Musings of a Snickerdoodle

I n the kingdom of Christ, insubmission to the plain letter of Scripture, a wish to look into the secret purposes of God, and 'to be wise above what is written,' has, at all times in some measure, and at this time in particular, distracted the church, and tainted the simplicity of divine truth. So much of corrupted nature is there  in us, men will even here be thinking for themselves, and call their views deep, enlarged. These biblical freethinkers take the word of God for their rule, but then it is in a different sense - in any sense, they do not much care what, so it be but different from that in which any simple mind would understand it…..Such critics have made intellect seem the enemy of truth, which God could never mean it should be. He foresaw, indeed, that it would become so. He knew how powerful an instrument in Satan's hand would be the reasoning, questioning pride of man, when induced to array itself against the reception of the word.  When He determined to reveal...

FAITH , like a simple, unsuspecting child, Serenely resting on its mother's arm Reposing every care upon her arm, Sleeps on his bosom, and expects no harm: Receives with joy the promises he makes, Nor questions of his purpose or his power; She does not doubting ask, "Can this be so?" The Lord has said it, and there needs no more. However deep be the mysterious word, However dark, she disbelieves it not; Where Reason would examine, Faith obeys, And "It is written," answers every doubt. Faith, with a keen and realizing glance, Revels in things yet distant and unseen, A nd tastes a joy as exquisite, as true, As if no veil of darkness hung between. It is no cold, reversionary bliss,-- No distant hope the trusting bosom proves; F aith has already wing'd the soul to heaven, In search of Him whom seeing not she loves. If clouds and darkness rest upon the soul, Darkness is welcome, since it is His will; In nature's saddest moments Faith can say, "Though he ...

"If any man in the world needs the special presence of God with them and His blessing in order to succeed, certainly ministers do.  For what is the design and end of their ministry? Is it not to open the eyes of sinners to turn them from darkness to light?  And from the power of sin and Satan to God and Christ? And who is sufficient for these things? In a work of this nature, what can ministers, of themselves, do? Verily, they may preach even to paleness and faintness, until the bellows are burnt, until their lungs and vitals are consumed, and their hearers will never be the better; not one sinner will be converted until God is graciously pleased, by the efficacious working of His Spirit, to add His blessing to their labors and make his word, in the mouth of the preacher, sharper than any two-edged sword in the heart of the hearer.  All will be vain, to no saving purpose, until God is pleased to give the increase. And in order to do this, God looks for their prayers, to c...

  "To sin is to love yourself at the expense of your neighbor.  More than that, it is to love yourself at the expense of God. Sin-shaped love expresses itself primarily in the form of narcissism.  It is self-absorbed love. This affection is hate masquerading as love, compelling us to engage in self-destructive behavior. Sin promises freedom and delivers slavery.  It speaks the language of friendship while treating us like enemies.  Sin is a cruel master who promises good wages only to reward our loyalty with hard service, disappointment and death.  For some reason, we return again and again to this false lover and expect a different result. The answer to sinful lust is love - God's love, which comes to us from the outside, like the righteousness of Christ.  Adopting the language that Martin Luther used to speak of Christ's righteousness, we might call it 'alien love' because it does not originate with us. It is a love that begins with God and can come ...

What is it to wait on the Lord? June 7, 2017 By:  Rick Lambert (When I was going through some of the most difficult trials I have ever experienced) Is it a blessing or is it berating? I'm talking about the trial of waiting; That heavy weight of God's neglect that is ever-stating, And the purposeless days that are so devastating. The endurance it demands is perplexing, And the energy it consumes is distressing. The long days and lonely nights that keep me guessing As I search and ponder what happened to God's blessing. Each day, joy crumbles and is replaced with mourning, And peace disappears into forlorning. But such an event must become the loud warning That my heart is being deceived into scorning. Is waiting really as bad as I am thinking? Perhaps it is a wonderful tool to stop me from shrinking As it stares in silence at me without blinking. Surely it cannot be present for my sinking. Waiting actually seems painless in the scheme of its framing, And maybe with God's...

Let me add in conclusion, that the passage which I have chosen for my text (Rev 1:3), in which a blessing is promised to all who read or hear this prophecy, has long appeared to me, to be utterly inconsistent with the popular historical or polemical interpretations.  If such interpretations, or even the principles upon which they proceed, be true, the Apocalypse can be read and understood by the scholar and the man of learning only: by him who has penetrated into the secrets of history, and traced the rise and progress and downfall of dynasties and doctrines; but to the poor, the unlettered, and to those who read the words of the prophecy alone, to those, who from their inability perhaps to read, are forced to content themselves with hearing it read by others; to such it is impossible, on the principles of the historical commentators, the Apocalypse can be any thing but an enigma and a riddle.  How can they keep those things that are written in this prophecy, to whom the thing...

