One Blog
The Holy Spirit: Person or Force?
R.A. Torrey’s on the importance of the personality of the Holy Spirit:
“The doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit is also of highest importance from the practical standpoint. If we think of the Holy Spirit only as an impersonal power or influence, then our thought will constantly be, how can I get hold of and use the Holy Spirit; but if we think of Him in the Biblical way as a divine Person, infinitely wise, infinitely holy, infinitely tender, then our thought will constantly be, ‘How can the Holy Spirit get hold of and use me?’”
- Braden
The Proper Use of Theology
I’ve read this somewhere:
“Theology is meant to lead to doxology.”
In other words, our growing knowledge of God (theology) is meant to lead to praise (doxology).
When you study the character and nature of our great God, do you practice your theology through praise and awe and worship?
- Braden
A Thriving Friendship
Ray Ortlund: “True friendship thrives when, before God, each one is more aware of his debts than his rights.”
HT: Justin Taylor
Hope for Change #2
The more desperate I feel and the more inadequate I see my efforts to produce change, the more room I allow for God’s sanctifying grace to surge in my soul. I am truly hopeless, but He is truly hopeful!
Dr. You
I saw this quote here: http://theologica.blogspot.com/2009/05/bonhoeffer-on-difference-between.html
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who died opposing Hitler, wrote the following in his book Life Together:
The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus.
The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is.
Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this.
In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner.
The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness.
The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.
- Braden