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By the year 200 of the Hejira a definite sect of mystics had arisen, and following the instructions of a prominent member, Abu Said, his disciples forsook the world and entered the mystic life with a view of pursuing contemplation and meditation. These disciples wore a garment of wool, and from this received their name. Sufiism spread rapidly in Persia, and all Moslem philosophers were attracted to this sect, as great latitude in the beliefs of its followers was at first permitted, until in the reign of Moktadir, a Persian Sufi named Hallaj was tortured and put to death for teaching publicly that every man is God. After this the Sufis veiled their teachings, and especially in their poetry used amorous language and sang of the delights of the wine cup. In spite of the amorous trend of poetry followed by the Sufis, to the observing eye there appears a beauty and a spirituality of thought which has found many devotees. Ideas of pantheism abound, for God is held to be immanent in all things, expresses itself through all things, and is the transcendent essence of every human soul. For a person to know God is to see that God is immanent in himself.
KEYS (10k)
4 Saint Thomas Aquinas
3 Sri Ramakrishna
1 Vincent van Gogh
1 "Thrice Greatest Hermes"
1 SWAMI RAMA
1 SWAMI PREMANANDA
1 Saint Gianna Molla
1 Pope Gregory the Great
1 Mother Teresa
1 Maximus the Confessor
1 Maurice Blondel
1 Clement of Alexandria
1 Aquinas
1 Angelus Silesius
1 Albert Einstein
1 Sri Ramana Maharshi
1 Sri Aurobindo
1 Saint Teresa of Avila
1 Ibn Arabi
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
22 Timothy J Keller
19 Anonymous
15 A W Tozer
12 J I Packer
11 D A Carson
8 Joel Osteen
7 Leo Tolstoy
7 John Piper
6 Thomas Merton
6 Neale Donald Walsch
6 Elizabeth Gilbert
6 C S Lewis
5 Sri Ramakrishna
5 Silouan the Athonite
5 Paramahansa Yogananda
5 Oswald Chambers
5 Max Lucado
5 Lynette Eason
5 Blaise Pascal
5 Beth Moore
1:I want to know God's thoughts - the rest are mere details.
~ Albert Einstein,#KEYS
2:If men knew themselves, they would know God." ~ Ibn Arabi, #KEYS
3:I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. ~ Vincent van Gogh, #KEYS
4:I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much. ~ Mother Teresa, #KEYS
5:The desire to know God and to love Him cannot be considered a desire in the ordinary sense. ~ SWAMI PREMANANDA, #KEYS
6:Make yourself grow to the greatest, leap forth from every body, transcend all Times, become Eternity, then you should know God." ~ "Thrice Greatest Hermes", #KEYS
7:Rather, we know God's nature through the ways of preeminence, causality, and negation ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.13.8ad2)., #KEYS
8:The problem of God's existence does not exist for God…. It only exists for the beings that are to know God and are to become like him in some fashion themselves. ~ Maurice Blondel, #KEYS
9:Who can know God? It is not for us, nor required, to know God fully. It is enough if we can see and feel that God is the only reality. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
10:He must enter the eternity of Night
And know God's darkness as he knows his Sun. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#KEYS
11:If there existed in our souls a perfect image of God, as the Son is the perfect image of the Father, our mind would know God at once ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.88.3)., #KEYS
12:Man, wouldst thou be a sage, wouldst thou know thyself and know God? First thou shouldst extinguish in thyself the desire of the world. ~ Angelus Silesius, the Eternal Wisdom #KEYS
13:For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, I, 5, par. 3, #KEYS
14:To know God is to love God, therefore the paths of jnana and bhakti (knowledge and devotion) come to the same. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Teachings of Ramana-Maharshi in his Own Words, Ch 6, #KEYS
15:If a man knows himself, he shall know God." ~ Clement of Alexandria, (c. 150 - c. 215), Christian theologian. A convert to Christianity, he was an educated man who was familiar with classical Greek philosophy and literature, Wikipedia., #KEYS
16:God sports in the world as man. He incarnates Himself as man -- as in the case of Krishna, Rama, and Chaitanya. One needs spiritual practice in order to know God and recognize Divine Incarnations. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #KEYS
17:What is a vocation? It is a gift from God, so it comes from God. If it is a gift from God, our concern must be to know God's will. We must enter that path: if God wants, when God wants, how God wants. Never force the door." ~ Saint Gianna Molla, #KEYS
18:The true believer practices what he believes. But of those who pay only lip service to faith, Paul has this to say: They profess to know God, but they deny him in their works. Therefore James says: Faith without works is dead. ~ Pope Gregory the Great, #KEYS
19:[Noetic movement] is the movement of the soul circling around God in a manner beyond knowledge, for the soul does not know God after the manner of beings, owing to God's absolute transcendence of beings. ~ Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 10.3 [1112d-1113a], #KEYS
20:An aspirant must control the dissipation of the mind. Conquest over the senses and the mind helps one to attain freedom from the charms and temptations of the world. Free from worldly distractions, nothing remains in the mind but the longing to know God. ~ SWAMI RAMA, #KEYS
21:To know God as unknown is said to be the pinnacle of knowledge... the mind is found to be most perfectly in possession of knowledge of God when it is recognized that God's essence is above everything that the mind is capable of apprehending. ~ Aquinas, On Boethius's De Trinitate, #KEYS
22:There can be a proportion of the creature to God, insofar as it is related to Him as an effect to its cause, and as potentiality to its act; and in this way the created intellect can be proportioned to know God ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, (ST 1.12.1ad4)., #KEYS
23:Bhakti is the one essential thing. Who can ever know God through reasoning? I want love of God. What do I care about knowing His infinite glories? One bottle of wine makes me drunk. What do I care about knowing how many gallons there are in the grog-shop? One jar of water is enough to quench my thirst. I don't need to know the amount of water there is on earth. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Ramakrishna, #KEYS
24:10.: I do not know whether I have put this clearly; self-knowledge is of such consequence that I would not have you careless of it, though you may be lifted to heaven in prayer, because while on earth nothing is more needful than humility. Therefore, I repeat, not only a good way, but the best of all ways, is to endeavour to enter first by the room where humility is practised, which is far better than at once rushing on to the others. This is the right road;-if we know how easy and safe it is to walk by it, why ask for wings with which to fly? Let us rather try to learn how to advance quickly. I believe we shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavouring to know God, for, beholding His greatness we are struck by our own baseness, His purity shows our foulness, and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are from being humble. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, 1.02, #KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:In the end, we know God as unknown. ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 2:In the end, we know God as unknown. ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 3:We cannot know God apart from His Word. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 4:As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 5:We cannot really know God if we do not pray. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 6:How can you know God if you don't know your big toe? ~ b-k-s-iyengar, @wisdomtrove 7:To know God and to live is the same thing. God is Life. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 8:Since you know God understands, you can boldly go to him. ~ max-lucado, @wisdomtrove 9:The man who would truly know God must give time to Him. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 10:From the moment a soul has the grace to know God, she must seek. ~ mother-teresa, @wisdomtrove 11:Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God. ~ alice-walker, @wisdomtrove 12:Whoever does not know God hidden in suffering does not know God at all. ~ martin-luther, @wisdomtrove 13:we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure. ~ charles-bukowski, @wisdomtrove 14:You will never know God's strength until He has supported you in deep waters. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 15:To know God is to fear Him. And this fear is to love Him as He deserves to be loved. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 16:Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 17:If we know God is for us, then it shouldn't matter how we feel, or what other people think of us. ~ joyce-meyer, @wisdomtrove 18:To truly know God we must long for Him without any other motive than reaching God Himself. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 19:If yuh don't know God yuh goin' suffer and dead! No God Noh Partial, regardless weh yuh deh pon earth. ~ bob-marley, @wisdomtrove 20:Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 21:It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God. ~ leo-tolstoy, @wisdomtrove 22:I know God is in charge. Not me, I'm nothing. I wouldn't be anything except for the power of the spirit of God. ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 23:Come to the Word with a spirit of longing with devotion and humble expectation. Be determined to know God. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 24:Let each man follow his own path. if he sincerely and ardently wishes to know God, peace be unto him! He will surely reach Him. ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove 25:You must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 26:When you know God as peace within, then you will realize Him as peace existing in the universal harmony of all things without. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 27:If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, & 28:God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. The man who would know God must give time to Him. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 29:If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God. ~ ken-wilber, @wisdomtrove 30:The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Jews know the true God, and love only the earth. The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 31:We should bathe our spirits in the deep, pure feeling that stirs within us when we gaze on the glories of His creation. This is the way to know God as beauty. