I remember when I was searching for my first job, and I kept getting turned down because I didn’t have any “experience.” And I kept thinking, “How am I supposed to get any experience if you won’t hire me?!” It’s frustrating being in a place where the only way you can get the job is to have experience, which you can’t get because you don’t have the job!
Sadly, I think this is how many people—even many Christians—feel about prayer. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.
Jesus Makes Joy Possible
“These things have I spoken unto you,” said Jesus, “that My joy may be in you.” What joy did Jesus have? He failed apparently in everything He came to do; all His disciples forsook Him, He was crucified, and yet He talked of His joy. The joy of Our Lord lay in doing what the Father sent Him to do. His purpose was not to succeed, but to fulfill the design of His coming—“For I am come down from heaven not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.” …
“God shall judge the righteous and the wicked.” But who is God? I have never seen God, or spoken to Him. An omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Being does not amount to anything to me; He is an abstract finding of man’s intellect. Can God take on hands and feet and man’s way of doing things, and manifest Himself on the plane on which we live? The Bible says that that is what God did do. Jesus Christ lived a human life on this earth…. What Jesus Christ exhibited was not omnipotence and omniscience and omnipresence, but absolute holiness in human flesh, and He said “he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” …
The essence of Christianity is not adherence to principles; but a personal relationship to God through Jesus Christ at work in the whole of my life.
From Shade Of His Hand
Are you basing your “success” on what you are accomplishing? If so, prepare yourself for disappointment.
But if you define “success” as a growing relationship with Jesus Christ, be prepared for an eternity of limitless joy!
Leonard Sweet explores how revolutionary Jesus Christ’s public ministry was in his outstanding book The Bad Habits Of Jesus. Check out my book review by clicking here, and then enjoy some of these quotes I especially liked.
“As the church we can be Jesus to the world, but only if we are not afraid of the spit in the dirt. To lose our earthiness is to lose our humility, which, in the end, is to lose our humanity.”
“It’s easier to donate money than to put our hand in the hand of a man or a woman who looks dirty, down, and drowned with mud. Yet the church of Jesus is not meant to be a hideaway but a hostel for all of God’s dirtiest who need restoration and healing.”
“Jesus didn’t procrastinate due to slackness or indecision or perfectionism or fear of moving forward. Jesus delayed doing what He wanted or needed to do because the timing wasn’t right, because He was telling time by His Father’s clock and making the most of the time His Father had given Him.”
“Sometimes delay is the best strategy for dealing with a problem, especially problems that have not been prayed over enough in the heart or played about enough in the mind.”
“We especially need to learn to wait on Jesus, which has both a Martha and a Mary meaning. There is the ‘waiter’ meaning of ‘waiting on Jesus,’ which means serving Him by serving others. To put the interests of others before our own is not to be weak but to be strong enough to transcend selfishness. That’s why love is only for the strong, not for the weak. Only the strong can love. … Then there is the ‘await’ meaning of ‘waiting on Jesus,’ which means patiently waiting without hating or wearing out the carpets with our pacing and fretting, sitting at His feet upon His arrival, leaning into His presence, and learning to put on the mind of Christ.”
“We all need the pendulum swing of snatching spaces of solitude and setting tables of sociability. In fact, the more plugged in and connected we are, the more we need to unplug and disconnect. A world of presence needs a time of absence.”
“Sometimes the Prince of Peace was a disturber of the peace so that He could be God’s purveyor of true peace.”
“When political correctness takes over in the church, it’s no longer about Jesus. … The Gospel becomes not God’s Good News but our own good intentions. … Jesus’ bad habit of not being afraid to offend so offends our PC sense of rectitude that He would be liable to be arrested for indecency.”
“When people today work for the church instead of working for God, love a denomination more than they love God, cherish their traditions more than they cherish their relationship with God, then they steal what is due only God.”
I will be sharing more quotes from this book soon. If you would like to be notified as soon as these quotes are posted, simply enter your email address in the box in the right column and click “Sign me up!” You can also follow me on Twitter and Tumblr where I share inspiring and thoughtful quotes ever day.
