Run Today’s Race - Chambers, Oswald

Run Today’s Race

A Word from Oswald Chambers
for Every Day of the Year
Copyright © 1968 Oswald Chambers Publications Association Ltd.
Scripture versions quoted: kjv; rv

Introduction

Source

Quotations are drawn from the lectures and sermons of Oswald Chambers.

Publication History

• As a book: Run Today’s Race was first published in 1968.

Oswald Chambers firmly believed in the concept of “seed thoughts”—brief, pithy sayings designed to arrest attention and stimulate thinking. The entry for December 9 perhaps best expresses his conviction on how to affect a person’s mind and behavior:

Our Lord was never impatient. He simply planted seed thoughts in the disciples’ minds and surrounded them with the atmosphere of His own life. We get impatient and take men by the scruff of the neck and say: “You must believe this and that. ” You cannot make a man see moral truth by persuading his intellect. “When He, the Spirit of truth is come, He shall guide you into all truth. ” (rv )

At the Bible Training College, 1 London, and at the Zeitoun2 YMCA Camp in Egypt, Chambers always posted a daily thought on a centrally located notice board. The daily words ranged from a spiritual challenge to humor. After a deluge that left the Zeitoun camp flooded, the board outside Oswald’s study hut read: “Closed during submarine manoeuvres! ” The day before, the board had proclaimed: “Beware! there is a religious talk here each evening! “

While Mrs. Chambers was still in Egypt after her husband’s death, she published the first Seed Thoughts Calendar, containing a brief thought from Oswald’s teachings for each day of the year. The small, thin book fit easily into the breast pocket of a soldier’s uniform. Other versions of the Seed Thoughts Calendar followed through the years.

In the two forewords included in this volume, Kathleen Chambers 3 explains the origin of the 1968 edition, and in the second, she comments for the first time on the mental illness that clouded her mother’s final years.

Foreword (to the First edition—1968)

There’s a harvest in a grain of wheat
If given to God in simple trust
For though the grain doth turn to dust
It cannot die! It lives; it must
For the power of God is behind it.
Anon.

Seed Thoughts Calendar was the name given to a small book first printed in 1918 in Egypt. That publication contained short sentences from my father’s messages to the soldiers camped in the desert 4 outside Cairo. For over twenty years it has not been reprinted. Now a similar selection appears under a new title. My mother felt, very strongly, that a new series should be prepared and in 1961 she collected and typed the first three months of these new Seed Thoughts and I have completed the work. May God bless all those who read this book and may these thoughts live because “the power of God is behind them. ” Kathleen Chambers 1968.

Foreword to the re Printed edition (1997)

There’s a harvest in a grain of wheat
If given to God in simple trust
For though the grain doth turn to dust
It cannot die! It lives; it must
For the power of God is behind it.
Anon

Seed Thoughts Calendar was the name given to a small book first printed in 1918 in Egypt. That publication contained short sentences from my father’s messages to the soldiers camped in the desert outside Cairo. My mother wanted a similar small book to be printed. Towards the end of my mother’s life, God allowed her to become very ill with a mental illness (not senility) and her mind became clouded and tor mented. She received treatment and became restored for nearly a year, before the illness returned to stay until she went into God’s presence. During the time my mother’s mind was freed, she typed the first three months of a Seed Thoughts Calendar. After she died, I looked up the other nine months’ quotations and this book was then printed under the title Run Today’s Race. It’s wonderful to know that Almighty God held my mother safe in the centre of His will and His purposes were not thwarted. May God bless all those who read this book and may these thoughts live because “the power of God is behind them. “

Kathleen Chambers 1996

January

1 God is so immediately near and so immensely strong that I get more and more joyous in my confidence in Him and less and less careful how I feel.

2 The very life of Jesus is given to us unstintedly if we will identify ourselves with His Death. At the back of us stands the Risen Life of Jesus that nothing can overcome.

3 The Spirit of God alters my dominating desires; He alters the thing that matters, and a universe of desires I had never known before, suddenly comes on the horizon.

4 It is a great moment when we realise we have the power to trample on certain moods, a tremen dous emancipation to get rid of every kind of selfconsciousness and heed one thing only: the relationship between God and myself.

5 Faith for my deliverance is not faith in God. Faith means, whether I am visibly delivered or not, I will stick to my belief that God is love. There are some things only learned in a fiery furnace.

6 It is easy to turn our religious life into a cathedral for beautiful memories, but there are feet to be washed, hard flints to be walked over, people to be fed. Very few of us go there, but that is the way the Son of God went.

7 Believe what you saw when you were in the light, and when you are in the ploughed field and God’s moral seasons are going over you—the remainder of the cold, hard winter, the begin nings of the strange, painful stirrings of spring— keep abandoned to Him. He knows the seasons to bring to your soul as He does in the natural world.

8 The tendency is strong to say—”O God won’t be so stern as to expect me to give up that! ” but He will; “He won’t expect me to walk in the light so that I have nothing to hide, ” but He will; “He won’t expect me to draw on His grace for every thing” but He will.

9 God narrows our “shan’ts” to one explosive point. I don’t need to go that way, but God will have to bring me there if I persist in the little disobedi ences which no one knows but myself, because it is engendering in me a spirit God cannot allow.

10 The Christian life is the simplest, the gayest, the most regardlessofconsequences life, lived as it is taught by Jesus. The plan of our life comes through the haphazard moments, but behind it is the order of God.

11 Prayer with most of us is turned into pious plati tude, it is a matter of emotion, mystical com munion with God. It is no use praying unless we are living as children of God. Then Jesus says— “Every one that asketh receiveth. “

12 Humility is the one stamp of a saint. Beware of the complacency of superiority when God’s grace has done anything for you.

13 When you are brought face to face with some thing in God’s word, watch your circumstances: the tyranny of things will either imperil your faith or increase it.

14 God has to rebuke us for our flippant, unthink ing familiarity with Jesus Christ; we have forgot ten Who He is.

15 Beware of the storms of spiritual misgiving. The security of the saint’s life is his relationship to Jesus and obedience to His Word.

16 It is easy to trust in God when we have not to hunt for money, but immediately the penny that is not there looms large, we allow the mosquito of worry to irritate our whole life away from rest in God.

17 If you are a saint God will continually upset your programme, and if you are wedded to your pro gramme you will become that most obnoxious creature under heaven, an irritable saint.

18 The Apostle James will have nothing to do with pious talk that is not backed by the life. Pious words without works are so much wind.

19 Reserve gives us an air of aloofness, and though it may start with being outward only, it will slowly and surely eat its way into the heart and result in a base form of selfcentredness.

20 A sense of possession is sufficient to render us spiritually dense. Watch the havoc the winds of God play with possessions.

21 There is never any risk in love that is “talked. ” If love is reticent it becomes a secret treasure that enervates. Keep it in the open, have nothing hid den to brood over.

22 The resentment of discipline of any kind will warp the whole life away from God’s purpose.

23 God always answers the stumbling questions which arise out of personal problems. We bristle with interrogation points, but we don’t wait for the answer because we do not intend to listen to it.

24 When God puts His Spirit within us, we can say—”even now” it is as black as night, but I will not accept a slander against Jesus Christ.

25 “That we may know what is the hope of His calling”—have I allowed my mind to get stagnant about Jesus Christ’s hope and taken another aim for my life? Sooner or later we must come, either with a sense of havoc or a sense of rejoicing, to Jesus Christ’s standard for us.

26 Peter couples suffering “according to the will of God” with active well doing (1 Peter 4:19). The folk who are most actively beneficent to you are those who are being crushed with suffering that would send you staggering.

27 “Until Christ be formed in you”—that brings me to the margin of my responsibility. Am I allow ing Him to manifest Himself, or am I saying: “I shall not submit to that. ” Then the blow will fall on the Son of God.

