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“Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”

“Thus all creation acknowledges the supremacy of God; and we learn from this song that he made all things for his pleasure; and through the same motive he preserves. Hence it is most evident, that he hateth nothing that he has made, and could have made no intelligent creature with the design to make it eternally miserable. It is strange that a contrary supposition has ever entered into the heart of man; and it is high time that the benevolent nature of the Supreme God should be fully vindicated from aspersions of this kind.”

-Adam Clarke, A Commentary and Critical Notes, (New York: George Lane & Levi Scott), 990.
published in 1851

I thought this appropriate since we are studying the letters to the seven churches in Revelation:

“Write to Sardis, saith the Lord,
And write what he declares;
He whose Spirit, and whose word,
Upholds the seven stars:
All thy works and ways I search,
Find thy zeal and love decay’d;
Thou art call’d a living church,
But thou art cold and dead.

Watch, remember, seek and strive,
Exert thy former pains;
Let thy timely care revive,
And strengthen what remains:
Cleanse thine heart, thy works amend,
Former times to mind recall;
Lest my sudden stroke descend,
And smite thee once for all.

Yet I number now, in thee,
A few that are upright;
These my Father’s face shall see,
And walk with me in white:
When in judgment I appear,
They for mine shall be confess’d;
Let my faithful servants hear,
And woe be to the rest.”

William Cowper, The Poetical Works of William Cowper, (London: Oxford University Press), 446.

“When theologians declare that they accept the evolution philosophy because, however the world came to be, God was behind it, this is a fatal concession for religion or theology. When religion withdraws into this position, it has abandoned the whole field of human interest. It may be safe from attack, but it is also powerless and a matter of indifference.”

William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man’s Almanac, (New Haven: Yale University Press), September 15th.

This headline from “The Globe and Mail”, Canada’s National Newspaper on Wednesday, May 14.

“Tenderly, one mother eased a jacket over her little boy’s hand and up around his shoulder. He didn’t look alarmed or frightened but dirt and blood were caked on his forehead. She touched his hair and then they pulled up the zipper on the body bag and carried him away. She had seen her son, at least; most of the children still lay in the rubble of the Xinjian elementary school.”

Would Jesus have the sinner die? Why hangs He then on yonder tree?
What means that strange expiring cry? (Sinners, He prays for you and me;)
Forgive them, Father, O forgive! They know not that by Me they live.

Jesus, descended from above, our loss of Eden to retrieve,
Great God of universal love, if all the world through Thee may live,
In us a quick’ning spirit be, and witness Thou hast died for me.

Thou loving, all-atoning Lamb, - Thee, by Thy painful agony,
Thy bloody sweat, Thy grief and shame, Thy cross and passion on the tree,
Thy precious death and life - I pray, take all, take all my sins away.

O let Thy love my heart constrain, - Thy love, for every sinner free, -
That every fallen son of man may taste the grace that found out me;
That all mankind with me may prove Thy sov’reign, everlasting love.

Charles Wesley, The Christian Book of Mystical Verse, (Camp Hill, Pennsylvania: Christian Publications), 30.

“Do all the good you can,
in all the ways you can,
to all the souls you can,
in every place you can,
with all the zeal you can,
as long as ever you can.”

John Wesley, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations, (New York: Black Dog & Leventhall Publishers, Inc.), 354.

No wonder he changed the world!

This post is dedicated to the student who is told any long sentence is a run-on. What follows is from the well-respected author of Robinson Crusoe in another novel of his. I know there are longer ones, but read it aloud, increasingly urgently and breathlessly, to get the full effect. Take that, Hemingway and your modern disciples of short, indeed, non-sentences!

“The captain, rather provoked than cowed with this, came to the barricade of the quarterdeck, and speaking very prudently to the men (for had he spoken roughly, two-thirds of them would have left the ship, if not all of them), he told them, it was for their safety as well as his own that he had been obliged to that severity; that mutiny on board a ship was the same thing as treason in a king’s palace, and he could not answer it to his owners and employers to trust the ship and goods committed to his charge with men who had entertained thoughts of the worst and blackest nature; that he wished heartily that it had been anywhere else that they had been set on shore, where they might have been in less hazard from the savages; that, if he had designed they should be destroyed, he could as well have executed them on board as the other two; that he wished it had been in some other part of the world where he might have delivered them up to the civil justice, or might have left them among Christians; but it was better their lives were put in hazard than his life, and the safety of the ship; and that though he did not know that he had deserved so ill of any of them as that they should leave the ship rather than do their duty, yet if any of them were resolved to do so unless he would consent to take a gang of traitors on board, who as he had proved before them all, had conspired to murder him, he would not hinder them, nor for the present would he resent their importunity; but, if there was nobody left in the ship but himself, he would never consent to take them on board.”

Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton, (Doylestown, Pennsylvania: Wildside Press), 38-9.

‘The practical part of the gospel is equally a stumbling-block to ungodly men, for when men inquire what they must do to be saved, they are told that they must receive the gospel as little children, that they must repent of sin, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Very humbling precepts for human self-sufficiency! And after they are saved, if they inquire what they should do, the precepts are not those which commend themselves to proud, hectoring human nature–for they are such as these– “Be kindly affectioned one to another.” “Forgiving one another and forbearing one another even as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven you.” To the world which loves conquerors, and blasts of trumpets, and chaplets of laurel, this kind of teaching has a marred visage, and an uncomely form.’

Charles Spurgeon, The Treasury of the Bible, Volume 3 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House), 716-7.

to be an atheist who is thankful. Who would you thank? That from a testimony from Dr. Carl Hodges. Thank God He is indeed real.

“What does the man of faith really see today when for a moment he resolutely climbs the mountain, and looks from the standpoint of his living fellowship with God?

. . . all the faithful see Him, and they see Him still in Himself as Love. God is Love. That fact has been forever made sure in human history by the Cross of Christ. That God is love never can be denied by all such souls as have really seen that Cross and have really come into fellowship with it in their own lives, and know its matchless power in the lives of other men. Therefore we know today that we must interpret circumstances by God, and not God by circumstances. The peril of the hour is that men and women of faith may be trying to account for God by the circumstances of affliction. It cannot be done. That is not the true outlook. The true method is that of interpreting the circumstances by the fact of God. Under the shadow of the Cross of the world’s Redeemer, in the presence of all that Cross has wrought in personal life and in history, we are compelled to look again at this dark hour from the standpoint of the abiding, unchanging certainty concerning God, that He is the God of love. When we begin to do that we find that we see God not only in Himself, but in His activity.”

G. Campbell Morgan, The Westminster Pulpit, Volume X (Grand Rapids: Baker Books), 167-8.