Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
I implore you in God's name, not to think of Him as hard to please, but rather as generous beyond all that you can ask or think.
This is Christ's own declaration, 'I will draw all men unto me.' Therein consists its potency for men: not in Christ's satisfaction of justice by suffering a legal penalty, but in that the cross is the supreme expression of a divine spirit of love, truth, mercy, brotherhood, faith, ministry, unselfishness, holiness, - a spirit which goes out to men with divine intensity of purpose and yearning to draw them into its own sphere, and to make them partakers of its own eternal quality. This was a fact before the foundation of the world, is a fact today, and will be a fact so long as any life remains unreconciled to God. Atonement is eternal in virtue of the eternal spirit of Christ through which he offered himself to God.
This is the glory of a religion of love. And this is the glory of the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ. He was anointed to comfort all that mourn. The God of all comfort sent His Son to be the comforter of a mourning world. And all through His life on earth He fulfilled His divine mission. When His disciples asked Him to call down fire from Heaven to consume some people who refused to receive Him, He turned and rebuked them, and said: Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy mens lives but to save them. He received sinners and ate with them. He welcomed Mary Magdalene when all men turned from her. He refused even to condemn the woman who was taken in the very act of sin, but said to the scribes and Pharisees who had brought her before Him, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her; and when, convicted by their own consciences, they all went out one by one without condemning her, He said to her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. Always and everywhere He was on the side of sinners. That was what He was for. He came to save sinners. He had no other mission.
If those frothy, fluctuating, and restless hearts of ours would come all about Christ, and look into His love, to bottomless love, to the depth of mercy, to the unsearchable riches of His grace, to inquire after and search into the beauty of God in Christ, they would be swallowed up in the depth and height, length and breadth of His goodness.
By his creation, then, each man is isolated with God; each, in respect of his peculiar making can say, 'my God;'; each can come to Him alone, and speak with Him face to face, as a man speaketh with his friend. There is no massing of men with God. When He speaks of gathered men, it is as a spiritual body, not of mass. For in a body every smallest portion is individual, and therefore capable of forming a part of the body.
Each of us is a distinct flower or tree in the spiritual garden of God, precious, each for his own sake, in the eyes of him who is even now making us, each of us watered and shone upon and filled with life, for the sake of his flower, his completed being, which will blossom out of him at last to the glory and pleasure of the Great Gardener.
God brings us to the end of our meager resources so we can discover the vastness of His.
'The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul.' Most laws condemn the soul and pronounce sentence. The result of the law of my God is perfect. It condemns but forgives. It restores--more abundantly--what it takes away.
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