These are the Top 10 posts that were published on my blog in 2016…
2. 7 Must-Have Bible Study Tools
3. 9 Quotes From “The Porn Circuit”
4. 7 Quotes From “The Beauty Of Intolerance”
5. 10 Quotes From “#struggles”
7. Notes From The Global Leadership Summit
8. 4 Practical Prayer Tips From Jesus
9. The Porn Circuit (book review)
10. 9 Quotes From “Chase The Lion”
And these are the posts with “staying power.” These posts received the most views in 2016, even though they were published in an earlier year…
1. 21 Quotes From “Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn” [originally posted October 22, 2013]
2. 17 Quotes From “Smith Wigglesworth On Prayer, Power & Miracles” [January 15, 2014]
3. 14 Quotes From “Smith Wigglesworth On Healing” [May 7, 2013]
4. 11 Quotes From Vujicic in “Stand Strong” [July 23, 2014]
5. 22 Quotes From “The Ragamuffin Gospel” [July 17, 2013]
6. 15 Quotes From “Mansfield’s Book Of Manly Men” [January 11, 2014]
7. 10 Quotes From “You Don’t Need A Title To Be A Leader” [March 19, 2013]
8. 13 Quotes From “God’s Pursuit Of Man” [September 13, 2014]
9. 23 Quotes From “The 5 Levels Of Leadership” [March 28, 2013]
10. 10 Quotes From “The Necessity Of An Enemy” [July 13, 2012]
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.
Christ’s Incarnation Means Our Freedom
Other religions deal with sins; the Bible alone deals with sin. The first thing Jesus Christ faced in man was this heredity of sin, and it is because we have ignored it in our presentation of the Gospel that the message of the Gospel has lost its sting, its blasting power; we have driveled it into insurance tickets for heaven, and made it deal only with the wastrel element of mankind. …
The revelation is not that Jesus Christ was punished for our sins, but that He was made to be sin. “Him who knew no sin” was made to be sin, that by His identification with it and removal of it, we might become what He was. … Jesus Christ went straight through identification with sin that every man and woman on earth might be freed from sin by His atonement. He went through the depths of damnation and came out more than conqueror; consequently everyone of us who is willing to be identified with Him is freed from the disposition of sin, freed from the connection with the body of sin, and can come out more than a conqueror too because of what Jesus Christ has done. …
The Holy Spirit will take my spirit, soul and body and bring them back into communion with God, and lead me into identification with the death of Jesus Christ, until I know experimentally that my old disposition, my right to myself, is crucified with Him, and my human nature is now free to obey the commands of God.
From The Shadow Of An Agony
As we approach the time of year we celebrate the Incarnation of Jesus, it’s amazing to think that He didn’t come just to identify with our sin, but to be made sin! Without Jesus Christ’s death on a Cross in our place, there is no hope for us.
As we celebrate the First Advent, it’s a good idea to keep in the front our our minds what Christ’s Incarnation means for us. It means we can be freed from sin—free to obey God, and free to look forward to Christ’s Second Advent, where He will take away His saints to be with Him forever!
In The Shadow Of An Agony, Oswald Chambers explores how we should process the hard events of our lives which seem to totally rock our neat and orderly world. Check out my book review by clicking here, and then enjoy a few quotes from this book.
“If Jesus Christ were only a martyr, His Cross would be of no significance; but if the Cross of Jesus Christ is the expression of the secret heart of God, the lever by which God lifts back the human race to what it was designed to be, then there is a new attitude to things.”
“The agony of a man’s affliction is often necessary to put him into the right mood to face the fundamental things of life. The Psalmist says, ‘Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now I have kept Thy Word.’ The Bible is full of the fact that there has to be an approach to the holy ground. If I am not willing to be lifted up, it is no use talking about the higher heights. … No man can do wrong in his heart and see right afterwards. If I am going to approach the holy ground, I must get into the right frame of mind—the excellency of a broken heart.”
“Jesus Christ did not come to give us pretty ideas of God, or sympathy with ourselves; He came from a holy God to enable men, by the sheer power of His Redemption, to become holy.”
“No man is the same after an agony; he is either better or worse, and the agony of a man’s experience is nearly always the first thing that opens his mind to understand the need of Redemption worked out by Jesus Christ.”
“The attitude of the Bible to the human race is not a common-sense one. The Christian aspect deals with the a specimen of a human race which is a magnificent ruin of what it was designed to be. Supposing the view of the Bible to be right, to whom it is it ‘up to’ to right the wrong? The Creator. Has He done it? He has, and He has done it absolutely single-handed. The tremendous revelation of Christianity is not the Fatherhood of God, but the Babyhood of God—God became the weakest thing in His own creation, and in flesh and blood He levered it back to where it was intended to be. No one helped Him; it was done absolutely by God manifest in human flesh. God has undertaken not only to repair the damage, but in Jesus Christ the human race is put in a better condition than when it was originally designed.”
“We have been taken up with creeds and doctrines, and when a man is hit we do not know what to give him; we have no Jesus Christ, we have only theology. For one man who can introduce another to Jesus Christ by the way he lives and by the atmosphere of his life, there are a thousand who can only talk jargon about Him.”