"We should have it so happen that, when our life's story is written, whoever reads it will not think of us as 'self-made men', but as the handiwork of God, in whom His grace is magnified.  Not in us may men see the clay but the Potter's hand." - Charles Spurgeon -  From the book: Living By Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon  by Thomas Nettles See more quotes on my quote collection blog:  https://snickerdoodlesquotes.blogspot.com/

…Spurgeon observed many, 'who, by hearing continually the most precious doctrine that belief in Jesus Christ is saving, have forgotten other truths, and have concluded that they were saved when they were not, have fancied they believed when as yet they were total strangers to the experience which was not grounded upon the divine word rightly understood, 'nor proved by any facts in their own souls.'  They resented any suggestion of self examination by gospel tests as 'an assault upon their assurance' and 'defended their false peace by the notion that to raise a question about their certain salvation would be unbelief.' Their ill-placed certainty has put them in a hopeless condition and they ignore biblical warnings and admonitions by 'their fatal persuasion that it is needless to attend to them.'  Their historical knowledge of the work of Christ has settled them in a conviction 'that godly fear and careful walking are superfluities, if not actuall...

Leaders, this is not the finish line.  This is the starting point.  We're aiming too low, even when we're hitting our target.  Again, if spiritual maturity is typically measured by daily Bible reading as individuals, and if discipleship (if it happens) is typically measured by the reproduction of sound doctrine and maybe Scripture memory, and if leadership is qualified by theological education (and perhaps business savvy for directing growth strategies and managing staff recruits), then we're functionally gnostic.  We've focused our efforts on the acquisition of spiritual knowledge in the mind while disregarding the spiritual significance of daily life in the physical world.  An incomplete gospel is an incorrect Gospel. F rom the book:  Leveling the Church: multiplying your Ministry by Giving it Away  - By Micah Fries and Jeremy Maxfield See more quotes on my quote collection blog:  https://snickerdoodlesquotes.blogspot.com/

"And some cannot advance any further with regard to  knowledge; they know the fundamentals, and feel as if they could master nothing more.  It is a great blessing that they know the gospel, and feel that it will save them; but the glorious mysteries of the everlasting covenant, of the sovereignty of God, of His eternal love and distinguishing grace, they cannot compass.....To hear of these things rather wearies them than instructs them:  They have not strength enough of mind for the deep things to God.  I would have every Christian wish to know all that he can know of revealed truth. Somebody whispers that the secret things belong not to us.  You may be sure you will never know them if they are secret; but all that is revealed you ought to know, for these things belong to you and your children.  Take care you know what the Holy Ghost teaches.  do not give way to a faint-hearted ignorance, lest you be great losers thereby.  That which is fit food f...

Faith must embrace doctrinal truth.  To the suggestion that the time would come when preaching the doctrines of grace would be passe, Spurgeon responded, "Out on ye, traitors, who tell us that we care to shape our gospel to suit this enlightened nineteenth century!  Out on ye, falsehearts, who would have us tone down the everlasting truth that shall outlive the sun, and moon, and stars, to suit your boasted culture, which is but varnished ignorance!"  No, still he would preach those truths that were mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds, and he would maintain it to the death.....Without such knowledge and consent to specific truth, no faith is possible.  A strong evidence of grace is the "mind's perception of revealed truth and its obedience to it," Spurgeon argued.  Since God has lifted the veil through divine revelation, the true believer does not make or invent his own precepts, but he learns them from God. From the book: Living By ...

He argued with no one about "problems" in the biblical text or in the Christian faith.  Not good could come of it. Those who raised such problems had not yet felt the weight of their sin or of their need for a  Redeemer.  Mere intellectual jousting would solve no issue in their minds, for the Scripture is not given in order that the vain philosophical cavils of resistant intellects might be satisfied, but that wounded consciences might be shown a perfect Redeemer.   From the book: Living By Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon  by Thomas Nettles See more quotes on my quote collection blog:  https://snickerdoodlesquotes.blogspot.com/

"There will still be mysteries in the word of God that must be accepted as revelations rather than understood as the results of reasoning." Spurgeon was not afraid to exercise faith in "receiving the statements of the Scriptures."  No independent confirmation of scriptural assertion was needed, for its authority was independent of human reason and research; its evidence was in itself and its witness to the needs of the human soul, as interpreted through the entire fabric of redemptive truth, served as sufficient ground for receiving it as a revelation.   From the book: Living By Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon by Thomas Nettles See more quotes on my quote collection blog:  https://snickerdoodlesquotes.blogspot.com/