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 32:So we can only know God well by knowing our iniquities. Therefore those who have known God, without knowing their wretchedness, have not glorified Him, but have glorified themselves. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 33:The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 34:The nearer we are to God, the less we will have occasions to cry or weep. The further we are from God, the more will long faces come. The more we know God, the more misery vanishes. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 35:Remember that you can pray any time, anywhere. Washing dishes, digging ditches, working in the office, in the shop, on the athletic field, even in prison - you can pray and know God hears! ~ billy-graham, @wisdomtrove 36:If you are not radiant with joy and friendliness, if you are not filled to overflowing with love and goodwill for all beings and all creatures and all creation, one thing is certain: you do not know God! ~ peace-pilgrim, @wisdomtrove 37:In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove 38:I really believe that what we finally want is to know God, as God has come to be known through Jesus. Knowledge is knowledge of the heart - the Spirit - I would say. It is the Spirit in us who reveals God. ~ henri-nouwen, @wisdomtrove 39:When we attempt to isolate another we only isolate ourselves. We are all God's children and there are no favorites. God is revealed to all who seek; God speaks to all who will listen. Be still and know God. ~ peace-pilgrim, @wisdomtrove 40:We are all part of the One Spirit. When you experience the true meaning of religion, which is to know God, you will realize that He is your Self, and that He exists equally and impartially in all beings. ~ paramahansa-yogananda, @wisdomtrove 41:If you wish to know God, you must know his Word. If you wish to perceive His power, you must see how He works by his Word. If you wish to know His purpose before it comes to pass, you can only discover it by His Word. ~ charles-spurgeon, @wisdomtrove 42:Understanding human nature is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing it can we know God. It is also a fact that the knowledge of God is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing God can we understand human nature. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove 43:For me God isn’t a great spirit that is separate from me. God is the primal oneness that is conscious through me. God is the mystery of being that is arising as all beings. And when I know God I experience a love that embraces all beings. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 44:Not only do we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ. We know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 45:Question: Since the will of the individual is illusory and one does not know God's will, how can one lead a purposeful life in this world. Ma: By contemplating the Self, one will find out. It is man's principal duty to aspire to Self-realization. ~ anandamayi-ma, @wisdomtrove 46:We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 47:The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 48:We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God; for, beholding His greatness we realize our own littleness; His purity shows us our foulness; and by meditating upon His humility we find how very far we are from being humble. ~ teresa-of-avila, @wisdomtrove 49:... knowing God is the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God's assistance and according to His intention. Wherever God is, there He is always creating... He wants to create a new human being. To need God is to become new. And to know God is the crucial thing. ~ soren-kierkegaard, @wisdomtrove 50:Love is basic for the very survival of mankind. I'm convinced that love is the only absolute ultimately; love is the highest good. He who loves has somehow discovered the meaning of ultimate reality. He who hates does not know God; he who hates has no knowledge of God. Love is the supreme unifying principle of life. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 51:To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God. ~ elizabeth-gilbert, @wisdomtrove 52:I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality. ~ martin-luther-king, @wisdomtrove 53:The man who knows God but does not know his own misery, becomes proud. The man who knows his own misery but does not know God, ends in despair... the knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course because in him we find both God and our own misery. Jesus Christ is therefore a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair. ~ blaise-pascal, @wisdomtrove 54:In my creature impatience I am often caused to wish that there were some way to bring modern Christians into a deeper spiritual life painlessly by short, easy lessons; but such wishes are vain. No shortcut exists. God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. It is well that we accept the hard truth now: The man who would know God must give time to Him. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 55:The mystics are not content to have a relationship with God via priests and institutions, but look inside themselves to know God directly. When they do, God is revealed as an all-embracing love that unites the universe into one indivisible whole. In communion with God, the mystics no longer experience themselves as separate individuals but as expressions of the Oneness. God is the only reality. God is everything. God does everything. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove 56:The Sacrament of the Body of the Lord puts the demons to flight, defends us against the incentives to vice and to concupiscence, cleanses the soul from sin, quiets the anger of God, enlightens the understanding to know God, inflames the will and the affections with the love of God, fills the memory with spiritual sweetness, confirms the entire man in good, frees us from eternal death, multiplies the merits of a good life, leads us to our everlasting home, and re-animates the body to eternal life ~ denis-diderot, @wisdomtrove 57:The Sacrament of the Body of the Lord puts the demons to flight, defends us against the incentives to vice and to concupiscence, cleanses the soul from sin, quiets the anger of God, enlightens the understanding to know God, inflames the will and the affections with the love of God, fills the memory with spiritual sweetness, confirms the entire man in good, frees us from eternal death, multiplies the merits of a good life, leads us to our everlasting home, and re-animates the body to eternal life ~ thomas-aquinas, @wisdomtrove 58:& 59:Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a world where everybody said, & 60:Yet if we would know God and for other's sake tell what we know we must try to speak of his love. All Christians have tried but none has ever done it very well. I can no more do justice to that awesome and wonder-filled theme than a child can grasp a star. Still by reaching toward the star the child may call attention to it and even indicate the direction one must look to see it. So as I stretch my heart toward the high shining love of God someone who has not before known about it may be encouraged to look up and have hope. ~ aiden-wilson-tozer, @wisdomtrove 61:Do you know God? Do you know there is a power greater than ourselves which manifests itself within us as well as everywhere else in the universe? This I call God. Do you know what it is to know God, to have God's constant guidance, a constant awareness of God's presence? To know God is to reflect love toward all people and all creations. To know God is to feel peace within - a calmness, a serenity, an unshakeableness which enables you to face any situation. To know God is to be so filled with joy that it bubbles over and goes forth to bless the world. ~ peace-pilgrim, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:I know God is my vindicator. ~ Joel Osteen, #NFDB
2:I want to know God's thoughts. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
3:I know God is working so I smile! ~ Kirk Franklin, #NFDB
4:The only way to know god is to become god. ~ Osho, #NFDB
5:To know God and to make Him known. ~ Loren Cunningham, #NFDB
6:Trials can be hard, if you don't know God. ~ Al Green, #NFDB
7:I know God exits, but I don't know where. ~ Mason Cooley, #NFDB
8:Oh, to know God's private address. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, #NFDB
9:No God, no peace. Know God, know peace. ~ Karen Kingsbury, #NFDB
10:As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
11:In the end, we know God as unknown. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
12:To know God's love is indeed heaven on earth. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
13:By faith we know God without seeing Him. By ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
14:We cannot really know God if we do not pray. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
15:The man who would truly know God must give time to Him. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
16:How can you know God if you don't know your big toe? ~ B K S Iyengar, #NFDB
17:I want to know God’s thoughts … the rest are details. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
18:To know God and to live is the same thing. God is Life. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
19:Since you know God understands, you can boldly go to him. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
20:The whole meaning of prayer is that we may know God. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
21:If we don't fear God, it's because we don't know God. ~ Craig Groeschel, #NFDB
22:Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God. ~ John Ruskin, #NFDB
23:Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
24:Sanford, Florida, ========== Can I Know God's Will?: 4 (Crucial ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
25:I want to know God's thoughts - the rest are mere details. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
26:You never know God is all you need until God is all you have. ~ Monique Duke, #NFDB
27:To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
28:Are you willing to go the extra mile in this new year to know God? ~ Mark Hart, #NFDB
29:One seeks to know the self better in order to know God better. ~ Edwin Gaustad, #NFDB
30:The more we get to know God, the more we want to know him better. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
31:I want to know God's thoughts - the rest are mere details.
