The Pursuit of God

The idea that your entire live can be a sacrament, an external expression of inward grace, is a truth that should run in your blood and shape the way you think

One hundred worshippers meeting together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be by other means.

You are surrounded by a spiritual kingdom, always within reach of your inner self, waiting for you to recognize it.

God did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a distance by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken words.

God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities.

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.

O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire.

The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing.

Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him. They should be recognized for what they are, God's loan to us, and should never be considered in any sense our own.

Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us.

The spiritual is real. If we would rise into that region of light and power plainly beckoning us through the Scriptures of truth we must break the evil habit of ignoring the spiritual.

Every man must choose his world. If we who follow Christ, with all the facts before us and knowing what we are about, deliberately choose the Kingdom of God as our sphere of interest I see no reason why anyone should object.

We must avoid the common fault of pushing the 'other world' into the future. It is not future, but present. It parallels our familiar physical world, and the doors between the two worlds are open.

Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there. God and the spiritual world are real. We can reckon upon them with as much assurance as we reckon upon the familiar world around us.

The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free. 'The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.' The life is in the speaking words.

Faith is not in itself a meritorious act; the merit is in the One toward Whom it is directed.

Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.

When we lift our inward eyes to gaze upon God we are sure to meet friendly eyes gazing back at us, for it is written that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout all the earth.

When the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has begun right here on this earth.

God never made salvation depend upon new moons nor holy days or sabbaths.

Lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus and you are instantly in a sanctuary though it be a Pullman berth or a factory or a kitchen.

The whole man must make the decision before the heart can know any real satisfaction. God wants us all, and He will not rest till He gets us all.

In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto.

The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of Christ.

Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.

It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything.

Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people.

We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.

The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die.

When religion has said its last word, there is little that we need other than God Himself.

He had everything, but he possessed nothing. There is the spiritual secret.

Deliver me from the urge to compete, help me to forget myself, and find my true peace in beholding thee.

The ancient curse will not go out painlessly; the tough, old miser within us will not lie down and die obedient to our command. He must be torn out of our heart like a plant from the soil; he must be extracted in agony and blood like a tooth from the jaw.

We must of necessity be a servant to someone, either to God or to sin.

Be thou exalted is the language of victorious spiritual experience.

The moment you make up your mind to exalt God over all, you step out of the world’s parade.

The whole course of life is upset by failure to put God where he belongs. We exalt ourselves instead of God and the curse follows.

In the Scriptures there is practically no effort made to define faith… It assumes the presence of faith and shows what it results in, rather than what it is.

Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do.

Obedience to the word of Christ will bring inward revelation of the Godhead.

Love considers nothing its own but gives all freely to the object of its affection.

It is possible to have some truth in the mind without having the Spirit in the heart, but it is never possible to have the Spirit apart from truth.

The unbelieving mind would not be convinced by any proof, and the worshiping heart needs none.

God alone trusts in Himself; all other beings must trust in him. Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its trust not in the living God but in dying men.

Every man lives by faith, the nonbeliever as well as the saint; the one by faith in natural laws and the other by faith in God.

God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode.

If we cooperate with Him in loving obedience, God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face.

We have almost forgotten that God is a person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can.

We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our soul, closer than our most secret thoughts

Wherever we are, God is here. There is no place, there can be no place, where He is not.

God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking.

Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there. God and the spiritual world are real.

The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal.

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love.

The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities.

He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.

God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature.

Faith enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things.

A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us, altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize it.

God is here when we are wholly unaware of it. He is manifest only when and as we are aware of His Presence.

The great Reality is God who is the Author of that lower and dependent reality which makes up the sum of created things, including ourselves.

The Word of God is quick and powerful. In the beginning He spoke to nothing, and it became something.

Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.

Since believing is looking, it can be done without special equipment or religious paraphernalia.

Essentially salvation is the restoration of a right relation between man and his Creator, a bringing back to normal of the Creator-creature relation.

The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe.

The pursuit of God will embrace the labor of bringing our total personality into conformity to His.

The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself.

The whole course of the life is upset by failure to put God where He belongs. We exalt ourselves instead of God and the curse follows.

The rest He offers is the rest of meekness, the blessed relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to pretend.

God is always seeking to reveal himself to us. He made a verbal proclamation of his nature to Moses, revealing his very self so that Moses’ face shone with supernatural light, Our pursuit of God is successful because he is forever seeking to manifest himself to us.

The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His presence.

Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us.

We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us.

God can be known in personal experience.

We apprehend the physical world by exercising the faculties given us for the purpose, and we possess spiritual faculties by means of which we can know God.

The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.

The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His Presence.

Let any man turn to God in earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness, let him seek to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days.

One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian encounters is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas, the sacred and secular… Its deadliest effect is the complete cleavage it introduces between religion and life… Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry.