Snippets of wisdom and food for thought from the Master's table.
--sayings and quotes from other folks
"Ambition is the grit in the soul which creates disenchantment with the ordinary
and puts the dare into dreams."
-- Max Lucado
Over the past year or so, with deaths of family members and friends, I
have been rereading passages from the book LIFE AFTER DEATH by Tony
Cooke. These following thoughts from that book have especially helped me, and I pray they will you also:"Thoughts of heaven quicken our faith. Our only sure and solid foundation is the hope of heaven. The only solution to earth's mysteries, the only righter of earth's wrongs, and the only cure for worldliness, is heaven. We need an infusion of heaven into our faith and hope that will create a homesickness for that blessed place. God's home is heaven. Eternal life and all good were born there and flourish there. All life, happiness, beauty, and glory are native to the home of God. All this belongs to and awaits the heirs of God in heaven. What a glorious inheritance!" (E.M.Bounds, The Promise of Heaven: A Kingdom, a Crown & an Inheritance (Greenville, S.C.: Ambassador, 2001), pp. 50-51)
God's promise of heaven should have a major influence in the way we live our lives here on earth. We have no reason to be pessimistic or fatalistic about our future. How we think, what we believe, what our attitude is, and how we conduct ourselves here should all be affected by the reality of heaven that is before us. The hope of heaven is what enables us to live our lives and deal with death according to an eternal perspective. (Tony Cooke, life after death, p.178)
"The
smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water,
is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight." --from "The Art of Eating" by M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992).
"It
is that exhilarating melody of the Promised Land that enables us to
dance even now. Our choices in life will mirror for us where our hope
lies and whether we really hear that melody. Only a preoccupation with
this greater glory will remove the lust, pride, and carnal ambition
that plagues us in the present." -- Stacy & Paula Rinehart (LIVING IN LIGHT OF ETERNITY)
"A
person's deepest affections and attachments indicate the path to his
greatest treasure." --Stacy and Paula Rinehart
"It
is good for a man's soul to know what he can do without." --Aristotle
"Entering
into silence is like stepping into cool clear water. The dust and
debris are quietly washed away, and we are purified of our triviality."
-- from "Meditations on Silence" by Sister Wendy Beckett.
"Deep
within your vast interior space is a tabernacle God built to commune
with you. From it He calls you with a tender urgency." -- from "The Fight" by John White.
"When
I can do nothing else, it is enough to have picked up a straw
for the love of God. People look for ways of learning how to
love
God...They take much trouble to abide in His presence by
varied
means. Is it not a shorter and more direct way to do everything for the
love of God, to make use of all the tasks one's lot in life
demands to show Him that love?...There is nothing complicated
about it. One has only to turn to it honestly and simply."-- from "Practicing the Presence of God" by Brother Lawrence
What an
awesome and orderly GOD!!God's accuracy may be observed in the hatching of eggs.
For example:
-the eggs of the potato bug hatch in 7 days;
-those of the canary in 14 days;
-those of the barnyard hen in 21 days;
-The eggs of ducks and geese hatch in 28 days;
-those of the mallard in 35 days;
-The eggs of the parrot and the ostrich hatch in 42 days.
(Notice, they are all divisible by seven, the number of days in a week!)
The lives of each of you may be ordered by the Lord in a beautiful way for His glory, if you will only entrust Him with your life. If you try to regulate your own life, it will only be a mess and a failure. Only the One Who made the brain and the heart can successfully guide them to a profitable end.
God's wisdom is seen in the making of an elephant. The four legs of this great beast all bend forward in the same direction. No other quadruped is so made. God planned that this animal would have a huge body, too large to live on two legs. For this reason He gave it four fulcrums so that it can rise from the ground easily.
The horse rises from the ground on its two front legs first. A cow rises from the ground with its two hind legs first. How wise the Lord is in all His works of creation!
God's wisdom is revealed in His arrangement of sections and segments, as well as in the number of grains:
-Each watermelon has an even number of stripes on the rind.
-Each orange has an even number of segments.
-Each ear of corn has an even number of rows.
-Each stalk of wheat has an even number of grains.
-Every bunch of bananas has on its lowest row an even number of bananas, and each row decreases by one, so that one row has an even number and the next row an odd number.
-The waves of the sea roll in on shore twenty-six to the minute in all kinds of weather.
All grains are found in even numbers on the stalks, and the Lord specified thirty fold, sixty fold, and a hundredfold - all even numbers.
God has caused the flowers to blossom at certain specified times during the day, so that Linnaeus, the great botanist, once said that if he had a conservatory containing the right kind of soil, moisture and temperature, he could tell the time of day or night by the flowers that were open and those that were closed!
Thus the Lord in His wonderful grace can arrange the life that is entrusted to His care in such a way that it will carry out His purposes and plans, and will be fragrant with His presence.
Only the God-planned safe life is successful. Only the life given over to the care of the Lord is fulfilled.
-- author unknown
And the fool has said in his heart there is no God! (Psalm 14:1).
(more to come)
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