Great Throughts Treasury

"Make sure it’s God’s trumpet you are blowing – if it is only yours, it won’t wake the dead; it will simply disturb the neighbors."

"That is the work of God. It is your living faith in the adequacy of the One who is in you, which releases His divine action through you. It is the kind of activity that the Bible calls "good works," as opposed to "dead works.""

"Godliness is a mystery! Fail to grasp this fact and you will never understand the nature of godliness. God did not create you to have just an ape-like capacity to imitate God. There would be no mystery in that, nor would this lift you morally much above the status of a monkey or a parrot! The capacity to imitate is vested in the one who imitates, and does not derive from, nor necessarily share the motives of the person being imitated, who remains passive and impersonal to the act of imitation. In direct contrast to this, godliness ­ or Godlikeness ­ is the direct and exclusive consequence of God's activity in man. Not the consequence of your capacity to imitate God, but the consequence of God's capacity to reproduce Himself in you! This is the nature of the mystery! Remove the mystery or try to explain it away, and the result must inevitably be disastrous, for you will no longer be anchored to anything absolute; you will be at liberty to choose your own God ­ the object of your own imitation; and your "godliness" will be the measure of your conformity to the object of your choice. The moment you come to realize that only God can make a man godly, you are left with no option but to find God, and to know God, and to let God be God in and through you, whoever He may be ­ and this will leave you with no margin for picking and choosing ­ for there is only one God, and He is absolute, and He made you expressly for Himself!"

"Faith in all its sheer simplicity! Faith that takes God precisely at His Word! Faith that simply says, "Thank You.""

"Every area of your life, in which you have not learned to be dependent, is an area of your life in which you have not as yet repented."

"It is your inherent right to choose which is at the very heart of the mystery, both of the mystery of godliness and of the mystery of iniquity."

"It is only when your quality of life baffles the neighbors that you are likely to impress them! It has got to become patently obvious to others that the kind of life you are living is not only commendable, but that it is beyond all human explanation! That it is beyond the consequences of man's capacity to imitate, and however little they may understand this, clearly the consequence only of God's capacity to reproduce Himself in you!"

"Make sure it is God's trumpet you are blowing- if it is only yours it won't wake the dead, it will simply disturb the neighbours."

"True godliness leaves the world, convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the only explanation for you, is Jesus Christ, to whose eternally unchanging and altogether adequate "I AM!" your heart has learned to say with unshatterable faith, "Thou art!" "