28 The one great enemy of discipleship is obstinacy, spiritual obstinacy. We deify independence and wilfulness and call them by the wrong name.

29 When we lie like fallow ground, God puts in new seeds and the harvest is the ripe fruit of God; oth erwise it is ripe fruit of naturalness only. Lying fallow is always the secret of spiritual growth.

30 When by God’s grace you become possessed of a new disposition, your nerves which have been used to obeying the wrong disposition are sure to say “I can’t” and you must say “You must, ” and to your amazement you find you can.

31 Let me plead with you, as though Christ besought you, do not be disobedient to the heavenly vision. There is only one purpose for your life, and that is the satisfaction of the Lord Jesus Christ.

February

1 Interest is natural, attention must be by effort. One of the great needs of the Christian life is to have a place where we deliberately attend to realities. That is the real meaning of prayer.

2 Christianity makes no allowance for heroic moods. It is easy to feel heroic in an armchair, when everything goes well, but Christianity deals with God’s standard in the common days when you are out of your armchair, and when things are not going well.

3 What we call crises, God ignores, and what God reveals as the great critical moments of a man’s life we look on as humdrum commonplaces. When we become spiritual we discern that God was in the humdrum commonplace and we never knew it.

4 Revise in your mind silences in prayer, in praise, or for the Truth, when you were so greedy for your own sensitiveness that you would not speak the word which might have saved a soul from a terrible blunder.

5 Pride, disdain for the people you talk to, will shut your mouth quicker than anything. When you speak, see that behind your voice is the life of God.

6 Fearless devotion to Jesus Christ ought to mark the saint today, but more often it is devotion to our set that marks us. We are more concerned about being in agreement with Christians than about being in agreement with God.

7 You will find nothing more searching than what the New Testament has to say with regard to the miserable, petty line of insisting on my rights. The Holy Ghost gives me power to forgo my rights.

8 Always beware of vowing, it is a risky thing. If you promise to do a thing and don’t do it, it means the weakening of your moral nature. We are all so glib in the way we promise and don’t perform and never realise that it is sapping our moral energy.

9 How often we have faced difficulties that never came, and every time we faced them we unfitted ourselves for the duty that lay before us. I have no business to be thinking about something else, my duty is always the duty that lies nearest.

10 If you have a passion for souls is it because your salvation has made such a practical change in you that you would part with your right hand to get every man there too?

11 We would never know that our spirit was wrong unless Jesus rebuked it, because it is so emphatically right according to our reason (Luke 9:55). The one thing to mark is the effect on our con science—does my spirit bear the mark of native self assertiveness or of disciplined self conquest?

12 The reason there is so much going off on side issues is because of spiritual insubordination that refuses to wed itself to Jesus Christ and His Word.

13 It is possible for practical Christian work to be active disobedience to God. We would rather work for God than sit for one moment before Him and let the Spirit riddle us through with His light.

14 The cross of discipleship is that I daily and hourly delight to tell my human nature that I am not my own, I no longer claim my right to myself. 15 Insist on taking the initiative for God in every place you are in. As a worker, always determine to give God “the first foot. ” 16 “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart. ” It is this state of mind and heart which is absolutely free to do the duty that lies nearest without any flutter. 17 You will always know whether you believe in God personally by your impertinent insistence on being an amateur providence for someone else. 18 To be continually worrying—”Does God want me to say this or do that? ” is to be in an infirm condition. There is no light of the knowledge of the glory of God in that, it means I am a self conscious spiritual prig. 19 Watch spiritual hardness, if ever you have the tiniest trace of it, haul up everything else till you get back your softness to the Spirit of God. 20 Never let common sense obtrude and push the Son of God on one side. Common sense is a gift which God gave to human nature; but it is not the gift of His Son; never enthrone common sense. The Son detects the Father; common sense never yet detected the Father and never will. 21 God’s providences come to you unawares and they produce flurry or faith. If they produce flurry there is no nourishment in God’s Word. The tiniest touch of the wing of God’s providen tial angel is enough to keep you from concentration on God, and the Bible is of no practical use. 22 Men do wrong things because they have no dominant interest, once a crisis comes, the vacuity is gone. 23 There was nothing secular in our Lord’s life and in the saint the sacred and the secular must be all His, the one must express the other. If I have to turn consciously from the shallow to the pro found, there is something radically wrong, not in the shallow, but in the profound. 24 It takes a long time to realise that God has no respect for anything I bring Him; all He wants from me is unconditional surrender. 25 There is nothing that detects spiritual rottenness so unerringly as to ask not with the lips, but with the will. “Ye shall ask what ye will ” said Jesus. 26 The great characteristic of the supernatural grace of God in a life is put by Jesus on the line of for giveness. Forgiveness is the supernatural mani festation of a miracle in you and me. 27 The secret of our inefficiency for God is that we do not believe what He tells us about prayer. Prayer is not rational but Redemptive. Little books of prayer are full of “buts. ” The New Tes tament says that God will answer prayer every time. The point is not—”will you believe? ” but “will I, who know Jesus Christ, believe on your behalf ? ” (see 1 John 5:14–16). 28 A man is never the same after he has seen Jesus Christ. We are to be judged by our immortal moments. 29 In every place you are in, insist on taking the ini tiative for God. Every time you pray your horizon is altered, your disposition and relationship to things is altered, and you wonder why it is you don’t pray more.

March

1 Grousing destroys generosity like a moth does a garment, slowly but completely.

2 If there is the tiniest grudge in your mind against any one, from that second, your spiritual penetration into the knowledge of God stops.

3 “I have chosen you. ” Keep that note of greatness in your creed. It is not that you have got God, but that He has got you. Why is God at work in me, bending, breaking, moulding, doing just as He chooses? —for one purpose only—that He may be able to say, “This is My man, My woman. “

4 Humility is not an ideal, it is the unconscious result of the life being rightly related to God.

5 We get the idea that the best thing to do is to hurry over our work in order to get a time alone with God, and when we do get it along that line it is mildewed, not fresh and vigorous, and we feel dissatisfied instead of refreshed. Then some times in the midst of our work there suddenly springs up a wonderful well of inner contemplation, which is so full of recreation that we thank God for it, and we don’t know how it came.

6 The only simplicity there is, is a simplicity of life which is true to Jesus, not to a theory about Him (2 Corinthians 11:3). You can’t tie yourself up in anything logically consistent.

7 If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle till you can. You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else. Try to restate to yourself what you implicitly feel to be God’s truth, and you give God a chance to pass it on to someone else through you.

8 Quiet trust in God is the state of mind and heart that is fittest to do the duty that lies nearest without any fluster.

9 We have judged our fellow men as sinners. If God should judge us like that we would be in hell. God judges us through the marvellous Atonement of Jesus Christ.

10 A God who did not know the last depth of sorrow and suffering would be a God “whom to be God is not fit. “

11 You can never make yourself holy by external acts, but, if you are holy, your external acts will be the natural expression of holiness.

12 Don’t waste time asking God to keep you from doing things—don’t do them!

13 God delights to put me in a place where He can make me wealthy. Follow Me, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.

14 It is easy to get lost in mists when we talk about the will of God, but if we don’t know what it is, we are to blame.

15 The more complicated the actual conditions are, the more delightfully joyful it is to see God open up His way through.

16 When we lean to our own understanding we do away with prayer and bank all on service. Consequently by succeeding in the external we fail in the eternal. In the eternal we succeed only by prevailing prayer.

17 The world, the flesh and the devil will put imaginary grief in your way just when Jesus Christ is wanting you to enter into fellowship with His sufferings.

18 There are not three stages in spiritual life—worship, waiting and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God’s idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of our Lord.