~ Albert Einstein,#NFDB
32:You can know a lot about God and godliness and still not know God. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
33:From the moment a soul has the grace to know God, she must seek. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
34:Religion means to know God and to love Him. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhup da, #NFDB
35:The way to love God is to begin to know God’s love to you. ~ D Martyn Lloyd Jones, #NFDB
36:You were placed on earth to know God. Everything else is secondary. ~ Greg Laurie, #NFDB
37:If you don’t know God as beautiful and satisfying, you don’t know him. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
38:We know God easily, if we do not constrain ourselves to define him. ~ Joseph Joubert, #NFDB
39:But to get to know God's friends is a very good way of "having" Him; ~ Teresa of vila, #NFDB
40:Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God. ~ Alice Walker, #NFDB
41:I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. ~ Vincent van Gogh, #NFDB
42:There is no believing in God. We either know God, or we do not. ~ Gregory David Roberts, #NFDB
43:Trying to know God and serve Him before we come to love Him is exhausting. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
44:Whoever does not know God hidden in suffering does not know God at all. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
45:Even good government was not good enough to know God among the thieves. ~ G K Chesterton, #NFDB
46:I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. ~ Vincent van Gogh, #NFDB
47:I cannot hope to know God’s will until I begin to search … and listen. ~ Kathleen Morgan, #NFDB
48:In all things seek to know God's Will and when known obey at any cost. ~ Jonathan Goforth, #NFDB
49:It has been said that we can know God only in so far as we can become God. ~ Ernest Holmes, #NFDB
50:A beautiful heart wants to know God and gets to know him through his Word. ~ Lauren Scruggs, #NFDB
51:But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. ~ Vincent Van Gogh, #NFDB
52:We know God is dead, they’ve told us, but listening to you I wasn’t sure. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
53:we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure. ~ Charles Bukowski, #NFDB
54:A culture that must express its gods in visual images cannot know God accurately. ~ Tony Reinke, #NFDB
55:You will never know God's strength until He has supported you in deep waters. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
56:For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God? ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
57:If you want to know God as your Father, you need to know Jesus Christ as your Savior. ~ Kevin DeYoung, #NFDB
58:It helps that I know God’s motives are good even when he allows bad things to happen. ~ Lynette Eason, #NFDB
59:When I know God's place, I can know my place— then things start to fall into place. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
60:I want to be around people smart enough to know God created the heavens and the earth. ~ Mike Huckabee, #NFDB
61:It's funny how aimless a person can feel at times, even when they know God is in control. ~ Chris Fabry, #NFDB
62:The end of all learning is to know God, and out of that knowledge to love and imitate Him. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
63:As I see it, we shall never succeed in knowing ourselves unless we seek to know God: let ~ Teresa of vila, #NFDB
64:For the better we know God, the more we will want all of our existence to revolve around him, ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
65:I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
66:Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
67:The one thing we most urgently need is a deeper knowledge of God. We need to know God better. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
68:To know God without being God-like is like trying to swim without entering water. —OREST BEDRIJ ~ Mark Nepo, #NFDB
69:By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
70:The whole duty of humanity, from a Christian perspective is: 'To know God and to show God.' ~ James Patterson, #NFDB
71:A fear-stricken person can never know God, and one who knows God will never fear a mortal man. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
72:The reason you don't get to know God is because you're afraid. You're afraid of the immensity. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
73:I don’t believe in God. I know God! Once you know someone, believing is no longer a concern. ~ William Paul Young, #NFDB
74:I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that he didn't trust me so much. ~ Mother Teresa, #NFDB
75:In Hermes' eyes Mankind's greatest error is that he has the power to know God and yet does not use it. ~ Tim Freke, #NFDB
76:If yuh don't know God yuh goin' suffer and dead! No God Noh Partial, regardless weh yuh deh pon earth. ~ Bob Marley, #NFDB
77:I shall never know God if I do not wrestle with and against evil, even at the cost of life itself. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
78:The main purpose of prayer is not to make life easier, nor to gain magical powers, but to know God. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
79:But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone. ~ Alice Hoffman, #NFDB
80:Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
81:It is terrible when people do not know God, but it is worse when people identify as God what is not God. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
82:I used to think I had to act a certain way to follow God, but now I know God doesn’t want us to be typical. ~ Bob Goff, #NFDB
83:One cannot know God by means of the mind. One can but turn the mind inwards and merge it in God. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
84:Repentance (Greek, metanoia) means "change of mind." So as we get to know God, we get to know ourselves. ~ R T Kendall, #NFDB
85:Samuel didn’t know God was speaking to him until his mentor Eli helped him understand what was happening. ~ Jeff Goins, #NFDB
86:The chief reason people do not know God is not because He hides from them but because they hide from Him. ~ John Stott, #NFDB
87:Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis. ~ Elaine Pagels, #NFDB
88:No man can know God unless God has taught him; that is to say, that without God, God cannot be known. ~ Irenaeus of Lyons, #NFDB
89:The greatest privilege any of us can have is this: we can know God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. ~ Sinclair B Ferguson, #NFDB
90:He was simply doing what all men tend to do who don’t know God, namely, worshipping himself as a god. ~ John F MacArthur Jr, #NFDB
91:To know God is to be transformed, and thus to be introduced to a life that could not otherwise be experienced. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
92:We know God will answer us when we call because one terrible day he did not answer Jesus when he called. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
93:When people ask me how they can know Gods plan for their lives, I tell them the best first step is to know God. ~ Pete Wilson, #NFDB
94:I know God is in charge. Not me, I'm nothing. I wouldn't be anything except for the power of the spirit of God. ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
95:As we come to know God better, we will also find it easier to know, follow, and accept His will for our life. ~ Elizabeth George, #NFDB
96:The only thing that truly satisfies the longing within is to know God more intimately today than we did yesterday. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
97:I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.” -Mother Teresa ~ Angela Roquet, #NFDB
98:The one thing we most urgently need in Western Christendom is a deeper knowledge of God. We need to know God better. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
99:But heaven save us from those who think they personally know God’s will and have to enforce it for the rest of us. ~ Nanci Rathbun, #NFDB
100:If we want to know God personally, to relate to Him intimately, we must be prepared to receive and experience His glory. ~ Che Ahn, #NFDB
101:Since it is impossible, without God, to come to knowledge of God, he teaches men through his Word to know God. ~ Irenaeus of Lyons, #NFDB
102:You cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world. ~ Andrew Klavan, #NFDB
103:You can not know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world. ~ Andrew Klavan, #NFDB
104:But I didn't get there easily. It helps that I know God's motives are good even when He allows bad things to happen. ~ Lynette Eason, #NFDB
105:When you can turn people on their head and shake them and no money falls out, then you know God's saying, "Move on, son." ~ A A Allen, #NFDB
106:You cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world. In ~ Andrew Klavan, #NFDB
107:I can know about God, that’s the body of truth. But I can’t know God, the soul of truth, unless I am ready to be obedient. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
108:God, as I use the word, is another name for what is. I always know God's intention: It's exactly what is in every moment. ~ Byron Katie, #NFDB
109:I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness. -Al Pacino ~ Sapphire Knight, #NFDB
110:The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
111:The deepest repentance and humility and our own frailty and weakness must be realized before we can know God's strength. ~ Frank Bartleman, #NFDB
112:To know God, you must appreciate the salvaging will of His son. Through Christ, we become true leaders worthy of rewards! ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
113:In Bonaventure’s view only one who is on a journey to God can really know God; faith seeks understanding through the path of love. ~ Ilia Delio, #NFDB
114:How do you know what God’s plan is?
