[b]April 29th - Random Quotes[/b]
We cannot organize revival, but we can set our sails to catch the wind from Heaven when God chooses to blow upon His people once again.

In an eyewitness report of the great Welsh revival of 1904, G. Campbell Morgan wrote, The horses are terribly puzzled. A manager said to me. The haulers are some of the very lowest. They have driven their horses by obscenity and kicks. Now they can hardly persuade the horses to start working, because there is no obscenity and no kicks.

For years I have made it a very careful and studied rule never to look at a commentary on a text, until I have spent time on the text alone. Get down and sweat over the text yourself. That is my method. . . . I once heard Dr W.J. Dawson say: "Half the bad theology in the world is due to suppressed perspiration." . . . The text is the sermon, and to that the preacher gives himself in serious thought. It may be that is one of the things most difficult to do, but the habit once acquired, becomes one of the joys of life - real, personal, unbiased thinking. It is so easy, especially when one has built up a library, to look at the text, and then turn around and put the hand on a book. It is a real peril. There must be firsthand thinking, actual work, critical work, on the text. As I said, I have made it a rule never to turn to any commentary or any exegetical work on a text, until I have put in personal, firsthand work on that text alone. Then I take any aid I can, and I find that these aids often help me to correct mistakes I have made. But we have gained enormously if we have first sat down and toiled at the text. . . . If a man settles down to his work, and makes notes and attends to the words and their idiomatic meanings in the languages in which this text is found, he will be mastering for himself the real meaning and the real intention of the text.

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SI Moderator - Greg Gordon

[b]April 30th - Individuality In Religion[/b]
First, every individual has personal relation to God. I do not say they have, but that every individual has a personal relation with God. That personal relation consists, first, in the fact of being; second, in the potentialities resident in the being; and, third, in the peculiarities that mark off the individual from all other individuals. I am what I am, not by my own choice, not by the choice of my parents after the flesh, but by the choice and election of God. That is fundamentally true of human nature. I am speaking of human nature essentially, not as we know it experientially, but of what it is in itself. In the deep, essential fact of human nature there is intimate first hand relationship to God. The underlying fact of every human life, the spirit, has an immediate relationship with God, which is independent of everything that has gone before. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews says, "We had the fathers of our flesh to chasten us, and we gave them reverence; shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?" I have nothing to do now with his question, or this argument; I have something to do with the essential conception of humanity which there finds incidental expression. It is that the individual has had a parentage on this earth which is of the flesh, but that the individual in the deepest, essential fact of his or her personality has but one Father, who is God. In an infinite mystery, God has united Himself with the human race in the process of its procreation, so that wherever a child is begotten, God acts, and creates its spirit life. It is equally true that each human being has relationship with God in capacity. The capacity of the individual is partial, but it also is definite. Every man has something that he is qualified to do naturally; every woman has something she is qualified to do naturally. Happy is the man or woman who has discovered the one thing he or she can do, and is doing that one thing well. It does not matter whether it is working in a carpenter's shop, or preaching the everlasting Gospel, or sewing with deft fingers - the great thing is to know the capacity, and remember that it is a Divinely bestowed gift.

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SI Moderator - Greg Gordon