“The New Testament view of a saint is a more rugged type. You and I are a mixture of dust and Deity, and God takes that sordid human stuff and turns it into a saint by Regeneration. A saint does not mean a man who has not enough sin to be bad, but a man who has received from Jesus Christ a new heredity that turns him into another man.”
“Our guide as to what emotions we are going to allow is this—What will be the logical outcome of this emotion? If it has to do with sin and satan, then grip it on the threshold of your mind and allow it no more way. You have no business to harbor an emotion the outcome of which you can see to be bad; if it is an emotion to be generous, then be generous, or the emotion will react and make you a selfish brute.”
“When I receive the Spirit of God, I am lifted not out of reason, but into touch with the infinite Reason of God.”
“Any fool will give up wrongdoing and the devil, if he knows how to do it; but it takes a man in love with Jesus Christ to give up the best he has for Him.”
“Churchianity is an organization; Christianity is an organism. Organization is an enormous benefit until it is mistaken for the life.”
“The stupendous difference between the religion of Jesus Christ and every other religion under heaven is that His religion is one which brings help to the bottom of hell, not a religion that can deal only with what is fine and pure.”
Every Thursday I share a section of the current Oswald Chambers book I am reading, in a series called “Thursdays With Oswald.” If you would like to be notified when these posts go live, just enter your email address in the box on the right, and then click “Sign me up!”
What happens when all of your perfect plans, all of your neat and tidy ideas, come crashing down around you because of a tragedy? This is the topic Oswald Chambers took on in his book The Shadow Of An Agony when The Great War (or what we now call World War I) was ravaging the nations.
Many people have had their worldviews rocked because a tragedy hit them out of nowhere. What then? Do you throw out all you have believed was true? Oswald Chambers explorers this topic in depth in this book, and comes to the conclusion that these shaking events should send us back to the foundation of the Bible.
For example, Chambers says, “In the past the error of the Christian faith was that it paid no attention to a man’s actual life; it simply used human beings and made them catspaws for a religious line of things. The present error is that humanity utilizes Christianity; if Jesus Christ does not coincide with our line of things, we toss Him overboard; Humanity is on the throne. In the New Testament the point of view is God and Man in union.”
Throughout this book you will see that Jesus Christ stepped into our agony to make a way for us to go through it as more than conquerors.
In commenting on The Shadow Of An Agony, Samuel M. Zwemer said, “Oswald Chambers points out that because Jesus Christ is so like unto His brethren we can face this turmoil and stress, and stand with Him in the shadow of a great agony, undiscouraged and unafraid.”
And Pastor Walter H. Armstrong noted, “This book deals with root or rock principles. It comes, not from the surface, but ‘out of the depths.’ It is the work of a great brain and a great heart. It does not shirk the problems of life, but it looks them straight in the face. Over against the tragedy of sin and suffering it brings us to the tragedy of the Cross of Christ.”
If you are walking through a difficult time in your life, the insights Oswald Chambers shares in this book may be just the lifeline you’re looking for. This is also an excellent book to read to prepare yourself for any tragedies which may be lurking around the corner. Don’t get caught unaware, but use these faith-building thoughts to prepare you to stand firm through the trials of life.
More Than A Carpenter by Josh & Sean McDowell is a wonderful resource to prepare you to share the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. Check out my book review by clicking here, and then enjoy these quotes that I especially found interesting.
“Why don’t the names of Buddha, Mohammed, or Confucius offend people the way the name of Jesus does? I think the reason is that these other religious leaders didn’t claim to be God.” —Josh McDowell
“It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal which through all the changes of eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on an all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has been not only the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive to its practice. … The simple record of these three short years of active fife has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the expectations of moralists.” —William Lecky, one of Great Britain’s most noted historians and a fierce opponent of organized Christianity
“This testimony [that Jesus was God], if not true, must be downright blasphemy or madness. … Self-deception in a matter so momentous, and with an intellect in all respects so clear and so sound, is equally out of the question. How could He be an enthusiast or a mad man who never lost the even balance of His mind, who sailed serenely over all the troubles and persecutions, as the sun above the clouds, who always returned the wisest answer to tempting questions, who calmly and deliberately predicted His death on the Cross, His resurrection on the third day, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the founding of His church, the distraction of Jerusalem—predictions which have been literally fulfilled? A character so original, so complete, so uniformly consistent, so perfect, so human and set so high above all human greatness, can be neither a fraud nor a fiction. The poet, as has been well said, would in this case be greater than the hero. It would take more than a Jesus to invent a Jesus.” —Philip Schaff
“There exists no document from the ancient world witnessed by so excellent a set of textual and historical testimonies, and offering so superb an array of historical data on which an intelligent decision may be made. An honest [person] cannot dismiss a source of this kind. Skepticism regarding the historical credentials of Christianity is based on an irrational bias.” —Clark H. Pinnock
“The Gospels tell us Jesus’ family, including James, were embarrassed by what He was claiming to be. They didn’t believe in Him; they confronted Him. In ancient Judaism it was highly embarrassing for a rabbi’s family not to accept him. Therefore, the Gospel writers would have no motive for fabricating this skepticism if it weren’t true. Later the historian Josephus tells us that James, the brother of Jesus, who was the leader of the Jerusalem church, was stoned to death because of his belief in his brother. Why did James’ life change? Paul tells us: the resurrected Jesus appeared to him. There’s no other explanation.” —J. P. Moreland
“The resurrection takes the question ‘Is Christianity valid?’ out of the realm of philosophy and makes it a question of history.”