Follow the joy. You know God’s plan by doing the things that bring you great joy. ~ Margaret Brownley,#NFDB
115:I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind. ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
116:If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, 'I am.' To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
117:To know God and not oneself to be God, to know blessedness and not oneself to enjoy it, is a state of disunity or unhappiness. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
118:For the believer wanting to know God’s will for her life, the first question to pose is not “What should I do?” but “Who should I be? ~ Jen Wilkin, #NFDB
119:that human life is an opportunity to come to know God, but that to fulfil this divine purpose we must cease to be enslaved by the body. ~ Tim Freke, #NFDB
120:He believed in God even if he was doubtful of men's claims to know God's mind. But that a God unable to forgive was no God at all. ~ Cormac McCarthy, #NFDB
121:I am a gay, Christian, farm girl from Kansas who sang Country Music and I did the very best I could do - to know God and to share God. ~ Chely Wright, #NFDB
122:And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. ~ Mainak Dhar, #NFDB
123:He must enter the eternity of Night
And know God’s darkness as he knows his Sun. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain,#NFDB
124:When you know God as peace within, then you will realize Him as peace existing in the universal harmony of all things without. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
125:Abraham Lincoln suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words. ~ Sarah Palin, #NFDB
126:What other goal could there be, then finding one's self within God and God within one's very Self? For as we know God, we also are known. ~ Vivian Amis, #NFDB
127:And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
128:How sad to see a worthless man who claims to know God confirm by running back to the road of self-righteousness that he never met Him. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
129:The perfection of learning is to know God in such a way that, though you realize he is knowable, yet you know him as indescribable. ~ Hilary of Poitiers, #NFDB
130:Man, wouldst thou be a sage, wouldst thou know thyself and know God? First thou shouldst extinguish in thyself the desire of the world. ~ Angelus Silesius, #NFDB
131:The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
132:Waiting is an expectant patience. It's a patience that says, "I don't know what God is going to do, but I know God is going to do something." ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
133:But you know that already, don’t you, Raiden Miller?” she asked. “You already know God’s use for you ’cause He’s needed to use you before. ~ Kristen Ashley, #NFDB
134:Never try to have more faith - just get to know God better. And because God is faithful, the better you know Him, the more you'll trust Him. ~ John Ortberg, #NFDB
135:All the great teachers have left a similar message: Go within, discover your invisible higher self and know God as the love that is within you. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
136:I don't see the big picture. I don't have a clue. But I know God does. I'm going to declare that, even if I don't feel it right now. ~ Steven Curtis Chapman, #NFDB
137:Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
138:Our part is to get to know God, as a Father and a friend. But to understand Him? His ways are far past our understanding. Infinitely far. ~ Elizabeth Musser, #NFDB
139:Quite simply, if our life of prayer is inconsistent, our ability to do or know God’s will throughout the day will have the same inconsistency. ~ Matthew Kelly, #NFDB
140:Our difficulty is not that we don't know God's will. Our discomfort comes from the fact that we do know His will, but we do not want to do it. ~ Henry Blackaby, #NFDB
141:When I embrace God for who He is and I understand who I am—when I know God's place, I can know my place—then things start to fall into place. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
142:In deep confusion, in great despair, when I reach out for him, he is there. When I am lonely as I can be, then I know God shines his light on me. ~ Van Morrison, #NFDB
143:In the Bible, there is no mention of the Trinity. . . . We get to know God, not through our proud philosophical concepts, but through Christ. ~ Michael Servetus, #NFDB
144:Know God and let Him be known. You were saved by grace for greater works apportioned for you even before you were born. Share the good news. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
145:“But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.” ~ Vincent Van GoghThe Epigraph to "Red Bird" by Mary Oliver [Born on this day, in 1935], #NFDB
146:God illumines the mind and shines within it. One cannot know God by means of the mind. One can but turn the mind inwards and merge it in God. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, #NFDB
147:It is because we know God’s will that we may say to Him: “God, we want You to do this thing, we are determined that You do it, You cannot but do it. ~ Watchman Nee, #NFDB
148:The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way. ~ William Barclay, #NFDB
149:We look upon prayer simply as a means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
150:If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God. ~ Ken Wilber, #NFDB
151:Looking back, I see now that I’ve come to know God more in the pastures, and wildernesses, and white spaces, and valleys than I have on the mountaintops. ~ J D Greear, #NFDB
152:Then each of you will control his own body and live in holiness and honor- not in lustful passion like the pagans who do not know God and his ways. ~ Paul the Apostle, #NFDB
153:If I really wanted to know God, I had to cast myself upon His mercy and love, relying completely upon Him and His willingness to reveal Himself to me. ~ Nabeel Qureshi, #NFDB
154:Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord. J.I. Packer ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
155:They know God exists already that’s old. I think now they’re trying to figure what to do with It.” “What to do with God.” “Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect. ~ Peter Watts, #NFDB
156:So to “love God with all your mind” means engaging all your powers of thought to know God as fully as possible in order to treasure him for all he is worth. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
157:When people ask me how they can know God's will for their lives, I tell them the best first step is to know God. Beyond that I really don't have any steps. ~ Pete Wilson, #NFDB
158:To know God, you need only to renounce one thing—your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
159:What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it - the fact that He knows me. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
160:When people say, "I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself," they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God's. ~ Timothy Keller, #NFDB
161:For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God. ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, I, 5, par. 3, #NFDB
162:When people say, "I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself," they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God's. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
163:To know God, know your heart (conscience). After you know your heart, you will learn to see God in all things. Truth can only be seen by those with Truth in them. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
164:We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
165:Who can know God fully? It is not given to us, nor is it required of us, to know Him fully. It is enough if we can see Him - feel that He is the only reality. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
166:There's a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. When you truly know God, you have energy to serve Him, boldness to share Him, and contentment in Him. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
167:Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone one who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
168:Never make choices simply because someone told you what is right. Know yourself, know your situation, know God for yourself, and decide what is right for your life. ~ Dianna Anderson, #NFDB
169:The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Jews know the true God, and love only the earth. The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
170:We should bathe our spirits in the deep, pure feeling that stirs within us when we gaze on the glories of His creation. This is the way to know God as beauty. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
171:Only a humble person can come to know God because the humble person can recognize that there is something more powerful, more complete and more perfect than they are. ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
172:Let God direct your steps. The main reason why many steps fail is that people know God is an expert in directing steps, but they don’t want to give him the contract. ~ Israelmore Ayivor, #NFDB
173:The knowledge of self is the most important thing, because how are you going to know God if you don't know yourself? How are you going to know anything if you don't know yourself? ~ RZA, #NFDB
174:And where people do not want to know God, he usually allows them to be without him—at least for a while. When desire conflicts with reality, sooner or later reality wins. ~ Dallas Willard, #NFDB
175:I don't think you can know God unless you're passionate about him so you're either screaming at him, enraptured with the idea of being around him or feeling him in your life. ~ Jim Carrey, #NFDB
176:I have never come to know God, to see God, to believe in God through doing science. He's not the conclusion of some sort of process of my personal scientific investigation. ~ George Coyne, #NFDB
177:It is the experience of being forgiven that moves us to forgive. The extent to which we know God’s mercy in our lives is the extent to which we will treat each other mercifully. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
178:There is no point in romanticizing other religions that reject the deity and saving work of Christ. They do not know God. And those who follow them tragically waste their lives. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
