TRUTH MUST BE UNDERSTOOD by inward illumination —then we know the truth. Until that time, we don’t. So, Jesus said, “If you will follow in, if ye continue in my Word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth.”
LITTLE BY LITTLE EVANGELICAL Christians these days are being brainwashed. One evidence is that increasing numbers of them are becoming ashamed to be found unequivocally on the side of truth. They say they believe but their beliefs have been so diluted as to be impossible to clear definition.
IT IS NECESSARY THAT we escape both the shackles of textualism and the irresponsible liberty of soulish emotionalism: that is, the scientist and the poet. To do this we must learn a few simple things:Words are not truth, but caskets in which the gem of truth is carried. God will hold us responsible for meanings, not for texts only. If God is hard to satisfy, He is also easy to please.
TRUTH IS JUST TRUTH—IT never has to worry about its image. Truth never worries about the effect it will have, about who is going to hate it or who is going to accept it or what there is to lose and what there is to gain.
NO ONE CAN KNOW TRUTH except the one who obeys truth.
TRUTH IS JUST TRUTH — IT never has to worry about its image. Truth never worries about the effect it will have, about who is going to hate it or who is going to accept it or what there is to lose and what there is to gain.
What are the axiomatic truths upon which all human life may rest with confidence! Fortunately they are not many. Here are the chief ones:\t1. Only God is great.\t2. Only God is wise.\t3. Apart from God nothing matters.\t4. Only what we do in God will remain to us at last.\t5. Human sin is real.\t6. With God there is forgiveness.\t7. Only what God protects is safe.
The uncomprehending mind is unaffected by truth.
TRUTH MUST BE UNDERSTOOD by inward illumination—then we know the truth. Until that time, we don’t. So, Jesus said, “If you will follow in, if ye continue in my Word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth.”
As long as people can hear orthodox truth divorced from life they will attend and support churches and institutions without objection. The truth is a lovely song, become sweet by long and tender association; and since it asks nothing but a few dollars, and offers good music, pleasant friendships and a comfortable sense of well-being, it meets with no resistance from the faithful. Much that passes for New Testament Christianity is little more than objective truth sweetened with song and made palatable by religious entertainment.
Divine truth is of the nature of spirit and for that reason can be received only by spiritual revelation.
It is utterly and completely futile to try to think our way through to knowing God, who is beyond our power of thought or visualization.This does not mean that it is impossible for us to think about Him—but it does mean that we cannot think around Him or think equal to Him or think up to Him!
Words are not truth, but caskets in which the gem of truth is carried. God will hold us responsible for meanings, not for texts only. If God is hard to satisfy, He is also easy to please.
YOU THINK YOU KNOW TRUTH. People memorize the Scriptures by the yard, but that is not a guarantee of knowing the truth. Truth is not a text. Truth is in the text, but it takes the text plus the Holy Spirit to bring truth to a human soul. A person can memorize a text, but the truth must come from the Holy Spirit through the text. Faith comes by hearing the Word, but faith is also the gift of God by the Holy Spirit.
Not facts, not scientific knowledge, but eternal Truth delivers men, and that eternal Truth became flesh to dwell among us. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”
Unused truth becomes as useless as an unused muscle.
Many of the doctrinal divisions among the churches are the result of a blind and stubborn insistence that truth has but one wing.
IF ONLY WE WOULD STOP lamenting and look up. God is here. Christ is risen. The Spirit has been poured out from on high. All this we know as theological truth. It remains for us to turn it into joyous spiritual experience. And how is this accomplished? There is no new technique; if it is new it is false. The old, old method still works. Conscious fellowship with Christ is by faith, love and obedience. And the humblest believer need not be without these.
The truth is self-validating and self-renewing; its whole psychology is that of attack. Its own vigorous attack is all the defense it needs.
An unblessed soul filled with the letter of truth may actually be worse off than a pagan kneeling before a fetish.
