God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.
GOD IS LOOKING FOR A people who want to be right.
So let us begin with God. Back of all, above all, before all is God; first in sequential order, above in rank and station, exalted in dignity and honor. As the self-existent One He gave being to all things, and all things exist out of Him and for Him.
We cannot think rightly of God until we begin to think of Him as always being there, and there first.
God’s glory is and must forever remain the Christian’s true point of departure. Anything that begins anywhere else, whatever it is, is certainly not New Testament Christianity.
God in His essential Being is unique in the only sense that word will bear. That is, there is nothing like Him in the universe. What He is cannot be conceived by the mind because He is “altogether other” than anything with which we have had experience before. The mind has no material with which to start. No man has ever entertained a thought which can be said to describe God in any but the vaguest and most imperfect sense. Where God is known at all it must be otherwise than by our creature-reason.
God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode.
God is not contained: He contains.
God is real. He is real in the absolute and final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon His. The great Reality is God who is the Author of that lower and dependent reality which makes up the sum of created things, including ourselves. God has objective existence independent of and apart from any notions which we may have concerning Him. The worshipping heart does not create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration.
God is the sum of all patience and the essence of kindly good will. We please Him most, not by frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms with all our imperfections, and believing that He understands everything and loves us still.
The heavens and the earth were intended to be a semitransparent veil through which moral intelligences might see the glory of God, but for sin-blinded men this veil has become opaque. They see the creation but do not see through it to the Creator; or what glimpses they do have are dim and out of focus. It is possible to spend a lifetime admiring God’s handiwork without acknowledging the presence of the God whose handiwork it is.
The widest thing in the universe is not space; it is the potential capacity of the human heart. Being made in the image of God, it is capable of almost unlimited extension in all directions. And one of the world’s worst tragedies is that we allow our hearts to shrink until there is room in them for little beside ourselves.
Nothing will or can restore order till our hearts make the great decision; God shall be exalted above.
THE GOD OF THE MODERN evangelical rarely astonishes anybody. He manages to stay pretty much within the constitution. Never breaks over our bylaws. He’s a very well-behaved God and very denominational and very much one of us, and we ask Him to help us when we’re in trouble and look to Him to watch over us when we’re asleep. The God of the modern evangelical isn’t a God I could have much respect for. But when the Holy Spirit shows us God as He is we admire Him to the point of wonder and delight.
WE COULD NEVER HAVE CREATED ourselves and we could never have redeemed ourselves. We cannot talk ourselves into getting a longing for God. It has to come from God.
God is real. He is real in the absolute and final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon His. The great Reality is God who is the Author of that lower and dependent reality which makes up the sum of created things, including ourselves. God has objective existence independent of and apart from any notions which we may have concerning Him. The worshipping heart does not create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration.
Anyone who knows God, even slightly, would expect God to make an orderly world because God Himself is the essence of order. God was never the author of disorder whether it be in society, in the home, or in the mind or body of man.
No one can know the true grace of God who has not first known the fear of God.
THE GREAT GOD ALMIGHTY who fills the universe and overflows into immensity can never be surrounded by that little thing that we call our brain, our mind, our intellect—never, never, never! Never can we rise to face God by what we know and by what we are, but only by love and faith are we lifted thus to know Him and adore Him!
MAN IS BETTER QUALIFIED to appreciate God than any other creature because he was made in His image and is the only creature who was. This admiration for God grows and grows until it fills the heart with wonder and delight.
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