19 God grant we may get to the place where discouragement is as impossible to us as it was to the Lord Jesus. The one dominant note of His life was the doing of His Father’s will.

20 When we receive the Holy Ghost He turns us into passionate followers of Jesus Christ. Then out of our lives will flow those rivers of living water that heal and bless, and we spend and suffer and endure in patience all because of One, and One only.

21 When we try to reserve our strength it works out in weariness. Spend to the hilt all we have got and God’s recreating power is greater than all the expended power.

22 “It is good that man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord “—quietly wait, submit to the yoke, sit silent. All these are characteristics the world ridicules. There is nothing that so quickly reveals whether we are one with Jesus as derision. If we are not one with Him, we always want to explain ourselves.

23 Beware every time you notice yourself doing a good thing, because you ruin it by the notice (Matthew 6:2).

24 Our notion of sacrifice is the wringing out of us something we don’t want to give up, full of pain and agony and distress. The Bible idea of sacrifice is that I give as a love gift the very best thing I have.

25 Unless in the first waking moment of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in, you will work on a wrong level all day; but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret, and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God.

26 God comes in where my helplessness begins, that is the bedrock of entering the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are the poor in spirit. “

27 God cannot trust us with His unsearchable riches if we are not faithful in the least things. “The cares of this world” will make us put the least things as the most important.

28 Never blink facts because they don’t agree with your theory.

29 “Why not rather be defrauded? ” asks Paul. Who can be defrauded better than a Christian? Yet we take our standards from the world and insist on our rights.

30 “They feared as they entered the cloud. ” Is there anyone “save Jesus only” in your cloud? If so, it will get darker; you must get into the place where there is “no one save Jesus only. “

31 “And He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief. ” If we really believed that God meant what He said— what should we be like? Dare I really let God be to me all that He says He will be?

April

1 My personal life may be crowded with small, petty incidents altogether unnoticeable and mean, but if I obey Jesus Christ in the hap hazard circumstances, they become pinholes through which I see the face of God and when I stand face to face with God I shall discover that through my obedience thousands were blessed.

providence should take you to hell itself, you are as safe and secure as Almighty God can make you. 21 We must realise the frontiers of death, that there is no more chance of our entering the life of God than a mineral has of entering the vegetable kingdom, we can only enter into the Kingdom of God if God will stoop down and lift us up. That is exactly what Jesus Christ promises to do. 22 The miracle of the grace of God is that He can make the past as though it had never been, He can “restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the canker worm, and the caterpiller, and the palmer worm” ( Joel 2:25). 23 As long as the devil can keep us terrified of thinking, he will always limit the work of God in our souls. 24 Never run away with the idea that it doesn’t matter much what we believe or think; it does. What we believe and think, we are; not what we say we believe and think, but what we really do believe and think, we are; there is no divorce at all. 25 Don’t be disturbed today by thoughts about tomorrow; leave tomorrow alone, and bank in confidence on God’s organising of what you do not see. 26 God and love are synonymous. Love is not an attribute of God, it is God. Whatever God is, love is. If your conception of love does not agree with justice and judgement, purity and holiness, then your idea of love is wrong. 27 The springs of love are in God, that means they cannot be found anywhere else. It is absurd for us to try and find the love of God in our hearts naturally, it is not there any more than the life of Jesus Christ is there. Love and life are in God and in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit whom God gives us, not because we merit Him, but according to His own particular graciousness. 28 Just as the disposition of sin entered into the human race by one man, so the Holy Spirit entered the race by another Man, and Redemption means that I can be delivered from the heredity of sin, and through Jesus Christ can receive an unsullied heredity, viz. ; the Holy Spirit. 29 Obedience to Jesus Christ is essential, but never compulsory. In the early stages we have the notion that the Christian life is one of freedom, and so it is, but freedom for one thing only— freedom to obey our Master. 30 Faith is more than an attitude of mind, faith is the complete, passionate, earnest trust of our whole nature in the Gospel of God’s grace as it is presented in the Life and Death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

May

1 Faith is not intelligent understanding; faith is deliberate commitment to a Person where I see no way.

2 You can never measure what God will do through you if you are rightly related to Jesus Christ.

3 My worth to God in public is what I am in private. Is my master ambition to please Him and be acceptable to Him, or is it something else, no matter how noble?

4 “If we walk in the light as He is in the light. ” Walking in the light means walking according to His standard, which is now ours.

5 God never gives strength for tomorrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of the moment. . . . The saint is hilarious when he is crushed with difficulties because the thing is so ludicrously impossible to anyone but God.

6 For those who have no engineered place of holiday, God Himself becomes the mountain calm and the limitless sea spaces. By prayer and Bible reading and meditation, the drab life (drab externally) has glorious holiday hours with God in which the soul is restored even in the valley of deep darkness.

7 The stronghold of the Christian faith is the joy of God, not my joy in God. . . . God reigns and rules and rejoices, and His joy is our strength. 8 When we say “Thy will be done, ” do we say it with a sigh? If so, we have never realised that the character of God is holy love; nothing can ever happen outside His purposeful will.

9 Everything that Satan and sin have marred, God holds in an unimpaired state for every son of man who will come to Him by the way back which Jesus Christ has made (Romans 16:20).

10 Remember, whatever happens, God is there. . . . You never get at God by blinking facts, but only by naming Him in the facts; whether they are devilish or not, say, “Lord, I thank Thee that Thou are here. “

11 I have no right to say that I believe in forgive ness as an attribute of God if in my own heart I cherish an unforgiving temper. The forgiveness of God is the test by which I myself am judged

2 To be shallow is not a sign of being wicked, nor is shallowness a sign that there are no depths; the ocean has a shore. The shallow amenities of life, eating, drinking, walking, talking are all ordained by God. These are the things in which our Lord lived. He lived in them as the Son of God, and He said that “the disciple is not above his Master. “

3 Shut out every other consideration and keep yourself before God for this one thing only— “My Utmost for His Highest. ” I am determined to be absolutely and entirely for Him and for Him alone.

4 Whenever God’s will is in the ascendant all compulsion is gone. When we choose deliber ately to obey Him, then with all His almighty power He will tax the remotest star and the last grain of sand to assist us.

5 Identification with the death of Jesus Christ means identification with Him to the death of everything that never was in Him.

6 Intercession leaves you neither time nor inclina tion to pray for your own “sad sweet self. ” The thought of yourself is not kept out because it is not there to keep out, you are completely and entirely identified with God’s interest in other lives.

7 Belief must be the will to believe. There must be a surrender of the will, not a surrender to a per suasive power, but a deliberate launching forth on God, and on what He says, until I am no longer confident in what I have done, I am confident only in God. The hindrance is that I will not trust God, but only my mental understanding. 8 Notion your mind with the idea that God is there. Nothing happens in any particular unless God’s will is behind it, therefore you can rest in perfect confidence in Him.

9 “If God so clothe the grass of the field . . . how much more . . . ” Jesus says that if we obey the life God has given us, He will look after all the other things. Has Jesus Christ told us a lie? If we are not experiencing the “much more” it is because we are not obeying the life God has given us; we are taken up with confusing considerations.

10 All I do ought to be founded on a perfect oneness with Him, not a self willed determination to be godly. The God of Israel is He that giveth strength and power to His people.

11 There are certain tempers of mind in which we never dare indulge. If we find they have distracted us from faith in God, then until we get back to the quiet mood before God, our faith in Him is nil, and our confidence in the flesh and human ingenuity is the thing that rules.

12 Whenever the insistence is on the point that God answers prayer, we are off the track. The meaning of prayer is that we get hold of God, not of the answer.

13 One of the most amazing revelations of God comes when we learn that it is in the common place things that the Deity of Jesus Christ is realised.

