defeat. He compelled their dark achievements to subserve His end, not theirs. They nailed Him to the tree, not knowing that by that very act they were bringing the world to His feet. They gave Him a cross, not guessing that He would make it a throne. They flung Him outside the gates to die, not knowing that in that very moment they were lifting up all the gates of the universe, to let the King come in. They thought to root out His doctrines, not understanding that they were implanting imperishably in the hearts of men the very name they intended to destroy. They thought they had defeated God with His back the wall, pinned and helpless and defeated: they did not know that it was God Himself who had tracked them down. He did not conquer in spite of the dark mystery of evil. He conquered through it.

James Stewart, Scotland

The Existence Of God – Ravi Zacharias

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Fact of life

We all know the experience of going into a supermarket and observing a four-year-old in total control of a mother. The mother begs, pleads, and threatens her son to stop having his tantrum. Then, at her wits’ end, she gives him the candy bar he’s been screaming for.

“But that’s the last one,” she says, struggling for some control. But by then control is an illusion.

Now imagine that four-year-old as a forty-year-old man. The scenario has changed, but the script is the same. When he is crossed, or when someone sets a limit with him, the same tantrum erupts. And by then, he’s had thirty-six more years of having the world cater to him. His recovery program will need to be very strong and consistent to help him. Sometimes recovery comes in the form of hospitalization, sometimes in divorce, sometimes in jail, and sometimes in disease.

But no one can really escape the disciplines of life. They will always win out. We always reap what we sow. And the later in life that is, the sadder a picture it is, for the stakes are higher.

‘God disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.’

Hebrews 12:10-11

Far from a world of grief and sin,
With God eternally shut in,
you shall rest forever and ever.

Seeing without the eye

Two of the most powerful forces in the world today are music, and television.
They are powerful and they are good in many ways, but they are also very risky, because music and visual, has the capacity to bypass reason, and go straight for the imagination.

When you listen to something by word, your imagination remains sovereign on it.
But when a picture is given to you, that imagination becomes sovereign over you.

And television is now conquering the last bastion.
They want our young people not just listening to music anymore, they want to rivet the pictures that are associated with the music upon the imaginations of our young people.

It is the last threshold to be crossed, and television is crossing it with devastating consequences as the imagination has been invaded.

We are living at the tail-end of the 20th century, raising a generation of young people all over this globe, where the imagination no longer has the capacity to harness it, because the intellect no longer can keep up with the barrage of pictures invading it.

 

“This life’s dim windows of the soul,
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole.
And goads you to believe a lie,
When you see with, and not through the eye.”

William Blake

 

We are meant to see through the eye, with the conscience.
Modern communication is getting us to see with the eye, devoid of the conscience.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that 20th century man has decided to abolish himself.

Tired of the struggle to be himself, he has created boredom out of his own affluence.
Impotence out of his own erotomania, and vulnerability out of his own strength.
He himself blows the trumpet that brings the walls of his own cities crashing down.
Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, having drugged and polluted himself into stupefaction, he keels over a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct.

Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge

You are free in our time to to say that God does not exist.
You are free to say that he does exist, but is evil.
You are free to say like some poor satirist, that he would like to exist if he could.
You may talk of God as a ‘mystification’, or ‘metaphor’.
You may boil him down with gallons of long words, or boil him to the rags of metaphysics.
And it is not merely that nobody punishes you for it, but nobody protests.

But, if you speak of God as a thing, like a tiger, as a reason for changing one’s conduct, then the modern world will stop you somehow if it can.

We have long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent.

It is now thought to be irreverent to be a believer.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton