I believe there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, and more perfect than the Savior; there is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ.
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- Fyodor Dostoevsky
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P.T. BarnumFineLinen said:Oswald Chambers
God is a consuming fire. His wrath and anger are spoken of. These attributes express the Divine hand raised against sin. If the Divine hand is raised against sin one must yield, and I don't believe it is the Divine hand. God is a consuming fire, not a fire burning forever in empty rage. He consumes man as the refiner's fire does the ore, burning the dross and bringing forth the good, as gold tried by fire.
The only reasonable answer to the issue of moral justice raised by the fact of the lostness of teaming billions of humanity (and thank God, the answer is as soundly scriptural as it is reasonable), lies the unending triumph of Jesus Christ in the subjecting of all things everywhere to God.
Theresasjourney said:If we seek God for our own good and profit, we are not seeking God.
- Johannes Eckhart
Whenever judgment comes, it comes on Love's errand, if it comes from God. Here is the spiritual watershed between two theologies. There is the popular theology that says, God loves His enemies, till they die. His love then turns into hate and vengeance. His love is in fact, a question of chronology, or, if one will, of geography, i.e., bounded by this world. And there is the truer theology that teaches with the Bible, that God is love--Love unchanging and eternal in all His ways.
The redemption of men from every tongue, people and race is far from being the whole story of Christ's work of atonement as John understands it. For he hears the choirs of heaven joined by the voices of the whole creation in a final outburst of praise. This should not be dismissed as mere hyperbole. John knows only too well that there is much on earth and under the earth and in the sea which has no inclination to join in the worship of Christ, and that these hostile elements are represented even in heaven. But such is his confidence in the universality of Christ's achievement that his vision cannot stop short of universal response. He agrees with Paul that God has already in the Cross reconciled the whole universe to himself, and that to make His act of amnesty and reconciliation known to the world is the royal and priestly task of the church, the success of which is already anticipated in the heavenly Amen.
Larry_Fout said:My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.
Elaine Maxwell
The radical failure in so-called religion is that its way is from man to God. Starting with man, it seeks to rise to God, and there is no road that way.
And I heard the voice of everything created in Heaven, upon earth, under the earth and such as are upon the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying. Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sits upon the throne, and unto the Lamb unto the ages of ages.
Every creature in a still wider antiphonal circle beyond the circle of angels, from all the four great fields of life (in heaven, upon the earth, under the earth (as in verse 3, with on the seas "epi thv talasshv" added). No created thing is left out. This universal chorus of praise to Christ from all created life reminds one of the profound mystical passage in Romans 8:20-22 concerning the sympathetic agony of creation (ktisiv) in hope of freedom from the bondage of corruption. If the trail of the serpent is on all creation, it will be ultimately thrown off. -A.T. Robertson Word Pictures Of The N.T.-
When that which is revealed of God is crystallized into a tradition, rigidly held and propagated with purely human energy, it becomes an impenetrable barrier to the truth. The life of the Spirit can never be confined within the framework of religious tradition. God is much greater than man's thought concerning Him, and the plant of the church grows best in a soil uncluttered by the pretty hedgerows of man's limited understanding.
To live without the eternal creative life is an impossibility; freedom from God can only mean an incapacity for seeing the facts of existence, an incapability of understanding the glory of the creature who makes common cause with his creator in his creation of him, would draw him into the circle of the creative heart, to joy that he lives by no poor power of his own will, but is one with the causing life of his life, in closest breathing and willing, vital and claimant oneness with the life of all life.
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