C S Lewis

C S Lewis speaking of his conversion experience:

As the dry bones shook and came together in that dreadful Valley of Ezekiel’s, so now a philosophical theorem, cerebrally entertained, began to stir and heave and throw off its graveclothes, and stood upright and became a living presence. I was to be allowed to play at philosopy no longer. It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from the God of popular religion. My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am.” People who are naturally religious find difficulty in understanding the horror of such a revelation. Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.” To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.

 

Bill Hybels

Sometime, in an airport, observe the difference between passengers holding confirmed tickets and those on standby. The ones with confirmed tickets read newspapers, chat with their friends or sleep. The ones on standby hang around the ticket counter and pace. The confidence factor causes the difference. If you knew that you would have to stand in judgment before the Holy God and learn your eternal destiny in fifteen minutes, what would your reaction be? Would you smoke and pace? Would you say to yourself, “I don’t know what God’s going to say – will it be ‘Welcome home, child,’ or will it be ‘Depart from me; I never knew you’?

George MacDonald

Instead of so knowing Christ that they have Him in them saving them, they lie wasting themselves in soul-sickening self-examination as to whether they are believers, whether they are really trusting in the Atonement, whether they are truly sorry for their sins – – the way to madness of the brain and despair of the heart…Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have, this day, done one thing because He said, Do it! Or once abstained because He said, Do not do it! It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.

H. A. Baker

Man by study will never find God. The man who trusts the workings of his own mind or the minds of other men will never see the city of God. Man, on the merits of his character, will never walk the golden streets. What a man is, what a man does, or how a man lives has nothing to do with his salvation. On the basis of how good he is, the best man on earth has no more help of heaven than the worst man on earth. Man who trusts in its own character, his own moral goodness, it’s only a modern Pharisee with eyes blinded to the truth.

Katherine Walden

At this very moment, as you read these words, all things are being made new. How you choose to be a steward of this moment is up to you. Never take this precious gift of newness for granted. Choose to cherish the potential of ‘all things new’, through the power that His resurrection gives you. Relationships strained, mistakes made, sins you commit, bring them to the cross. Treasure the gift of newness he grants you every day.