179:you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window. You will not see the sky if you have covered the glass with blue paint. But ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
180:He who from the depth of his soul seeks to know God will certainly realize Him. He must. He alone who is restless for God and seeks nothing but Him will certainly realize Him. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
181:God created man to know Him, and to know Him in a fuller degree than any other creature can know God. No other creature has Christ, and no other creature has the capacity to know God. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
182:Pastors and missionaries (need) to know God and to find in him a Treasure more satisfying than any other person or thing or relationship or experience or accomplishment in the world. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
183:We aren't Christians because we live like Christians; we are Christians because we have accepted the gift of salvation. We have come to know God on an experiential, authentic level. ~ Judah Smith, #NFDB
184:This is what Descartes meant when he said: 'I know God before I know myself.' The only mark of God in us is that we feel that we are not God. ~ Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy (1959), p. 90, #NFDB
185:A clear conscience is absolutely essential for distinguishing between the voice of God and the voice of the enemy. Unconfessed sin is a prime reason why many do not know God's will. ~ Winkie Pratney, #NFDB
186:So we can only know God well by knowing our iniquities. Therefore those who have known God, without knowing their wretchedness, have not glorified Him, but have glorified themselves. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
187:God has witnessed everything done to you. Those that love God will feel shame for what they did. Those that don't ....do not know God or have a concept of repentance or forgiveness. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
188:The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
189:7Beloved, j let us love one another, for love is from God, and k whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 l Anyone who does not love does not know God, because m God is love. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
190:The nearer we are to God, the less we will have occasions to cry or weep. The further we are from God, the more will long faces come. The more we know God, the more misery vanishes. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
191:Instead, we must look at suffering—whatever the proximate causes—as primarily a way to know God better, as an opening for serving, resembling, and drawing near to him as never before. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
192:I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know God's thoughts, the rest are details. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
193:There are those who say that to know God you must overcome all earthly passions. Yet to understand and accept them is enough. What you resist persists. What you look at disappears. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
194:Why should I ever resist any delay or disapointment, any affliction or oppression or humiliation - when I know God will use it in my life to make me like Jesus and to prepare me for heaven? ~ Kay Arthur, #NFDB
195:Remember that you can pray any time, anywhere. Washing dishes, digging ditches, working in the office, in the shop, on the athletic field, even in prison - you can pray and know God hears! ~ Billy Graham, #NFDB
196:We live in a broken world full of broken people. But isn’t it comforting to know God isn’t ever broken? He isn’t ever caught off guard, taken by surprise, or shocked by what happens next. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
197:As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
198:As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
199:Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. —1 JOHN 4:7–8 ~ Sarah Young, #NFDB
200:God is supplying all of our needs. He is Jehovah-Jireh; the Lord our Provider. This may seem impossible but I know God can do the impossible. Where God gives vision He always provides provision. ~ Joel Osteen, #NFDB
201:I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore of humanity. What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul. . . . I know God is neither in heaven nor down below, but in everyone. ~ Mahatma Gandhi, #NFDB
202:The fact that we are born with the potential to go from simple survival to God-consciousness is the remarkable trait that sets our nervous systems apart from all other creatures. How to Know God. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
203:It's tempting to get lost in the study, to turn to books and study groups and classes, to know all about God but not know God himself, to read about the Bible rather than read the Bible itself. ~ Michelle DeRusha, #NFDB
204:Every person has a life mission to fulfill. Never attempt to destroy what God has put in another person to do. You don't know God's plans, but Satan will most certainly use you to stop his plans. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
205:We must know before we can love. In order to know God, we must often think of Him; and when we come to love Him, we shall then also think of Him often, for our heart will
be with our treasure. ~ Brother Lawrence,#NFDB
206:God sports in the world as man. He incarnates Himself as man -- as in the case of Krishna, Rama, and Chaitanya. One needs spiritual practice in order to know God and recognize Divine Incarnations. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
207:God sports in the world as man. He incarnates Himself as man --- as in the case of Krishna, Rama, and Chaitanya. One needs spiritual practice in order to know God and recognize Divine Incarnations. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, #NFDB
208:We only know God in His works, but we are forced by science to admit and to believe with absolute confidence in a Directive Power-in an influence other than physical, or dynamical, or electrical forces. ~ Lord Kelvin, #NFDB
209:the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
210:Looking back, I find it remarkable how easily I accepted ideas about God as substitutes for direct experience of him. It took me a long time to begin to know God through my heart and not simply my head. ~ David G Benner, #NFDB
211:9But now that you have come to know God, or rather o to be known by God, p how can you turn back again to q the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
212:If a person really wants to know God and will give up his sin and turn to Christ, God will make Himself real to him. In our day the problem is that a great many folk do not really mean business with God. ~ J Vernon McGee, #NFDB
213:Ignorance of God's prophetic outline, failure to know God's program for the Church, the nations, and Israel, is the cause of the overwhelming amount of error and misunderstanding of the events of the future. ~ M R DeHaan, #NFDB
214:In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all. ~ C S Lewis, #NFDB
215:I really believe that what we finally want is to know God, as God has come to be known through Jesus. Knowledge is knowledge of the heart - the Spirit - I would say. It is the Spirit in us who reveals God. ~ Henri Nouwen, #NFDB
216:I am not asking whether you know things about Him but do you know God, are you enjoying God, is God the centre of your life, the soul of your being, the source of your greatest joy? He is meant to be. ~ Martyn Lloyd Jones, #NFDB
217:If God sees that my spiritual life will be furthered by giving the things for which I ask, then He will give them, but that is not the end of prayer. The end of prayer is that I come to know God Himself. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
218:If you just know God, have a sense of His depth of love and abundance of grace all for you in Christ, you’ll consequently find wealth appropriately unimpressive and suffering appropriately untroubling. This ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
219:Anyone, without exception, can know God if they really want to simply by praying, by honestly telling Him that they want to know Him. He always responds to honest seekers. Jesus promised, 'All who seek, find. ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
220:But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more? (Gal. 4:9) ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
221:When we know God to be our Father, should we not desire that he be known as such by all? And if we do not have this passion, that all creatures do him homage, is it not a sign that his glory means little to us? ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
222:God. Our highest destiny is to know God, to be in personal relationship with him. Our chief claim to nobility as human beings is that we were made in the image of God and are therefore capable of knowing him. ~ John R W Stott, #NFDB
223:The choice before us is rather stark: either live to be comfortable (both internally and externally, but especially internally), or live to know God. We can’t have it both ways. One choice excludes the other. P91 ~ Larry Crabb, #NFDB
224:2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
225:It’s breathtaking to picture almighty God saying, “I know Francis Chan. He’s my son. I love him!” Are you confident this is what God would say if I asked Him about you? Do you know God or just know about Him? Are ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
226:That doesn’t mean we should say, “Bring me more struggle because more people will get salvation.” None of us runs eagerly into that battle. But when the battle comes to us, we know God is working a great purpose. ~ Louie Giglio, #NFDB
227:We are all part of the One Spirit. When you experience the true meaning of religion, which is to know God, you will realize that He is your Self, and that He exists equally and impartially in all beings. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
228:But kids like us grow up and need our own relationship with God, forged in the heart through time and experience, not draped around us by the church we attend. We need to know God for ourselves, not secondhand. ~ Frank E Peretti, #NFDB
229:Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