14 Sanctification means intense concentration on God’s point of view. It means every power of body, soul and spirit chained and kept for God’s purpose only.

15 Remember whose you are and whom you serve. Provoke yourself by recollection and your affec tion for God will increase tenfold, your imagi nation will not be starved any longer, but will be quick and enthusiastic, and your hope will be inexpressibly bright.

16 As long as there is a human being who does not know Jesus Christ, I am his debtor until he does. The mainspring of Paul’s service is not love for men but love for Jesus Christ.

17 We impoverish God’s ministry to us the moment we forget He is Almighty; the impoverishment is in us, not in Him. We will come to Jesus as Comforter or as Sympathiser, but we will not come to Him as Almighty.

18 Undaunted radiance is not built on anything passing, but on the love of God that nothing can alter. The experiences of life, terrible or monoto nous, are impotent to touch “the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. “

19 I claim the fulfilment of God’s promises, and rightly, but that is only the human side; the Divine side is God’s claim on me, which I recognise through the promises.

20 There is never any fear for the life that is “hid with Christ in God, ” but there is not only fear, but terrible danger, for the life unguarded by God. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High”—once there, and although God’s.

12 How many of us get into a panic when we are faced by physical desolation, by death, or war, injustice, poverty, disease? All these in all their force will never turn to panic the one who believes in the absolute sovereignty of his Lord.

13 There are saints who are being rattled out of holiness by fussy work for God, whereas one five minutes of brooding on God’s truth would do more good than all their work and fuss.

14 Everything the devil does, God overreaches to serve His own purpose.

15 Naturally, a man regards his right to himself as the finest thing he has, yet it is the last bridge that prevents Jesus Christ having His way in that life.

16 Christianity is not service for Jesus Christ, not winning souls; it is nothing less than the life of Jesus being manifested more and more in my mortal flesh.

17 The very powers of darkness are paralysed by prayer. No wonder Satan tries to keep our minds fussy in active work till we cannot think to pray.

18 Beware of making God’s truth simpler than He has made it Himself.

19 Don’t shut up any avenue of your nature, let God come into every avenue, every relationship, and you will find the nightmare curse of “secular and sacred” will go.

20 If we have faith at all it must be faith in Almighty God; when He has said a thing, He will perform it; we have to remain steadfastly obedient to Him.

21 There are disasters to be faced by the one who is in real fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ. God has never promised to keep us immune from trouble; He says “I will be with him in trouble, ” which is a very different thing.

22 A self indwelt by Jesus becomes like Him. “Walk in love, even as Christ also loved you. ” Jesus has loved me to the end of all my meanness and self ishness and sin; now, He says, show that same love to others.

23 “Why does God bring thunderclouds and disasters when we want green pastures and still waters? ” Bit by bit we find, behind the clouds, the Father’s feet; behind the lightning, an abid ing day that has no night; behind the thunder, “a still small voice” that comforts with a comfort that is unspeakable.

24 Anywhere the man who is devoted to Jesus Christ goes, Jesus Christ is there with him.

25 Through the Redemption, God undertakes to deal with a man’s past, and He does it in two ways: by forgiving him, and by making the past a wonderful culture for the future.

26 The thing that preserves a man from panic is his relationship to God; if he is only related to himself and to his own courage, there may come a moment when his courage gives out.

27 Christianity means staking ourselves on the hon our of Jesus; His honour means that He will see us through time, death and eternity.

28 The great need is not to do things, but to believe things. The Redemption of Christ is not an expe rience, it is the great act of God which He has performed through Christ, and I have to build my faith upon it.

29 One man or woman called of God is worth a hundred who have elected to work for God.

30 Beware of interpreting Scripture in order to make it suit a prearranged doctrine of your own.

31 Bible facts are either revelation facts or nonsense. It depends on me which they are to me.

June

1 We must strenuously cast our ways and our bur dens on Him and wait for Him in all haphazard and top syturvy moments.

2 The more complete our sense of need, the more satisfactory is our dependence on God.

3 Beware of paddling in the ocean of God’s truth, when you should be out in it, swimming.

4 The Holy Ghost destroys my personal private life and turns it into a thoroughfare for God.

5 Be carefully careless about everything saving your relationship to God. Refuse to be swamped by the cares of this life.

6 Whenever there is the tiniest element of doubt, quit. Never say: “Why shouldn’t I? There’s no harm in it. “

7 The pure man or woman, not the innocent, is the safeguarded man or woman. God demands that they be pure and virtuous. Innocence is the characteristic of a child, it is a blameworthy thing for a man or woman not to be reconciled to the fact of sin.

8 It is never “Do, do” with the Lord, but “Be, be” and He will “do” through you.

9 On the top of those very billows, which look as if they would overwhelm us, walks the Son of God.

10 The New Testament view of a Christian is that he is one in whom the Son of God has been revealed, and prayer deals with the nourishment of that life.

11 Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man’s disposition. When you pray, things remain the same, but you begin to be different.

12 In order to be able to wield the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, we must obey, and it takes a courageous heart to obey.

13 The habit of ejaculatory prayer ought to be the persistent habit of each one of us.

14 We have to form the mind of Christ until we are absorbed with Him and take no account of the evil done to us. No love on earth can do this but only the love of God.

15 Unbelief is the most active thing on earth; it is a fretful, worrying, questioning, annoying, self centred spirit. To believe is to stop all this and let God work.

16 If God is first, you know you can never think of anything He will forget.

17 Our Lord is not the great Teacher of the world, He is the Saviour of the world and the Teacher of those who believe in Him, which is a radically different matter.

18 The suffering which springs from being “a meddler in other men’s matters” (a busy body) is humiliating to the last degree. A free translation of 1 Thessalonians 4:11 might well read, “Study to shut up and mind your own business” and among all the texts we hang on our wall let this be one.

19 God continually introduces us to people for whom we have no affinity, and unless we are worshiping God, the most natural thing to do is to treat them heartlessly, to give them a text like the jab of a spear, or leave them with a rapped out counsel of God and go. A heartless Christian must be a terrible grief to God.

20 Let memory have its way. It is a minister of God with its rebuke and chastisement and sorrow. God will turn the “might have been” into a wonderful culture for the future.

21 “If we walk in the light” God will give us communion with people for whom we have no natural affinity.

22 “For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ. ” We are en-wheeled with the odour of Jesus, and wherever we go we are a wonderful refreshment to God.

23 Jesus did not say “dream about your Father in secret, ” but “pray to thy Father in secret. ” Prayer is an effort of will. After we have entered our secret place and have shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. The great battle in private prayer is the overcoming of mental wool gathering.

24 Are we detached enough from our own spiritual hysterics to wait on God? To wait is not to sit with folded hands, but to learn to do what we are told. These are phases of His ways we rarely recognise.

25 God has loved me to the end of all my sinfulness, of all my self will, all my stiff neckedness, all my pride, all my self interest; now He says—”love one another, as I have loved you. ” I am to show to my fellow men the same love that God showed me. That is Christianity in practical working order.

26 The Bible talks plentifully about joy, but it nowhere talks about a “happy Christian. ” Happiness depends on what happens; joy does not. Remember, Jesus Christ had joy, and He prays “that they might have My joy fulfilled in them selves. “

27 The Bible characters fell on their strong points, never on their weak ones. “Kept by the power of God”—that is the only safeguard.

28 God engineers everything; wherever He puts us, our one great aim is to pour out a whole hearted devotion to Him in that particular work. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. “

29 Jesus said, “Go . . . and make disciples” (rv), not converts to your opinions.

30 If you want to be of use to God, get rightly related to Jesus Christ and He will make you of use unconsciously every minute you live.