“I believe in the resurrection, partly because a series of facts are unaccountable without it.” —Michael Ramsey, former Archbishop of Canterbury
“The Old Testament contains sixty major messianic prophecies and approximately 270 ramifications that were fulfilled in one Person, Jesus Christ. … We find the chances of just forty-eight of these prophecies being fulfilled in one person to be only 1 in 10157. … All of the prophecies about the Messiah were made at least four hundred years before He was to appear. … This description of the manner of [Christ’s] death was written eight hundred years before the Romans used crucifixion as a method of execution.” —Josh McDowell
I am always sharing quotes from More Than A Carpenter and other interesting authors regularly on both Twitter and Tumblr. Please make sure you are following me there as well to see these quotes as soon as they are posted.
This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.
Is Your Christianity Actual Or Only Ideal?
Christianity is not adherence to a set of principles—righteousness, goodness, uprightness—all these things are secondary. The first great fundamental thing about Christianity is a personal relationship to Jesus Christ which enables a man to work out the ideal and actual as one in his own personal life. …
We are not built for mountains and dawns and artistic affinities; they are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff of life, and this is where we have to prove our mettle. A false Christianity takes us up on the mount and we want to stay there. “But what about the devil-possessed world?” “Oh, let it go to hell! We are having a great time up here.” … It is a great thing to be on the mount with God, and the mountains are meant for inspiration and meditation; but a man is taken there only in order that he may go down afterwards among the devil-possessed and lift them up. …
God won’t clear up our social conditions; Jesus Christ is not a social Reformer, He came to alter us first, and if there is any social reform done on earth, we will have to do it. …
If we cannot live in the demon-possessed valley, with the hold of God on us, lifting up those who are down by the power of the thing that is in us, our Christianity is only an abstraction.
From The Shadow Of An Agony
Jesus Christ did not stay on the mountaintops with His Father, aloof from the needs of people. He went away for times of refreshing, but always came back to the messiness of people’s lives.
Can the same be said of our Christianity? Are we content with merely knowing we are going to Heaven? Or are we daily going into the valleys to rescue those oppressed and held captive by the devil?
Ideal Christianity wants to be alone with Jesus on the mountain. Actual Christianity—that Jesus modeled for us—meets with Christ on the mountain only to be strengthened for the work in the valley.
Is your Christianity actual, or only ideal?
Craig T. Owens 
Book Reviews From 2016
December 27, 2016 — Craig T. Owens#struggles
Alive
An Angel’s Story
Answering Jihad
Archeological Study Bible
Chase The Lion
Churchill’s Trial
Culture
Hope … The Best Of All Things
How To Read A Book
I Stand At The Door And Knock
Jesus Always
Letters To A Birmingham Jail
Light & Truth—Acts & The Larger Epistles
Light & Truth—Revelation
Light & Truth—The Lesser Epistles
More Than A Carpenter
Of Antichrist And His Ruin
On This Day
One Of The Few
Our Iceberg Is Melting
Shaken
So, Anyway…
Streams In The Desert
The American Patriot’s Almanac
The Bad Habits Of Jesus
The Beauty Of Intolerance
The Blessing Of Humility
The Dawn Of Indestructible Joy
The Duty Of Pastors
The Gospels Side-By-Side
The Mathematical Proof For Christianity
The Philosophy Of Sin
The Place Of Help
The Porn Circuit
The Psychology Of Redemption
The Seven Laws Of Love
The Shadow Of An Agony
The Tabernacle Of Israel
Think On These Things
Today’s Moment Of Truth
Useful Maxims
Your Sorrow Will Turn To Joy
Here are my book reviews for 2011.
Here are my book reviews for 2012.
Here are my book reviews for 2013.
Here are my book reviews for 2014.
Here are my book reviews for 2015.
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