230:We know God is there, but we tend to see him as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, he has not become our happiness. We therefore pray to procure things, not to know him better. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
231:I know God enjoys hearing my take on how best we should all proceed, as I'm always full of useful advice. I'm sure God says either, "Oh, I so love Annie's selfless and evolved thoughts," or else "Jeez. What a head case. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
232:Give up this dry discussion, this hodge-podge of philosophy. Who has been able to know God by reasoning? Even sages like Suka and Vyasa are at best like big ants trying to carry away a few grains of sugar from a large hea. ~ Sarada Devi, #NFDB
233:If you wish to know God, you must know his Word. If you wish to perceive His power, you must see how He works by his Word. If you wish to know His purpose before it comes to pass, you can only discover it by His Word. ~ Charles Spurgeon, #NFDB
234:I grew up on the island, Trinidad to be exact, and I never thought it would be possible. These sort of things happen once in a lifetime. I just know God is bigger than me and everything I do is to serve and please Him. ~ Heather Headley, #NFDB
235:Know God’s Will? How Should I Live in This World? What Does It Mean to Be Born Again? Can I Be Sure I’m Saved? What Is Faith? What Can I Do with My Guilt? What Is the Trinity? What Is Baptism? Can I Have Joy in My Life? Who ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
236:I can rise above the humility of my failure with an intense desire to search deeper and a blind faith that some day my sight may pierce through the veils that hide. I know God's face is there if I keep my gaze steady enough. ~ Emily Carr, #NFDB
237:Understanding human nature is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing it can we know God. It is also a fact that the knowledge of God is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing God can we understand human nature. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
238:Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. ROMANS 12:2 NLT ~ Various, #NFDB
239:If you don’t love somebody, it gets annoying when they tell you what to do or what to feel. When you love them you get pleasure from their pleasure, and it makes it easy to serve. I didn’t love God because I didn’t know God. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
240:The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience. ~ Muhammad Iqbal, #NFDB
241:To be honest with you, I am passionate about all the people out there who want to know Jesus, they want to know God, and they are sick of a system that is hung up on a bunch of things that have nothing to do with the love of God. ~ Rob Bell, #NFDB
242:You cannot know God until you've stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking that you've already heard God. I cannot tell you My Truth until you stop telling Me yours. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
243:When things don't turn out the way we want, about the only thing we can do is know God is still there piecing together all the scraps of the events in our lives the way He has planned. He sees the big picture even when we don't. ~ Jody Hedlund, #NFDB
244:When believers come to know God's love heart-deep, we are compelled to live into that love life-deep. To be preapproved means this: We love from our approval, not for our approval. We love without expecting anything in return. ~ Jennifer Dukes Lee, #NFDB
245:We imagine that our theological/conceptual systems are the means by which we know God as God is. I truly believe that such postures and perspectives put us in danger of conceptual idolatry, worshiping our ideas of and frameworks for God. ~ Tim Keel, #NFDB
246:It's a sweet thing, faith. With it, you can handle any circumstance, any crisis, because you know God always has your back. And when God is for you, who can be against you? Nobody. As my Aunt Hattie says, "One and God are a majority." ~ Patti LaBelle, #NFDB
247:Things are much simpler here than we like. Not that we do not know God’s commandments, but that we do not do them—and then gradually, as a consequence of such disobedience, we no longer know what is right—that is our predicament. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
248:Why was this bloody world created?"
"As a sewer for the stars," a voice in front of him said. "Alternatively to know God and to glorify Him forever."
" [...] The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative. ~ Charles Williams,#NFDB
249:Our security, once and for all, lies with no one but God and our relationship with Him. And we need not be obsessed with that relationship for it to give us peace. We need do little more than seek to know God better for the grace to come. ~ Karen Casey, #NFDB
250:The best way to avoid meaningless repetition is to continue getting to know God. The better you know a person, the more the two of you have to discuss. Whenever you learn something new about our great God, include that in your prayer life. ~ Tony Evans, #NFDB
251:Not only do we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ. We know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
252:teach them how to know God." "Why?" "So that they will be saved. Because it was Christ's command that His disciples should give the message. I am His disciple, so I have to tell the message." "Was there any special stipulation as ~ Grace Livingston Hill, #NFDB
253:The exercise of force is contrary to the principles of God’s government; He desires only the service of love; and love cannot be commanded; it cannot be won by force or authority. Only by love is love awakened. To know God is to love Him; ~ Ellen G White, #NFDB
254:I’d like to encourage Christian women to be whatever you want to be and to do so with your ultimate purpose of glorifying God in mind. Wherever you go, just know God will be there too! He has put ambition in your heart for a reason. ~ Candace Cameron Bure, #NFDB
255:Extreme measures bring extreme results. If you want a normal life, do what normal people do. If you want to know God intimately, walk with Him daily, and please Him in every way, you're going to have to do what few do. Absolutely nothing. ~ Craig Groeschel, #NFDB
256:What were we made for? To know God. What aim should we have in life? To know God. What is the eternal life that Jesus gives? To know God. What is the best thing in life? To know God. What in humans gives God most pleasure? Knowledge of himself. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
257:The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
258:The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all. If ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
259:We’ll do our business in the East Room. It’s my favorite at this time of day. If you and I didn’t know God is a profitable and self-sustaining construct of the worlds’ churches, the morning light would be almost enough to make us believers again. ~ Stephen King, #NFDB
260:The Lord does not show Himself to a proud soul. The proud soul, no matter how many books it reads, will never know God, since by its pride it does not give place for the grace of the Holy Spirit, while God is known only by the humble soul. ~ Silouan the Athonite, #NFDB
261:We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
262:No one can know a person’s thoughts except that person’s own spirit, and no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit. 12 And we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given us. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
263:C. S. Lewis pointed out that some people are angry with God for His not existing, and others for His existing but for failing to do as mortals would have Him do. Instead of such childishness, we are urged to know God and to learn of His attributes. ~ Neal A Maxwell, #NFDB
264:By striving to prove how much they deserve God’s love, legalists miss the whole point of the gospel, that it is a gift from God to people who don’t deserve it. The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
265:To know God as the sovereign disposer of all good, inviting us to present our requests, and yet not to approach or ask of him, were so far from availing us, that it were just as if one told of a treasure were to allow it to remain buried in the ground. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
266:If we're going to know God as he truly is, then we must come face to face with the God who kills people. We cannot sanitize God or smooth out his jagged edges. We cannot pick the parts of God we like and discard the rest. We must take God as he is. ~ Stephen Altrogge, #NFDB
267:Would you please be open to the possibility that the gospel, real Christianity, is something very different from religion?” That gives many people hope that there is a way to know God that doesn’t lead to the pathologies of moralism and religiosity. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
268:It is easier for us to get to know God than to know our own soul...God is nearer to us than our soul, for He is the ground in which it stands...so if we want to know our own soul, and enjoy its fellowship, it is necessary to seek it in our Lord God. ~ Julian of Norwich, #NFDB
269:Jonah was angry at the withering of the plant, but not over what could have happened to Nineveh. Most of us have cried at the death of a pet or when an object with sentimental value is broken, but have we cried over the fact that a friend does not know God? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
270:Christians need the Spirit of God to reveal more of himself and his ways to us, if we are to know God better, for it is the Spirit's task to take things that belong to the domain of God, the domain of glory, and bring them to us so that we can receive them. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
271:I know God is here in the nature and the people, but more than that, he is within me. The kingdom of heaven is where I belong. It is where all of my journeys have been taking me. And no place on earth can match the welcome that is found in God’s arms. ~ Emily T Wierenga, #NFDB
272:A blind person could make a lifelong study of the eye, properties of light, the sight process and become a great expert in the field, but in another sense he would know nothing about sight. A person could know a great deal about God and yet not know God. ~ Stephen R Covey, #NFDB
273:I know God can't answer every prayers exactly the way you want Him to. But I couldn't help thinking that He hadn't been doing very well by me lately.