July

1 I have no right to ask God for miracles when my next duty stands neglected.

2 “I will give you rest”—not a reasonable explanation, but the staying power of knowing that I am un-perplexed.

3 It requires the Almighty grace of God to take the next step when there is no vision and no spectator

4 Don’t let the sense of failure corrupt your new action.

5 God’s order comes in the haphazard, and never according to our scheming and planning. God takes a great delight in breaking up our programmes.

6 Zeal to serve God may be, and very often is, an insistence on God’s proving that I am right.

7 God’s permissive will is the means whereby His sons and daughters are to be manifested. We are not to be like jelly fish saying—”It’s the Lord’s will. ” We have not to put up a fight before God, not to wrestle with God, but to wrestle before God with things.

8 God holds us responsible for what we won’t look at. We are nowhere judged by the light we have, but by the light we have refused ( John 3:19).

9 If God has made your cup sweet, drink it with grace; if He has made it bitter, drink it in communion with Him.

10 When I only do what God wants me to do, He will recuperate me all the time. Watch the things that exhaust you.

11 Wherever you make the Most High your habita tion, just there you will have victory.

12 Prayer imparts the power to walk and not faint.

13 Satan has no power to dispossess God of me.

14 We must distinguish between the burdenbearing that is right and the burden bearing that is wrong. We ought never to bear the burden of sin or doubt, but there are burdens placed on us by God which He does not intend to lift off. He wants us to roll them back on Him. “Cast what He hath given thee [mg] upon the Lord ” (Psalm 55:22 rv ).

15 The basis of panic is always cowardice. The clearest evidence that God’s grace is at work in our hearts is that we do not get into panics.

16 To bridle the tongue does not mean to hold your tongue, that might mean “If I speak, I would say something! ” It means to have the tongue under the control of a disciplined heart; that tongue need never apologise.

17 Nothing that happens can upset God or the almighty reality of Redemption.

18 The new life will manifest itself in conscious repentance and unconscious holiness, never the other way about. The bedrock of Christianity is repentance. If ever you cease to know the virtue of repentance, you are in darkness.

19 The best is always yet to be with God. Every thing you have ever dreamed or longed for, will be.

20 Lack of hospitality and disbelief in holiness go together. God’s Home is so sacred that He gave His only begotten Son to make it hospitable to us.

21 It is one thing to go through a crisis grandly, and another thing to go through every day glorifying God when nobody is paying any attention to you.

22 Be simply and directly and unmistakably His today.

23 Looking for opportunities to serve God is an impertinence; every time and all the time is our opportunity of serving God.

24 Never misunderstand the shadow of God’s Hand; when He leaves you alone it is assuredly to lead you into the inner meaning of Philippians 3:10.

25 When I want to debate about doing what I know to be supremely right I am not in touch with God.

26 If you once allow the victory of a wrong thing in you, it is a long way back again to get readjusted.

27 The centre of salvation is the Cross, and why it is so easy to be saved is because it cost God so much.

28 Beware of the pious fraud in you which says— “I have no misgivings about Jesus, only about myself. ” No one ever had misgivings about himself !

29 Measure your growth in grace by your sensitiveness to sin.

30 Don’t put things down to the devil, but to your own undisciplined nervous system.

31 God never answers prayer to prove His own might.

August

1 In our own spiritual experience some terror comes down the road to meet us and our hearts are seized with a tremendous fear; then we hear our own name called, and the voice of Jesus saying, “It is I; be not afraid, ” and the peace of God which passeth all understanding takes possession of our hearts.

2 Jesus Christ has destroyed the dominion of death, and He can make us fit to face every prob lem of life, more than conqueror all along the line.

3 Jesus Christ can make the weakest man into a Divine dreadnought, fearing nothing. He can plant within him the life that Time cannot touch.

4 Never be deluded into making this statement: “I am here because I am so useful, ” say rather “I am here because God wants me here. ” The one lodestar of the saint is God Himself, not esti mated usefulness.

5 Thank God for His safeguarding, for His salva tion which keeps us, waking and sleeping, con scious and unconscious, in danger and out of it.

6 The love of God in Christ Jesus is such that He can take the most unfit man—unfit to survive, unfit to fight, unfit to face moral issues—and make him not only fit to survive and to fight, but fit to face the biggest moral issues and the strongest power of Satan, and come off more than conqueror.

7 The devil is a bully, but when we stand in the armour of God, he cannot harm us; if we tackle him in our own strength we are soon done for; but if we stand with the strength and courage of God, he cannot gain one inch of way at all.

8 One strong moral man will form a nucleus around which others will gather; and spiritually, if we put on the armour of God and stand true to Him, a whole army of weakkneed Christians will be strengthened.

9 We have to love where we cannot respect and where we must not respect, and this can only be done on the basis of God’s love for us. “This is My commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you. “

10 The selfexpenditure of the love of God exhib ited in the life and death of our Lord becomes a bridge over the gulf of sin; human love can be imbued by Divine love, the love that never fails.

11 Whenever we begin to worship our habit of prayer or of Bible reading, God will break up that time. We say—”I cannot do this, I am pray ing; it is my hour with God. ” No, it is our hour with our habit; we pray to a habit of prayer.

12 Conscience is the faculty of the spirit that fits itself on to the highest a man knows, whether he be an agnostic or a Christian; every man has a con science, although every man does not know God.

13 God engineers our circumstances and He brings across our paths some extraordinary people, viz. , embodiments of ourselves in so many forms, and it is part of the humour of the situation that we recognise ourselves.

14 Where did Jesus place His feet? He placed them by the sick and the sorrowful, by the dead, by the bad, by the twisted and by the good. He placed His feet exactly where we have to place ours, either with or without Him, in the ordinary rough and tumble of human life as it is. “I will make the place of My feet glorious. “

15 No matter what our circumstances are, we can be as sure of abiding in Him in them as in a prayer meeting.

16 There is something in human pride that can stand big troubles, but we need the supernatural grace and power of God to stand by us in the little things.

17 The need is not to do things, but to believe. “What must I do to be saved? ” Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. “

18 Do we come to the Bible to be spoken to by God, to be made “wise unto salvation, ” or sim ply to hunt for texts on which to build addresses? There are people who vagabond through the Bible, taking out of it only sufficient for the making of sermons; they never let the word of God walk out of the Bible and talk to them.

19 It is never wise to underestimate an enemy. We look upon the enemy of our souls as a conquered foe; so he is, but only to God, not to us.

20 There is nothing so secure as the salvation of God; it is as eternal as the mountains, and it is our trust in God that brings us the conscious realisation of this.

21 God is never away off somewhere else; He is always there.

22 Things go by threes in the Bible: Father, Son and Holy Ghost; God, Church, converts; Hus band, wife, children. It is God’s order, not man’s. Whenever one of the three is missing, there is something wrong.

23 The remarkable thing about fearing God is that when you fear God you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God you fear everything else. “Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord. “

24 “Except your righteousness shall exceed”—not be different from but “exceed, ” that is, we have to be all they are and infinitely more! We have to beright in our external behaviour, but we have to be as right, and “righter” in our internal behaviour. We have to be right in our words and actions but we have to be right in our thoughts and feelings.

25 It is easy for me to talk about what I could do with a thousand pounds if I had it; the test is what I do with the 21⁄2 d5 I have got. It may be hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, but it is just as hard for a poor man to seek first the kingdom of God.

26 Work is often taken up with the absurd deification of pluck—”this thing has got to be done, and I must do it, ” and men damage their souls in doing it because God is not there to protect them. But when a man or a woman is called of God, the facts he or she has to face never upset the equilibrium of the life garrisoned by the presence of God.

27 Jesus Christ never says that a man is damned because he is a sinner; the condemnation is when a man sees what Jesus Christ came to do and will not let Him do it.

