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.
The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds.
THE RESULT OF WHAT GOD saw among men was grief to God’s own heart… and only love can grieve. You cannot grieve unless you love. God loved the man whom He had made and the degenerate and corrupt race that had descended from Him. God’s love caused Him to grieve, and it filled Him with anxious care.
YET FOR ALL GOD’S GOOD will toward us He is unable to grant us our heart’s desires till all our desires have been reduced to one.
GOD SEEKS OUT THOSE WHO are willing that their lives should be fashioned according to His own grace and love. He sifts out those who cannot see God’s purpose and design for our blessing.
GOD WILL SIFT OUT THOSE who only speculate about the claims of Christ and He will lead forward those who by His grace see Him in His beauty and seek Him in His love.
THE WHOLE MAN MUST MAKE the decision before the heart can know any real satisfaction. God wants the whole person, and He will not rest till He gets us in entirety. No part of the man will do.
IN OUR DESIRE AFTER GOD let us keep always in mind that God also has desire, and His desire is toward the sons of men, and more particularly toward those sons of men who will make the once-for-all decision to exalt Him over all.
God and man exist for each other and neither is satisfied without the other.
And what kind of habitation pleases God! What must our natures be like before He can feel at home within us! He asks nothing but a pure heart and a single mind. He asks no rich paneling, no rugs from the Orient, no art treasures from afar. He desires but sincerity, transparency, humility and love. He will see to the rest.
God has nothing to say to the frivolous man.
Some things are not debatable; there is no other side to them. There is only God’s side. H 114God being who He is, the inheritance we receive from Him is limitless—it is all of the universe!
. . .everything God does is praiseworthy and deserves our deepest admiration. Whether He is making or redeeming a world, He is perfect in all His doings and glorious in all His goings forth.
To know man we must begin with God.
YET FOR ALL GOD’S GOOD will toward us He is unable to grant us our heart’s desires till all our desires have been reduced to one.
No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in seeking to know and do the will of God, leaving to Christ the matter of how happy he shall be.
God shines in many ways throughout His universe He shines best of all in the lives of men and women He created and then redeemed.
The man who would know God must give time to Him.
Until a man has gotten into trouble with his heart he is not likely to get out of trouble with God.
GOD MADE US FOR HIMSELF—that is the only explanation that satisfies the heart of a thinking man, whatever his wild reason may say.
Man in the plan of God has been permitted considerable say; but never is he permitted to utter the first word nor the last. That is the prerogative of the Deity, and one which He will never surrender to His creatures.
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.
Everything that God does in His ransomed children has as its long range purpose the final restoration of the divine image in human nature. Everything looks forward to the consummation.
In God there is no was or will be, but a continuous and unbroken is. In Him history and prophecy are one and the same.
GOD CAN BE KNOWN SATISFACTORILY only as we devote time to Him.
The man who would know God must give time to Him.
At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His Presence.
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