The dedication of the patriots who refuse to compromise will remain as long as they have life. It is for them a duty to carry the torch of a glorious past through an inglorious present and hand it over to what, if they can make it so, will make it a glorious future. We who know the strength and insidiousness of diabolical influences standing athwart their path can at least, in all humility, salute them and offer them all the support in our power. The Captains and the Kings have departed, the aristocracy has turned craven, the squirearchy has gone bad, but the true Loyalists of every land still advance into the battle with hearts unafraid and with intrepid souls.
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A. K. Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords
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The beauty of Christianity is that you don’t have to do what you feel. We live above our feelings.
Jesus, the Christ, my good and holy God, my infallible Lord who sits at the right hand of the throne of Yahweh, and who is one with Him in every essence,
be my obsession.
unknownchristian:
The wife of Pastor Saeed Abedini, who is imprisoned in Iran for being a Christian, spoke at my school this morning. She came to pick up Saeed’s sister who has been a student here this semester. She brought fire. It’s Jesus or nothing. There is no compromising. Christians are suffering and being persecuted in other countries standing up for their faith. We have opportunity to stand up for our faith too. Just because it’s not as severe as in other countries doesn’t mean we don’t have the same opportunity. You can always stand up for your faith in whatever culture you are in.
She shared a story about how when she was in Iran one time a guard was holding a gun to her head and told her to deny Jesus. She had to decide in that moment whether Jesus was more real than the gun that was being held to her head. Jesus spoke to her and said, “Don’t deny me and I will not deny you.” She stood up for her faith and the guard came to trust in Jesus and asked for a Bible.
It’s Jesus or the world. There is no compromise. Hot or cold or vomited from his mouth. You choose.
I want to be a woman who lives totally abandoned to the first commandment: to love my Lord, my God, with all my heart. I don’t want the reputation that I love God, I don’t want to write songs about loving God, I don’t want to talk about loving God. I want to actually love God. When I close my eyes, I want my heart to move. When I close my eyes and I look at Him, I want to feel alive on the inside. I want to look at Him with a fire in my heart and it’s real.
It is discipline imposed on the body which forms virtue. Body and spirit are but one: disordered movements of the former betray outwardly the disarranged interior of the soul. But inversely, discipline can act on the soul through the body — in ways of dressing, in posture and movement, in speech, and in table manners.
You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.
The consensus among modern scholars — nearly universal — is that there were no dying and rising gods that preceded Christianity. They all post-dated the first century.
If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.
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C.S. Lewis
Is anyone else picturing the THX sound right now?
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I mean, I’m not saying C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is divinely inspired, but there’s probably a golden copy in Heaven.
