Musings of a Snickerdoodle

"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...

Made for the Journey by Elizabeth Elliot is an account of her first year as a missionary to Ecuador.  I've read it before as it was previously published as These Strange Ashes.  Elliot started her missionary full of excitement and triumphal expectation.   She was heading out the jungle to attempt to learn the Colorado Indian language in order to reduce it to writing and translate the Bible into that language. There is a note of underlying criticism throughout of the 'traditional' missionary way of doing things. Having started her work, she fights to have success in even figuring out the language.   She combats laziness in herself, but does start making some progress with the language.   Then everything falls apart.   People die, in tragic ways, including her main language informant.   She has difficulty continuing the study, but does have a good amount of language information to leave with those who would stay while she moved on to differen...

The only thing I knew about Oswald Chambers was that he wrote the devotional, My Utmost For His Highest, which I looked through some years ago (I don't remember if I read it all the way through) and liked some of the concepts that I found in it.  When I saw this biography of his wife I thought that it would be a good way to know more about the couple. It   really informed me quite a bit and gave me a better picture of these two people, or a rather it gave me the only picture I've had so far as I didn't know really anything at all about them. Gertrude Annie Hobbes, known as "Biddy" (Oswald's nickname for her), was not expecting the life that God had planned for her. She had trained for and had become excellent at taking shorthand notes and was a good typist as well.  Her goal was to be the first female secretary to the prime minister of England. God had other plans.  She and Oswald Chambers initially 'fell' in love on a ten day voyage to America.  ...

Short Answers to Big Questions about God, the Bible and Christianity by Clinton E. Arnold and Jeff is just what its title declares it to be, it is an endeavor to answer, in only a few pages, many questions new Christians, or unbelievers, have about God, the Bible or Christianity.   The book is not as good as I had hoped it would be.   My main problem with it is its presentation of the relationship/interaction between God and mankind.     First, its discussions of the love of God toward people are presented too much like the modern concept of "falling in love", an uncontrolled, "couldn't help it" type of thing.   Here are a few quotes to demonstrate what I mean:   "God isn't just loving, he is love……And he isn't just a loving person 'in theory'; he literally, at this very moment, is aware of his deep love for you. " and, "he loves you because he created   you…If   you have a child,   you have felt this love before; you don...