Counting The Cost

Random thoughts on walking with Jesus in this turvy-topsy world

The price of a soul

"Eternal and most glorious God, you have stamped the soul of humanity with your Image, received it into your revenue, and made it part of your treasure; do not allow us so to undervalue ourselves, so to impoverish you, as to give away these souls for nothing, and all the world is nothing if the soul must be given for it. Do this, O God, for his sake who knows our natural infirmities, for he had them, and knows the weight of our sins, for he paid a dear price for them; your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ."

-John Donne

posted by: Jrobbins at 22:56 | link | comments |
quotes i love

Salvation for ALL who ask for it

"God has given His Son to die for sinners. Are you a sinner? Then God gave His Son to die for you. You may ignore it. You may neglect it. You may walk away from it, but you can never change it. He gave His Son to die for you. It does not make any difference who you are or what you have done....It is true for anyone - "whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." The person who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ will be born again, not of the flesh, but of the Spirit....The life that begins in Christ Jesus will never die."

-Dr. Manford George Gutzke

posted by: Jrobbins at 00:22 | link | comments |
quotes i love

Guilt or grace? Um...I choose grace!

“The Christian life is built upon the foundation of (1) facing who you really are and (2) trusting who Christ truly is. Everything you do will be shaped by the degree to which you act on the blessings that are yours in Christ.

If you only look at yourself and carry around a load of guilt, you will hide, excuse, blame, rationalize, and cover up your shame rather than enjoy the freedom of confession and the joy of forgiveness. You will not enjoy the lasting fruit that comes from following the wisdom that is already yours in Christ! Instead, you will reduce the Christian life to a simplistic list of rules and behaviors that never touch the real problems, and you will be blind to the gaps in your relationship to Christ.”

- Timothy S. Lane & Paul David Tripp, How People Change

 

 

 

posted by: Jrobbins at 00:30 | link | comments |
quotes i love

Pain and God's glory

"God uses hardships to improve our character, remove sinful habits, make us heaven-hearted, and instill compassion toward others, to name a few. 
 
But answers and reasons, no matter how good and true they are, cannot be the coup de grace.  Purified faith should never be an end in itself - it should culminate in God.  Stronger character is made muscular not for its own sake, but God's.  A livelier hope is more spirited because its focus is not on "things getting better," but on God.  To forget this is to tarnish faith, weaken character, and deflate hope.  As the Phillips' paraphrase puts II Peter 1:8, "If you have these qualities existing and growing in you then it means that knowing our Lord Jesus Christ has not made your lives either complacent or unproductive."  It really is all about Jesus.  Simply Jesus. "

-Joni Earackson Tada

posted by: Jrobbins at 00:07 | link | comments |
god and suffering

Deal with my own sin? Yikes!

"Somewhere along the line in your own prayer life you need to get honest. You need to begin to say to God, “I want You to reveal my sin, I want You to stir it up in me. I want You to show it to me. I want You to blow away the dust that is covering it. I want You to peel off the things that have been hiding it away in my life, so that it becomes manifest and visible to me. I want to see the reality of my sin. I want You to show it to me just the way it is.” That is a vital part of your communion with God.

When you pray to God it must be an honest confession. The true prayers of repentance go something like this, 'God show me all the sins of my life, reveal all of them, uncover every little corner of my life. Bring it up and may it become as detestable to me as it is to You. May I never do that again, and may You give me the strength to see it go away.' " 

-Pastor John MacArthur

posted by: Jrobbins at 01:02 | link | comments |
quotes i love

Getting back to the Word

"Have you ever thought about what life would be like if God had never given us His written Word?

Of course, we'd know that there is a God. Psalm 19 tells us that "the heavens declare the glory of God." But we wouldn't know what He's like. We wouldn't know how to please Him. We also wouldn't know right from wrong. We might experience some vague sense of guilt when we sin, but we wouldn't know why.

Imagine never hearing the promises of God, the commands of God, the will of God, or the ways of God. Thankfully, we don't have to exist in that kind of spiritual vacuum. God has spoken. He has revealed Himself to us. "

-Nancy Leigh DeMoss

 

 

 

posted by: Jrobbins at 01:39 | link | comments |

Knowing God

"Not a single loophole for worry or fear is left to the soul that knows God.

"Ah, yes," you say, "but how am I to get to know Him? Other people seem to have some kind of inward revelation, but I never do; and no matter how much I pray, everything seems dark to me. I want to know God, but I do not see how to manage it."

Your trouble is that you have got a wrong idea of what knowing God is, or at least the kind of knowing I mean. For I do not mean any mystical interior revelations. Such revelations are delightful when you can have them, but they are not always at your command, and they are often variable and uncertain. The kind of knowing I mean is just the plain matter-of-fact knowledge of God's nature and character that comes to us by believing what is revealed in the Bible concerning Him."

-Hannah Whitall Smith

posted by: Jrobbins at 01:10 | link | comments |
quotes i love, knowing god

Template by motime.com  |  header image credit: Markus Gann © www.begann.de