I KNOW THAT THERE IS an intellectual element in the gospel, for one of the attributes of deity is intellect. We call this element theology or doctrine. Human thought may engage theology, and it may engage doctrine. These things are necessary and right in their place, but there must be a seeking of the heart and being which is beyond the intellect.
. . .truth, to be understood, must be lived; that Bible doctrine is wholly ineffective until it has been digested and assimilated by the total life.
YOU CAN FILL YOUR HEAD full of knowledge, but the day that you decide you are going to obey God, the knowledge will get down into your heart. You will know. Only the servants of truth can ever know truth. Only those who obey can ever have the inward change.
Theological truth is useless until it is obeyed. The purpose behind all doctrine is to secure moral action
CONSCIENCE NEVER DEALS with theories. Conscience always deals with right and wrong and the relation of the individual to that which is right or wrong.
The essence of my belief is that there is a difference, a vast difference, between fact and truth. Truth in the Scriptures is more than a fact. A fact may be detached, impersonal, cold and totally disassociated from life. Truth on the other hand, is warm, living and spiritual. A theological fact may be held in the mind for a lifetime without its having any positive effect upon the moral character; but truth is creative, saving, transforming, and it always changes the one who receives it into a humbler and holier man
Be sure you don’t laugh at something that God takes seriously. Conscience is one of those things!
CONSCIENCE SINGLES YOU out as though nobody else existed.
IT TAKES MORE THAN EDUCATION to change a man’s human nature. Education may bring about certain restraints and some degree of control, but just let a man act freely from within, and you will find out what he really is.
GOD HAS GIVEN US A FAITHFUL witness inside of our own being.… It is able to single a man out and reveal his loneliness, the loneliness of a single soul in the universe going on to meet an angry God. That’s the terror of the conscience.
Truth is a glorious but hard mistress. She never consults, bargains or compromises.
THAT LIGHT THAT HAS COME into the world, which lights every man that comes into the world, is the ground of moral conscience. However it operates, that is its ground. That is why it is here. Because the living, eternal Word is present in the world, present in human society, secretly present, humanity has a secret awareness of moral values.
THE LONELY SOUL—LONELY in the universe with only that soul and an angry God—that’s the terror of conscience. And that’s exactly what the conscience does—it singles a man out!
THAT POWER OF CONSCIENCE that God has set in the human breast suddenly can isolate a soul and hang it between heaven and hell, as lonely as if God had never created but one soul—that’s not a joking matter. . . .
When men deal with things earthly and temporal they demand truth; when they come to the consideration of things heavenly and eternal they hedge and hesitate as if truth either could not be discovered or didn’t matter anyway.
DEEP
WE ARE TURNING OUT FROM the Bible schools of this country year after year young men and women who know the theory of the Spirit-filled life but do not enjoy the experience. These go out into the churches to create in turn a generation of Christians who have never felt the power of the Spirit and who know nothing personally about the inner fire.
REMEMBER THE CONSCIENCE is always on God’s side—always on God’s side! It judges conduct in the light of the moral law, and as the Scripture says, excuses or accuses.
Truth engages the citadel of the human heart and is not satisfied until it has conquered everything there.
DON’T THROW YOUR HEAD away—you are going to need it! I am convinced that God has made it plain that man alone, of all the creatures on earth, is created so that he can have fullness of knowledge about the earth and all the wonders and glories that it holds. I believe that through grace man can have a fullness of knowledge even about the works of God—but this certainly does not mean that we find Him and know Him and love Him through thought processes and human wisdom.
PERCEPTION OF IDEAS RATHER than the storing of them should be the aim of education. The mind should be an eye to see with rather than a bin to store facts in. The man who has been taught by the Holy Spirit will be a seer rather than a scholar. The difference is that the scholar sees and the seer sees through; and that is a mighty difference indeed.
. . .one of the greatest weaknesses in the modern church is the willingness to lay down foundations of truth without ever backing them up with moral application.
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