2 Kings 2:1-18
Matthew 5:13-16
Proverbs 29:18
Chad Walsh wrote the book titled: “Early Christians of the Twenty-first Century”
“Millions of Christians live in a sentimental haze of vague piety, with soft organ music trembling in the lovely light from stained glass windows. Their religion is a pleasant thing of emotional quivers, divorced from the will, divorced from the intellect and demanding little except lip service to a few harmless platitudes.
I suspect that Satan has called off his attempt to convert people to agnosticism. After all, if a man travels far enough away from Christianity, he is liable to see it in perspective and decide that it is true. It is much safer, from Satan’s point of view, to vaccinate a man with a mild case of Christianity so as to protect him from the real disease.”
Major Ian Thomas “The Saving Life of Christ”
“Christ did not die simply that you might be saved from a bad conscience, or even to remove the stain of past failure, but to ‘clear the decks’ for divine action.”
Howard Hendricks in his little booklet “The Battle of the Gods” writes:
“It is very easy to become compulsively active. It is hard to learn the lesson of the barrenness of busyness. Your activity simply becomes an anesthetic to deaden the pain of an empty life. And if you get off long enough, you discover you have activity without accomplishment.
We are compulsive activists, and there are so many voices clamoring for our attention that it is easy to miss the voice of God in the process. You may be asking God to use you, to shape you, to mold you, to give you a cutting edge, not only in the present generation but, if the Lord tarries, in the next generation. But you will have nothing to say to this generation or the next unless God first speaks to you.”
As the Greek philosopher Socrates long ago said:
“An unexamined life is not worth living.”
Major Ian Thomas ‘The Saving Life of Christ’
“Make sure it is God’s trumpet you are blowing – if it is only yours it won’t wake the dead, it will simply disturb the neighbors.
It is not self-righteousness but Christ-righteousness, the righteousness that is by faith – a faith that by renewed dependence upon God releases His divine action to restore the marred image of the invisible God.”