“Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” —Revelation 3:20
Christ outside! Such is the sad picture presented to us in our text—Christ outside, waiting at the door, pleading for entrance, pleading to unheeding ears.
The doors have been closed to our Lord Jesus Christ ever since the day the inn at Bethlehem had no room for Him. “He is despised and rejected of men,” it was said of Him long ago, even before He came …
“Glorify God in your body.” Through the five senses of the body we become conscious of the outside world,—we can say that we know the world in which we live, for this world has made its way to us through these senses, and our great consciousness within cries out, “I know.”
Within this body is a soul. The soul has senses also,—I do not know how many; but with these senses it reaches out and knows its kind. For those the soul loves it would sacrifice and sometimes die. The consciousness within the soul rises up and says of the …
Christianity is not a cold, dead or not a theory about Christ; it is not a series of ethical statements proceeding from Christ; it is not a system, builded upon the concepts of Christ—Christianity is Christ.
Christianity is not a cold, dead organization; it is a living organism, and it could not survive the loss of Christ, its living, vital Head any more than a human body, a living organism, could survive the loss of its head. Herein lies the chief distinction between Christianity and all world religions. Buddhism survive the loss of Buddha; …
“They that wait upon the LORD shall renew (exchange) their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” —Isaiah 40:31
You will notice that, before God gives a promise like this, He is like a good banker. The banker, before he asks you to deposit your money, writes on his window and on his literature his resources.
God says, “Hast though not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting Lord, the creator, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of His understanding. …
(Helpful to Sunday School Lesson of March 14, 1920, Revelation 1)
“The Revelation of Jesus Christ,”—not Revelations, but the REVELATION of that which God told the devil in the garden of Eden, “The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head.” This is the record of the “bruising,” the record of the ascendancy of Jesus Christ and His Body, called “the church,” over all the works of the devil and over all the kingdoms of the earth.
There are many things out of place, and the Revelation of Jesus Christ shows how these things are to get back …
When I wrote the book Hitler’s Cross, I explained some of the “cultural myths” that fed into the Nazi agenda and thus made Hitler’s Germany possible. These cultural myths are fueled by propaganda that pushes a culture in a destructive direction.
In Hitler’s time there were several powerful cultural myths, including that the Jews were sub-human, that whatever was good for Germany was good for Christianity, and that obedience to the state transcends individual conscience, among others. Eric Hoffer said that, “propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.” The further we drift from God as …
God’s plan was to get his people into the land of Canaan. He never wanted them to die in the wilderness and have to come through the Jordan again, which was typical of another water crossing. So many people think that crossing the Jordan is typical of coming into the fulness of the Holy Spirit and forget that there are two types, because the parents came through the Red Sea and the children there in the wilderness had never been through the Red Sea. God had to take them through Jordan.
The experience of the fulness of the Holy Spirit …
I have just read a book entitled, “A Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion,” sent out from Chicago University. I wish someone would write a companion volume and entitle it “A Color-Blind Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion.” For these eminent gentlemen are blind to three things. They are blind to the purple—they see no royalty in Jesus Christ. To them He is an evolution from things before Him, and did not come down from heaven as He said He did, but came up from the mud with the rest.
(Helpful to Sunday School Lesson of Easter 1920, Mark 16)
“And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.” This, and the occasion when Jesus spoke to Lazarus are the only records of Jesus using a loud voice. Both are in connection with death—one to bring a man from death, the other, in utter agony as He Himself enters into death.
We have, as a Sunday School lesson, the story of the resurrection, but I have purposely started with this agonizing cry of Jesus that we might go to the cross before we look at the open …
“Not accepting deliverance that they might obtain a better resurrection.” —Hebrews 11:35
All nature is full of resurrected things. It would seem as if our northern lands God in His providence has brought together both the spiritual and the natural springtime that the world like an open book might speak to us of the deeper mysteries of the new creation where every blade of grass and every bursting bud and every blossom seems to whisper to us again, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much …