28 There is a purpose in every life that is in God’s keeping of which we know little, but which He will fulfill if we let Him rightly relate us to Him self.

29 The whole claim of the Redemption of Jesus is that He can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human soul, not only hereafter, but here and now.

30 Thousands of people are happy without God in this world, but that kind of happiness and peace is on a wrong level. Jesus Christ came to send a sword through every peace that is not based on a personal relationship to Himself.

31 It does not matter where a man may get to in the way of tribulation or anguish, none of it can wedge in between and separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

September

1 If you only know what God has done for you, you have not a big enough God; but if you have had a vision of Jesus as He is, experiences can come and go, you will endure, “as seeing Him Who is invisible. “

2 “Perfect love casteth out fear, ” but to say “there fore will we not fear, though the earth be removed, ” is only possible when the love of God is having its way.

3 “Be strong in the Lord”—we much prefer to be strong for the Lord. The only way to be strong in the Lord is to be “weak in Him. “

4 Undisciplined imagination is the greatest disturber not only of growth in grace, but of spiritual sanity.

5 Sin is not weakness, it is not a disease; it is red handed rebellion against God, and the magni tude of that rebellion is expressed by Calvary.

6 “I suppose it’s God’s will”—where is the joy of the Lord about that? The conception Jesus had of the will of God was that of glad, leaping obe dience to it as the most glorious thing conceivable.

7 The reason we know so little about God’s wisdom is that we will only trust Him as far as we can work things out according to our own reasonable common sense.

8 How much of our security and peace is the out come of the civilised life we live, and how much of it is built up in faith in God?

9 We impoverish God in our minds when we say there must be answers to our prayers on the material plane; the biggest answers to our prayers are in the realm of the unseen (Ephesians 6:12–13).

10 Worry is nothing in the world but personal irritation with God because I cannot see what He is after—only I don’t call it that, I talk about “an overwhelming burden of care. “

11 Never take your obedience as the reason God blesses you; obedience is the outcome of being rightly related to God.

12 The Christian life is stamped by “moral spontaneous originality, ” consequently the disciple is open to the same charge that Jesus Christ was, viz. : that of inconsistency. But Jesus Christ was always consistent to God.

13 The heredity of the Son of God is put into me at regeneration, a life neither time nor death can touch.

14 God does not do anything with us, only through us.

15 The devil would like us to believe that we are in a losing battle; nothing of the sort! We are “more than conquerors, ” hilariously more than victors, “through Him that loved us. “

16 No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner un-conquerableness. If you have the whine in you kick it out ruthlessly. It is a positive crime to be weak in God’s strength.

17 When God forgives, He never casts up at us the mean, miserable things we have done. “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins. ” A cloud cannot be seen when it is gone.

18 When we are standing face to face with Jesus and He says “Believest thou this? ” our faith is as natural as breathing, and we say—”Yes Lord, ” and are staggered and amazed that we were so stupid as not to trust Him before.

19 It is a tremendous thing to know that God reigns and rules and rejoices, and that His joy is our strength. The confidence of a Christian is that God is never in the sulks “. . . the Father of lights, with Whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning” (rv).

20 Mental woolgathering can be stopped immediately the will is roused. Prayer is an effort of will, and the great battle in prayer is the overcoming of mental wool gathering. We put things down to our own inability to concentrate. “My soul, wait thou only upon God, ” i. e. pull yourself together and be silent unto God.

21 “The L ord is my rock, ” my encircling guard. Where did the Psalmist learn this truth? In the school of silent waiting upon God. The Rock of Ages is the great sheltering encirclement; we are watched over by the Mother guardianship of God.

22 When the point of entire reliance on the res urrection life of Jesus is reached, and we are brought into perfect contact with the purpose of God, we find all our questions have gone. Are we living that life now? If not why shouldn’t we?

23 The secret of sacramental discipleship is to be so abandoned to the disposition of God in us that He can use us as broken bread and poured out wine for His purpose in the world, even as He broke the life of His own Son to redeem us.

24 Buck up and face the music, get related to things. It is a great thing to see physical pluck, and greater still to see moral pluck, but the greatest to see of all is spiritual pluck, to see a man who will stand true to the integrity of Jesus Christ no matter what he is going through.

25 “Love never faileth”! (rv). What a wonderful phrase that is! but what a still more wonderful thing the reality of that love must be; greater than prophecy—that vast forth telling of the mind and purpose of God; greater than the practical faith that can remove mountains; greater than philanthropic self sacrifice; greater than the extraordinary gifts of emotions and ecstasies and all eloquence; and it is this love that is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.

26 A great point is reached spiritually when we stop worrying God over personal matters or over any matter. God expects of us the one thing that glorifies Him—and that is to remain absolutely confident in Him, remembering what He has said beforehand, and sure that His purpose will be fulfilled.

27 Every time you venture out in the life of faith you will find something in your common sense cares that flatly contradicts your faith. Can you trust Jesus Christ where your common sense cannot trust Him?

28 “Abide in Me, ” says Jesus, in spiritual matters, in money matters, in every one of the matters that make life what it is.

29 The next best thing to do is to ask, if you have not received; to seek, if you have not found; to knock if the door is not opened to you.

30 We can choke God’s word with a yawn; we can hinder the time that should be spent with God by remembering we have other things to do. “I haven’t time! ” Of course you have time! Take time, strangle some other interests and make time to realise that the centre of power in your life is the Lord Jesus Christ and His Atonement.

October

1 Forgetting in the Divine mind is an attribute, in the human mind it is a defect, consequently God never illustrates His Divine forgetfulness by human pictures, but by pictures taken from His own creation—”As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions” (Isaiah 44:22).

2 We have to keep in the light as God is in the light and the grace of God will supply supernat ural life all the time. Thank God there is no end to His grace if we will keep in the humble place .The overflowing grace of God has no limits, and we have to set no limits to it, but “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. “

3 Beware of the thing of which you say—”O that doesn’t matter much. ” The fact that it does not matter to you may mean that it matters a very great deal to God. Nothing is a light matter with a child of God. How much longer are some of us going to keep God trying to teach us one thing? He never loses patience.

4 The people who are always desperately active are a nuisance; it is through the saints who are one with Him that God is doing things all the time.

5 The essence of Christianity is that we give the Son of God a chance to live and move and have His being in us.

6 The need is never the call; God’s redemption is the call, the need is the opportunity.

7 You have no right to say, because you realise a need “I must go”; if you are sanctified you cannot go unless you are sent.

8 I have to get to the implicit relationship that takes everything as it comes from God. He never guides presently, but always now. Realise that the Lord is here now, and the emancipation is immediate.

9 When you are thinking of the grudge you owe someone, let the Spirit of God bring back to your mind how you have treated God.

10 Beware of blaspheming the Creator by calling the natural sinful. The natural is not sinful, but unmoral and unspiritual. It is the home of all the vagrant vices and virtues, and must be disciplined with the utmost severity until it learns its true position in the providence of God.

11 If a man will resign himself in implicit trust to the Lord Jesus, he will find that He leads the wayfaring soul into the green pastures and beside the still waters, so that even when he goes through the dark valley of the shadow of some staggering episode, he will fear no evil. Noth ing in life or death, time or eternity, can stagger a soul from the certainty of the Way, for one moment.

12 By the “dimensions of effective Redemption” understand the Redemption of God expressing itself in the individual experience; but beware of limiting the Redemption to our individual expe rience of it.

13 That a Christian can smilingly do a smart trick is a staggering thing. Destruction of conscientious ness means we have lost the fierce purity of the Holy Ghost and taken on the pattern and print of the age.

14 If you are ignored because of faddy notions of your own, you are not on the right line, but if, because you stand true to your Lord and what He represents, you awaken antipathy, you are on the right line.