"Men who do their best, always do more, though haunted by a sense of failure.  Be good and true.  Be patient, be undaunted, leave your usefulness for God to estimate.  He will see to it that you do not live in vain."   George Morrison   See more quotes on my quote collection blog:  https://snickerdoodlesquotes.blogspot.com/

"If any man in the world needs the special presence of God with them and His blessing in order to succeed, certainly ministers do.  For what is the design and end of their ministry? Is it not to open the eyes of sinners to turn them from darkness to light?  And from the power of sin and Satan to God and Christ? And who is sufficient for these things? In a work of this nature, what can ministers, of themselves, do? Verily, they may preach even to paleness and faintness, until the bellows are burnt, until their lungs and vitals are consumed, and their hearers will never be the better; not one sinner will be converted until God is graciously pleased, by the efficacious working of His Spirit, to add His blessing to their labors and make his word, in the mouth of the preacher, sharper than any two-edged sword in the heart of the hearer.  All will be vain, to no saving purpose, until God is pleased to give the increase. And in order to do this, God looks for their prayers, to c...

" Far from our personalities being like eye color (something you are born with and can't do anything about), our personalities are something that God gave us so that we would have something to put on the alter and offer to Him…We are naturally full of instincts and desires that are contrary to what God wants us doing.   That means that those things are something to obey with, not something to obey around." Rachel Jankovic From her book:  You Who:  Why You Matter and How to Deal With It. See more quotes on my quote collection blog:  https://snickerdoodlesquotes.blogspot.com/

"We don't want to be like Jesus because we like plain old us better.  We value what we see as our uniqueness apart from Him.  On some level, we are all tempted to believe that we ourselves, even in our sin, are more interesting than we would be in Christ……On one hand, this is what reveals our darkest bit of idolatry- our desire to cling to Me, no matter what.  Rather me in in sin than Him in me.  This is ultimately hell; being left to ourselves and our desires, and being given free reign."    Rachel Jankovic From her book:  You Who:  Why You Matter and How to Deal With It. See more quotes on my quote collection blog:  https://snickerdoodlesquotes.blogspot.com/

Soon after I stopped feeling this intense love and presence of God, I started grasping for things that normally brought that passion back.  I would drive almost an hour away to find churches with great worship bands and speakers……I knew on some level that there was something off about the way I was approaching this, but I felt like I needed to do whatever it took to get that feeling back.  And then one day it struck me:  my faith had stopped being about God and had become about how I felt.  That was really selfish of me.  It shouldn't have mattered how I felt if I trusted that God was real.  At that point the best thing for someone like me was to remove those feelings so that my faith would once again become about God, not myself. ….the end result was that I began learning how  to center my life around God with or without the feelings that I once had…….To make Christianity purely about feelings is to make it about ourselves rather than God.  God ...

Yes, that is how it ever has been, ever must be with the people of God.  Until we are carried quite out of our depth, beyond all our own wisdom and resources, we are not more than beginners in the school of faith.  Only as everything fails us and we fail ourselves, finding out how poor and weak we really are, how ignorant and helpless, do we begin to draw upon abiding strength.  "Blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee," not partly in Thee and partly in himself.  The devil often makes men strong, strong in themselves to do evil…. The Lord on the contrary makes His servant weak, puts him in circumstances that will show him his own nothingness, that he may lean upon the strength that is unfailing.  It is a long lesson for most of us, but it cannot be passed over until deeply learned.  And God Himself thinks no trouble too great, no care too costly to teach us this.    - Dr and Mrs. Howard Taylor Quote from their book : The Growth...

Freedom from sin is only granted to Christians.  Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 10:13 tells  believers that they have not been seized by any temptation that cannot be overcome.  He is not talking to non-Christians, who Paul establishes elsewhere are controlled by the sinful flesh and cannot do anything spiritually pleasing to God (Rom. 8:7-8).... "...walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh..." (Gal 5:16-17).  Again, this command is to Christians.  Unbelievers cannot "walk by the Spirit."  However, believers walking by the Spirit have the ability  to "not gratify the desires of the flesh ."  If this is true, that no temptation has ever come across a Christian that is not common to all, and that sin is nothing more than a Christian yielding to his fleshly desires, then how can addiction as commonly understood (i.e., uncontrollable urges and impulses) actually exist for believers? ......Granted, sin can certainly fe...