Power does not come by working up emotions. We may shout, sweat, get excited, and whack the pulpit when we have the anointing of God. But without that anointing, we are actors, and the platform is a mere stage. God does not want theatricals. Get God’s love into your heart and true emotions flow. Anything else is emotionalism, imitation feeling. It reminds me of a man trying to speak from one city to another by shouting when the telephone line was dead. If the line is live, and there is power in it, his voice will reach the other city quite easily. If the Gospel is live, it will reach the hearts of hearers.
Honesty
Jim Anderson
The world is full of men who want to be right when actually the secret of a man’s strength and his pathway to true honour is his ability to admit fault when he has failed. God wants to fill the church with men who can say they are wrong when they are wrong. A man who is willing to humble himself before God and his family and say, “I was wrong.” will find that his family has all the confidence in the world in him and will much more readily follow him. If he stubbornly refuses to repent or admit he was wrong, their confidence in him and in his leadership erodes.
John Bunyan
When thou prayest, rather let thy heart be without words than thy words be without heart.
A W Tozer
Sometimes we react by a kind of religious reflex and repeat dutifully the proper words and phrases even though they fail to express our real feelings and lack the authenticity of personal experience. Right now is such a time. A certain conventional loyalty may lead some who hear this unfamiliar truth expressed for the first time to say brightly, “Oh, I am never lonely. Christ said, `I will never leave you nor forsake you,’ and, `Lo, I am with you alway.’ How can I be lonely when Jesus is with me?”
Now I do not want to reflect on the sincerity of any Christian soul, but this stock testimony is too neat to be real. It is obviously what the speaker thinks should be true rather than what he has proved to be true by the test of experience. This cheerful denial of loneliness proves only that the speaker has never walked with God without the support and encouragement afforded him by society.
Thomas Beckingham
At some point, the two worlds of who we pretend to be and who we really are must collide. It is, however, better to let those two worlds collide rather than have everything snap under the tension of keeping them apart.
Joni Eareckson Tada
Gut-wrenching questions honor God. Despair directed at God is a way of encountering him, opening ourselves up to the One and only Someone who can actually do something about our plight.
Katherine Walden
God’s “not yet” means exactly that. It doesn’t mean “no”. Earthly parents sometimes lie to their child, saying “not yet,” with the hope their child will forget about their request. God’s “yes” is always ‘yes’ and His “no” is always “no.” God doesn’t forget His promises and He makes no promise that He will not keep.
Stuart Scott
We can agree with what the gospel says about our sinfulness without becoming overwhelmed by guilt and shame. Further, we do not have to prove that we are victims rather than victimizers out of a desperate effort to persuade ourselves that we are righteous. We have Christ’s righteousness already. We can rest in this.
C.S. Lewis
The real trouble is that ‘kindness’ is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that ‘his heart’s in the right place’ and ‘he wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.
Hosea Ballou
Honest and courageous people have very little to say about either their courage or their honesty.