15 “Won’t you yield to Jesus? He has done so much for you”—to talk in that way is an insult to God and a crime against human nature. It is the presentation of an overplus of human sentiment smeared over with religious jargon.

16 Don’t put prayer and obedience in the place of the Cross of Christ—”Because I have obeyed, Christ will do this, or that”; He won’t. The only way we are saved and sanctified is by the free grace of God.

17 Anything that obtrudes itself into my consciousness can very easily shut God out. It is not the big things that keep us from being settled in God, but the tiny things.

18 Just as Jesus Christ and His Gospel are inseparable, so the disciples were inseparable from their message. When the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, He made these men the living epistles of the teachings of Jesus, not human gramophones, recording the facts of His life; they became part and parcel of their message.

19 An appalling thing today is that the man of the world has his eyes open in a way many a preacher of the Gospel has not. Ibsen, for example, saw things clearly; he saw the inexorable inevitable ness of God’s pronouncements—no forgiveness, no deliverance, no emancipation, because he ignored Jesus Christ and His Redemption and saw facts as they are.

20 God rarely rebukes us for our impulsive plans because those plans work their own distress.

21 The bedrock permanent thing in Christianity is forgiveness not sanctification and personal holiness; the great abiding thing underneath is infinitely more rugged than that, it is all that the New Testament means by that terrific word “forgiveness. “

22 If you allow anything to hide the face of Jesus Christ from you, you are either disturbed or you have a false security. “My peace I give unto you” a peace which comes from looking into His face and realising His un-disturbedness.

23 Because a thing is impossible in a man’s present moral imperfection it does not mean he is exonerated from it. God’s law has nothing to do with possibility or impossibility.

24 Whenever you come in contact with the great destructive sins in other lives, be reverent with what you don’t understand. There are facts in each life you know nothing about and God says: “Leave him to Me. “

25 It is easier to stand true to a testimony which is mouldy with age because it has the dogmatic ring about it that people agree with, than to talk from your last moment of contact with God.

26 It is impossible to get exhausted in work for God; we get exhausted because we try to do God’s work in our own way and refuse to do it in dependence on Him.

27 Beware of the sentiment that we consecrate nat ural gifts to God; we cannot, we can only consecrate to God the holy disposition He gives us (Romans 12:1).

28 Never try to explain God until you have obeyed Him. The only bit of God we understand is the bit we have obeyed.

29 It is the most natural thing to be like the person you live with most, therefore live most with Jesus Christ; be absorbingly taken up with Him.

30 If I am a Christian, to whom is my appeal? To none but to those God sends you to. You can’t get men to come; nobody could get you to come till you came. “The wind bloweth where it listeth: . . . so is every one that is born of the Spirit. “

31 To trust in the Lord is to be foolish enough to know that if we fulfill God’s commands, He will look after everything.

November

1 If there is to be another revival, it will be through the readjustment of those of us on the inside who call ourselves Christians.

2 The Cross did not “happen” to Jesus. He came on purpose for it. The whole of the purpose of the incarnation is the Cross; the manifestation of it in the crucifixion is the historic revelation of the true nature of God (Revelation 13:8).

3 For one man who can introduce another to Jesus Christ by the way he lives and by the atmosphere of his life, there are a thousand who can only talk jargon about Him.

4 Nothing has any power to alter a man save the incoming of the life of Jesus, and that is the only sign that he is born again.

5 “Labour. ” It is the one thing we will not do. We will take open air meetings, we will preach—but labour at prayer! There is nothing thrilling about a labouring man’s work, but it is the labouring man who makes the conceptions of the genius possible; and it is the labouring saint who makes the conceptions of his Master possible.

6 The difference between a man with the Spirit of God and a man without, is that the one does the will of God by deliberate, delighted choice; the other does the will of God without knowing what he is doing, kicking and rebelling.

7 God will never begin to teach me His will in other matters until I do what I know. Theoretic knowledge becomes our condemnation—”If ye know these things blessed are ye if ye do them” (rv).

8 A man can never be the same again, I don’t care who he is, after having heard Jesus Christ preached. He may say he pays no attention to it; he may appear to have forgotten all about it, but he is never quite the same, and at any moment truths may spring up into his consciousness that will destroy all his peace and happiness.

9 Am I going to live a sequestered life on the mount and never come down into the demon possessed valley, never prove that what I saw on the mount is sufficient to enable me to face what I find in the valley?

10 It is one of the most flattering things to go and rescue the degraded, one of the social passions of mankind, but it is not the most Christian. It is quite another thing to proclaim to men who are among the best, that they have to give up their right to themselves to Jesus Christ.

11 Have you never met the person whose religious life is so exact that you are terrified to come near him? Never have an exercise of religion which blots God clean out.

12 To understand the tiniest bit of truth about God is to love it with all our heart and soul and mind; all that lies dark and obscure just now, is one day going to be as clear, as radiantly and joyously clear, as the bit we have seen.

13 Experiences of what God has done for me are only stepping stones; the one great note is—Itrust in the Lord Jesus, God’s providence can do with me what it likes, make the heavens like brass, earth like hell, my body loathsome (as Job’s was), but the soul that is trusting in Jesus gets where Job got, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. “

14 If we do only what we are inclined to do, some of us would do nothing for ever and ever! There are un-employables in the spiritual domain, spiritually decrepit people, who refuse to do anything unless they are supernaturally inspired. The proof that we are rightly related to God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not.

15 A great many Christian workers worship their work. The one concern of the workers should be concentration on God, and this will mean that all other margins of life are free with the freedom of a child—a worshiping child, not a wayward child.

16 God will put you through many mills that are not meant for you, mills you would not be put through but that He wants to make you good bread for His little ones to eat. You can see now the meaning of that hard place you have been in.

17 We say, “Seeing is believing, ” but it isn’t true. Belief is necessary before we can interpret what we see; we will explain things away if we don’t believe them possible. “. . . because thou hast seen Me, hast thou believed? ” ( John 20:29 rv mg).

18 A good way to measure our spiritual life is to ask ourselves—What is it that produces the greatest perturbation in me? Is it the sins of men against men, or is it the sins of spiritual pride against God?

19 Our attitude to the Bible is a stupid one, we come to the Bible for proof of God’s existence: the Bible has no meaning for us unless we know that God does exist. The Bible states and affirms facts for the benefit of those who believe in God, those who don’t believe in God can tear it to bits if they like.

20 Always remain alert to the fact that where one man has gone back is exactly where anyone may go back (1 Corinthians 10:13). You have gone through the big crisis, now be alert over the least things. . . . Do not forecast where the temptation will come; it is the least likely thing that is the peril.

21 By surrendering ourselves to quiet communion with God, by resting for a while from all our thinking and acting and serving, by leaving all things for once in our Heavenly father’s hands, secret wounds are healed, gathering unbelief is dispelled, and displaced armourrefixed.

22 Jesus Christ can put into the man, whose energy has been sapped by sin and wrong until he is all but in hell, a life so strong and full that Satan has to flee whenever he meets him. Jesus Christ can make any life more than conqueror as they draw on His Resurrection life.

23 God does not give us overcoming life: He gives life to the man who overcomes. In every case of tribulation, from gnats to the cruelty of the sword, we take the step as though there were no God to assist us, and we find He is there.

24 The afflictions after sanctification are not meant to purify us, but to make us broken bread in the Hands of our Lord to nourish others. Many Christian workers are like Ephraim, “a cake not turned”; they are faddists and cranks, and when they are given out for distribution they produce indigestion instead of giving nourishment.

25 If you sow vows, resolutions, aspirations, emotions, you will reap nothing but exhaustion (“. . . and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it, ” Leviticus 26:16) but sow the Word of God, and, as sure as God is God, it will bring forth fruit.