Even so, I prayed. It wasn't a proper prayer, just a cry for help, but I felt He was listening. ~ Laura Amy Schlitz,#NFDB
274:Someone created all of this, all of the beauty of the earth, all of the fragility of human life and all of the extraordinary existence of us. Choosing to believe in God only when you are surrounded by death and destruction is to truly not know God at all. ~ Rachel Higginson, #NFDB
275:We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God; for, beholding His greatness we realize our own littleness; His purity shows us our foulness; and by meditating upon His humility we find how very far we are from being humble. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, #NFDB
276:The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God. ~ Barbara Hambly, #NFDB
277:Someone created all of this, all of the beauty of the earth, all of the fragility of human life and all of the extraordinary existence of us. Choosing to believe in a god only when you are surrounded by death and destruction is to truly not know God at all. ~ Rachel Higginson, #NFDB
278:We spend so much time trying to put send to death that we don't spend enough time striving to know God deeply, trying to gaze upon the wonder of Jesus Christ and have that transform our affections to the point where our love and hope are steadfastly on Christ. ~ Matt Chandler, #NFDB
279:3For this is the will of God, i your sanctification: [2] j that you abstain from sexual immorality; 4that each one of you know how to control his own k body [3] in holiness and l honor, 5not in m the passion of lust n like the Gentiles o who do not know God; ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
280:So the question we need to ask today is this: if the teaching in our church was limited to the songs that we sing, how well taught would we be? How well would we know God? We should make it our aim not only to preach the whole counsel of God but to sing it, as well. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
281:I always know God is there, but He confuses me still at times. It is hard when you go through a valley. Just remember, ‘I’m going to learn something in this valley that I would not have otherwise learned, and I am who I am today because of what I have been through, ~ Nick Vujicic, #NFDB
282:I believe we shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavouring to know God, for, beholding His greatness we are struck by our own baseness, His purity shows our foulness, and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are from being humble. 11. ~ Teresa of vila, #NFDB
283:Well, as long as we do not know God experientially then we should at least realize that we are simply ideological believers,” Father Maximos replied dryly. “The ideal and ultimate form of true faith means having direct experience of God as a living reality.” I ~ Kyriacos C Markides, #NFDB
284:To know God’s love is indeed heaven on earth. And the New Testament sets forth this knowledge, not as the privilege of a favored few, but as a normal part of ordinary Christian experience, something to which only the spiritually unhealthy or malformed will be strangers. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
285:You have to work at it. You have to know God on a very intimate level in order to have the kind of faith that will withstand the storms life throws at you. It's a good thing that we only have to have the amount of a mustard seed. Sometimes that's about all I can find. ~ Lynette Eason, #NFDB
286:I know that God loves you. And that He’s not interested in obeying your plans. He’s interested in giving you the best. And all you need to do is believe that. When you know God loves you, then faith is simply the expectation that God will show up, that love in hand. ~ Susan May Warren, #NFDB
287:True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:23). Truth matters. There is no real worship without it. Intense affections for God, when we do not know God, are not truly affection for God. They are affections for a distortion of God in our imagination. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
288:Now if the religious skeptic is right, we can know nothing about God. And if we can know nothing about God, how can we know God so well that we can know that he cannot be known? How can we know that God cannot and did not reveal himself—and perhaps even through human reason? ~ Peter Kreeft, #NFDB
289:The highest dream we could ever dream, the wish that if granted would make us happier than any other blessing, is to know God, to actually experience Him. The problem is that we don’t believe this idea is true. We assent to it in our heads. But we don’t feel it in our hearts. ~ Larry Crabb, #NFDB
290:Well,’ I laughed, ‘I certainly don’t know God, and frankly I’m inclined to think that God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I’ve come across.’ ‘Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.’ He ~ Gregory David Roberts, #NFDB
291:The most important thing we can pray about for others is that they will know God better and that He will help them understand His will, grow in spiritual wisdom, and live lives that honor Him. We can pray that they will become more like Him and bear the fruit of His Spirit. ~ Stormie Omartian, #NFDB
292:You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
293:Maybe your family is more drama than delight, more crazy than kind? I can’t say that your family will ever understand or bless you, but I know God will. Let God give you what your family doesn’t. If your earthly family doesn’t support you, then let your heavenly one take its place. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
294:What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance, and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God? ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
295:And a true God is not One with the most servants, but One who serves the most, thereby making Gods of all others. For this is both the goal and the glory of God: that His subjects shall be no more, and that all shall know God not as the unattainable, but as the unavoidable. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
296:...knowing God is the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God's assistance and according to His intention. Wherever God is, there He is always creating... He wants to create a new human being. To need God is to become new. And to know God is the crucial thing. ~ Soren Kierkegaard, #NFDB
297:Whatever else you set out to do, begin by getting to know God and seeking His will in your life. If you do that, you will find Him. He will lead you. He will bless you. What a wonderful promise! But it is conditional. If you turn your back on the Lord, He will cast you off forever. ~ James C Dobson, #NFDB
298:The Christian ministry is difficult, and we must not be lazy or trite. However, we often place burdens upon ourselves and make demands upon ourselves that are not according to the will of God. The more I know God and understand His perfect work on my behalf, the more I am able to rest. ~ Paul Washer, #NFDB
299:God is my life. God is my love. God is the temple that calls my heart to unceasing worship. God is my Goal. No duty can be performed without the power borrowed from God, so my highest duty is to find Him." Without that attitude of devotion and determination one cannot know God ~ Paramahansa Yogananda, #NFDB
300:The world is full of religions and religious people who don’t know God. Religion can serve faith, but it doesn’t substitute for faith, and it can never replace faith. Meaningful expressions of the heart, mind, and will become lifeless if they’re not mixed with a deep and abiding faith. ~ Gary L Thomas, #NFDB
301:To illustrate: Everybody in the world knows the word “God,” but there are few people in the world who know God. For most of us God has remained a word, a term, a power outside the self; God, Itself, has not become a living reality except to those few people who are known as mystics. ~ Joel S Goldsmith, #NFDB
302:The only thing of transcendent importance to human beings is the knowledge of God. This knowledge does not belong to those who endlessly focus on themselves. Those who truly come to know God delight just to know him. He becomes their center. They think of him, delight in him, boast of him. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
303:If you know God through Jesus Christ, then you are experiencing eternal life right now even though you haven’t physically died. And if you are experiencing eternal life right now, death is no more than a brief interruption to that which you are already experiencing—life that has no end. ~ David Jeremiah, #NFDB
