Gifts of emotions and stories of grace

God very graciously gives us the gift of our emotions to help alert us to when something needs attention in our hearts.

God is our redeemer and because of the cross even the most difficult and painful experience of your life can be turned into a story of grace.

Source: Carolyn Mahaney "Teach what is Good"

Read Full Post »

A Microcosmic View of Revival

I read the following on Saturday night and found it very encouraging and helpful.

_____________________________________________________________

Many years ago, I witnessed revival in its most microcosmic form in a sudden, unexpected, and remarkable work of God’s Spirit on a friend. The work was so dramatic, the effect so radical, that news of it spread quickly to different parts of the country. People were asking, “Just what exactly happened?”

Five things seemed to have happened, and they were still fresh in the memory two and a half decades later:

1. A painful exposure of the particular sin of unbelief occurred. Listening to preaching was a staple of my friend’s spiritual diet, but what came with overpowering force was a sense that God’s Word had actually been despised inwardly. God’s own Word, preaching in the power of the Spirit, stripped away the mask of inner pride and outward reputation for spirituality. There was a fearful exposure of sin.

2. A powerful desire arose to be free from all sin. A new affection came, as if unbidden, into the heart. Indeed, a desire seemed to be given actually to have sin increasingly revealed and exposed in order that it might be confessed, pardoned, and cleansed. Disturbing though it was, there was a sweetness of grace in the pain.

3. The love of Christ now seemed marvelous beyond measure. A love for Him flowed from a heart that could not get enough of Christ, ransacking Scripture to discover more and more about Him.

4. A new love for God’s Word was born—for reading it, for hearing it expounded and applied, and especially for knowing every expression of God’s will, so that it might be obeyed.

5. A compassionate love for others now flowed. It came from this double sense of sin and need on the one hand and grace and forgiveness on the other. Christian witness ceased to be a burden and became the expression of Spirit-wrought and powerful new affections.

source: Sinclair Ferguson ‘One Night Only’ from In Christ Alone: Living the Gospel-Centered Life

Read Full Post »

The Plowman’s Education

“In Isaiah 28:26 we read that God instructs the plowman, teaching him how he is to do his work. But this instruction does not come to the plowman in writing, in so many words, nor in the form of lessons at school; it is a teaching, rather, which is contained and expressed in all the laws of nature, in the character of air and of soil, of time and place, of grain and corn. What the plowman must do is conscientiously to get to know all those laws of nature, and in this way to learn the lesson which God teaches in them.”

—Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith (Eerdmans 1956), p. 65.

Read Full Post »

How can you understand your life?

“The steps of a man are from Yahweh; What does a man know about his own way?”

Proverbs 20:24

Read Full Post »

Psalm 119:37

Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things;
and give me life in your ways.

Read Full Post »

Christian Spirituality

A great article is to be found here: http://exiledpreacher.blogspot.com/2008/01/ten-things-on-christian-spirituality.html

Read Full Post »

Truth must be guarded

“What one generation knows and teaches, the second generation assumes, and the third generation loses.”

Read Full Post »