26 The greatest note of triumph that ever sounded in the ears of a startled universe was that sounded on the Cross of Christ—”It is finished. ” That is the last word in the Redemption of man.

27 The springs of love are in God, not in us. It is absurd to look for the love of God in our hearts naturally, it is only there when it has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

28 The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being thus dominated because I have yielded. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame for it because at a point, away back, I yielded myself to myself. Likewise, if I obey God, I do so because I have yielded myself to Him.

29 “What I tell you in darkness”—watch where God puts you into darkness, and when you are there, keep your mouth shut. When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else when you get into the light.

30 “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. ” How much evil has begun to threaten you today? What kind of mean little imps have been looking in and saying; “Now what are you going to do next month—this summer? ” “Be anxious for nothing, ” Jesus says. Look again and think. Keep your mind on the “Much more” of your Heavenly Father.

December

1 Our Lord took words that were despised and transfigured their meaning; He did things that were commonplace and sordid and ordinary and transfigured them. Our Lord was the unconscious light in the midst of the most ordinary circumstances conceivable.

2 In the New Testament, “world” means the system of things which has been built on God’s earth, the system of religion or of society or of civilisation that never takes Jesus Christ into account.

3 “Ye are the light of the world. ” We have the idea that we are going to shine in heaven, but we are to shine down here, “In the midst of a crooked and perverse nation” (Philippians 2:15). We are to shine as lights in the world in the squalid places, and it cannot be done by putting on a brazen smile, the light must be there all the time.

4 It is an easy business to preach, an appallingly easy thing to tell other people what to do; it is another thing to have God’s message turned into a boomerang—”You have been teaching these people that they should be full of peace and joy, but what about yourself ? Are you full of peace and joy? “

5 Do we “follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth”? He will take us through the strange dark things—we must follow Him “whithersoever He goeth. ” “For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 7:17).

6 When we have a certain belief, we kill God in our lives, because we do not believe Him, we believe our beliefs about Him and do what Job’s friends did—bring God and human life to the standard of our beliefs and not to the standard of God.

7 Jesus Christ says, “Except ye . . . become as little children . . . ” A little child is certain of its parents, but uncertain about everything else, there fore it lives a perfectly delightful healthy life.

8 When we know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, it means we are free from anxi ety, free from carefulness, so that, during the twenty four hours of the day, we do what we ought to do all the time, with the strength of life bubbling up with real spontaneous joy.

9 Our Lord was never impatient. He simply planted seed thoughts in the disciples’ minds and surrounded them with the atmosphere of His own life. We get impatient and take men by the scruff of the neck and say: “You must believe this and that. ” You cannot make a man see moral truth by persuading his intellect. “When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall guide you into all the truth. “

10 Nothing has any power to alter a man save the incoming of the life of Jesus and that is the only sign that he is born again.

11 The man who has seen Jesus can never be daunted; the man who has only a personal testimony as to what Jesus has done for him may be daunted, but nothing can turn the man who has seen Him; he endures “as seeing Him Who is invisible. “

12 Can God keep me from stumbling this second? Yes. Can He keep me from sin this second? Yes. Well, that is the whole of life. You cannot live more than a second at a time. If God can keep you blameless this second, He can do it the next. No wonder Jesus Christ said “Let not your heart be troubled”! We do get troubled when we do not remember the amazing power of God.

13 When a so called rationalist points out sin and iniquity and disease and death, and he says “How does God answer that? ” you have always a fathomless answer—the Cross of Christ.

14 If you only take your own ideas, you will never know the truth. The whole truth is the only truth, and the whole truth is Jesus Christ—”I am . . . the Truth. ” Any bit of truth is an error if taken alone.

15 The majority of present day preachers under stand only the blessings that come to us from the Cross, they are apt to be devoted to certain doc trines which flow from the Cross. Paul preached one thing only: the crucified Christ, “Who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. “

16 Who of us can see, behind chance and in chance, God? Who of us can see the finger of God in the weather? When we are in living touch with God we begin to discern that nothing happens by chance.

17 If you put your faith in your experience any thing that happens—toothache, indigestion, an east wind, incongenial work—is likely to upset the experience, but nothing that happens can ever upset God or the almighty reality of the Redemption; once based on that, you are as eternally sure as God Himself.

18 In the Cross we may see the dimensions of Divine love. The Cross is not the cross of a man, but an exhibition of the heart of God. At the back of the wall of the world stands God with His arms outstretched, and every man driven there is driven into the arms of God. The Cross of Jesus is the supreme evidence of the love of God (Romans 8:35–39).

19 “. . . He only is my rock and my salvation” (Psalm 62:6). A rock conveys the idea of an encircling guard, as that of a mother watching her child who is learning to walk; should the child fall, he falls into the encircling love and watchfulness of the mother’s care. “The L ord is my rock, ” my encircling guard. Where did the Psalmist learn this truth? In the school of silent waiting upon God.

20 “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow” (Matthew 6:28). A lily is not always in the sun shine; for the greater part of the year it is hid den in the earth. “How they grow”—in the dark, only for a short time are they radiantly beautiful and sweet. . . . We can never be lilies in the gar den unless we have spent time as bulbs in the dark, totally ignored. That is how to grow.

21 When it is a question of God’s Almighty Spirit, never say “I can’t. ” Never let the limitation of natural ability come in. If we have received the Holy Spirit, God expects the work of the Holy Spirit to be manifested in us.

22 Never forget that our capacity in spiritual mat ters is measured by the promises of God. Is God able to fulfill His promises? Our answer depends on whether we have received the Holy Spirit.

23 “Add to your faith virtue . . . ” (2 Peter 1:5). “Add” means there is something we have to do. We are in danger of forgetting that we cannot do what God does, and that God will not do what we can do. We cannot save ourselves nor sanctify ourselves, God does that; and God will not give us good habits, He will not give us character, He will not make us walk aright. We have to do all that ourselves, we have to work out the salvation God has worked in.

24 Have you ever noticed what Jesus said would choke the word He puts in? The devil? No, the cares of this world. It is the little worries always. I will not trust where I cannot see, that is where infidelity begins. The only cure for infidelity is obedience to the Spirit.

25 Jesus Christ is God incarnate coming into human flesh from the outside, His Life is the Highest and the Holiest entering in at the lowliest door. Have I allowed my personal life to become a “Bethlehem” for the Son of God?

26 If I put my trust in human beings first, I will end in despairing of everyone; I will become bitter, because I have insisted on man being what no man ever can be—absolutely right. Never trust anything but the grace of God in yourself or in anyone else.

27 There are many things that are perfectly legitimate, but if you are going to concentrate on God you cannot do them. Your right hand is one of the best things you have, but Jesus says if it hinders you in following His precepts, cut it off. This line of discipline is the sternest one that ever struck mankind.

28 Put all “supposing” on one side and dwell in the shadow of the Almighty. Deliberately tell God that you will not fret about that thing. All our fret and worry is caused by calculating without God.

29 A river touches places of which its source knows nothing, and Jesus says if we have received of His fullness, however small the visible measure of our lives, out of us will flow the rivers that will bless to the uttermost parts of the earth. We have nothing to do with the out flow—This is the work of God that ye believe. . . . ” God rarely allows a soul to see how great a blessing he is.

30 In tribulation, misunderstanding, slander, in the midst of all these things, if our life is hid with Christ in God, He will keep us at ease. We rob ourselves of the marvellous revelation of this abiding companionship of God. God is our refuge”—nothing can come through that shelter.

31 The ideal is not that we do work for God, but that we are so loyal to Him that He can do His work through us—”I reckon on you for extreme service, with no complaining on your part and no explanation on Mine. ” God wants to use us as He used His own Son.