304:Sometimes you wish you could keep quiet. It's the kind of thing you heard the prophet Jeremiah complain of where he says, "You know God, I didn't want to be a prophet and you made me speak words of condemnation against a people I love deeply. Your word is like a fire burning in my breast." ~ Desmond Tutu, #NFDB
305:How would you ever come to know God’s name for that star? – You wouldn’t, He holds it close, the boy said. It’s a thing you’ll never know. It’s a lesson that sometimes we’re meant to settle for ignorance. Right there’s what mostly comes of knowledge [boy tips his chin at the battlefield] ~ Charles Frazier, #NFDB
306:asked why we should strive to know God, my answer would be selfish: I want to be a creator. This is the ultimate promise of spirituality, that you can become the author of your own existence, the maker of personal destiny. Your brain is already performing this service for you unconsciously. ~ Deepak Chopra, #NFDB
307:The object of education is not merely to enable our children to gain their daily bread and to acquire pleasant means of recreation, but that they should know God and serve Him with earnestness and devotion. ~ Hermann Adler, quoted in Joseph H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (One-volume edition)p. 78-9, #NFDB
308:There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose. not merely that we know God, but that He knows us. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
309:To know God is not a matter of education, but of illumination. The stairwell to illumination is utter fascination in the presence of God. Push out all other activities and come in silent wonder and admiration in the presence of God. Then God will open up His heart and illuminate Himself to you. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
310:I know God could have stopped it but… he didn’t.
And you can accept that?
What choice do I have? Unless I want to be angry and bitter my whole life, I have to believe there’s a reason it happened. ….. It helps that I know God’s motives are good even when he allows bad things to happen. ~ Lynette Eason,#NFDB
311:Carl Jung, in a letter to the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Watson, remarked that the Latin for “alcohol” is spiritus, which is also the word for “soul,” and that the abuse of alcohol was fueled by a desire to know God, to transcend daily drudgery for a glimpse of a greater reality. ~ Peter Bebergal, #NFDB
312:Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
313:Many rich and powerful men would pay dearly to see the Lord or His Most Pure Mother, but God does not appear in riches, but in the humble heart... Every one of the poorest men can be humbles and come to know God. It need neither money nor reputation to come to know God, but only humility. ~ Silouan the Athonite, #NFDB
314:God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is God’s last word. Nothing will replace what God has said to us through his Son. If you want to know God, you have to come to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is Alpha and Omega; his ministry is the ministry of revelation. He reveals God to us. ~ Warren W Wiersbe, #NFDB
315:Sticking to the Bible at every turn, like it’s an owner’s manual or book of instruction, as the way to know God misses what Paul and the rest of the New Testament writers show us again and again: the words on the page of the Bible don’t drive the story, Jesus does. Jesus is bigger than the Bible. For ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
316:So many of us limit our praying because we are not reckless in our confidence in God. In the eyes of those who do not know God, it is madness to trust Him, but when we pray in the Holy Spirit we begin to realize the resources of God, that He is our perfect heavenly Father, and we are His children. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
317:We are here on this earth to know God intimately, fully, correctly, and contagiously; to house His holy person in our very bodies, allowing Him to showcase to the world around us His loving nature, His attitude, His thoughts, His emotions, and His actions through the way we live every moment of our lives. ~ Eric Ludy, #NFDB
318:God is invoked … and He is invoked against the God of the spirit, of intelligence and love - excluding and hating this God. What an extraordinary spiritual phenomenon this is: people believe in God and yet do not know God. The idea of God is affirmed and at the same time disfigured and perverted. ~ John Howard Griffin, #NFDB
319:I realized that most times it’s not the big things along my spiritual journey that tempt me to get off track. It’s a culmination of small daily aggravations I know God could fix but doesn’t. But what if instead of seeing these aggravations as inconveniences, I saw them as reminders to draw near to God? ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
320:Only a life lived for others is a life worth while . I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious . I want to know God's thoughts... all the rest are details. Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift. It's not that I'm so smart , it's just that I stay with problems longer. ~ Albert Einstein, #NFDB
321:To know God and to find one's full satisfaction in that knowledge is the ultimate goal of Christian experience. The Lord's greatest delight comes when His people discover the ultimate value lies in the knowledge of God. Nothing in the material world can complete with the delights that are present in His Person. ~ Max Anders, #NFDB
322:Paradoxically, we come to know God best not by looking at God exclusively, but by looking at God and then looking at ourselves—then looking at God, and then again looking at ourselves. This is also the way we best come to know our selves. Both God and self are mostly fully known in relationship to each other. ~ David G Benner, #NFDB
323:In short, we have no positive, inner desire to pray. We do it only when circumstances force us. Why? We know God is there, but we tend to see him as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, he has not become our happiness. We therefore pray to procure things, not to know him better. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
324:The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. ~ John Milton, #NFDB
325:Only those who thus continue in their conversion truly know God. For they know their sin. Though they are confronted by the wrath of God, at the same time they discern the greatness and superior strength of God’s love. They never cease to acknowledge their sin, in order in that way to proclaim God’s mercy. Andre Louf ~ Neal Lozano, #NFDB
326:The soul that has come to know God fully no longer desires anything else, nor does it attach itself to anything on the earth; and if you put before it a kingdom, it would not desire it, for the love of God gives such sweetness and joy to the soul that even the life of a king can no longer give it any sweetness. ~ Silouan the Athonite, #NFDB
327:If you dont love somebody, it gets annoying if they tell you what to do or what to feel. When you love them, you get pleasure from their pleasure nad it makes it easy to serve. I didnt love God because i didnt know God. universe is not effected by time. Light exists outside of time.. It is still a mystery to physicists. ~ Donald Miller, #NFDB
328:If you don’t delight in the fact that your Father is holy, holy, holy, then you are spiritually dead. You may be in a church. You may go to a Christian school. But if there is no delight in your soul for the holiness of God, you don’t know God. You don’t love God. You’re out of touch with God. You’re asleep to his character. ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
329:In a very real sense my science does inform my knowledge of God. If you would allow me to say that we never know God, because if I claim that I know God, I know something other than God, because God is not knowable, he is unknowable. So we have to approach it in that sense first, that my knowledge of God is always limited. ~ George Coyne, #NFDB
330:Love is basic for the very survival of mankind. I'm convinced that love is the only absolute ultimately; love is the highest good. He who loves has somehow discovered the meaning of ultimate reality. He who hates does not know God; he who hates has no knowledge of God. Love is the supreme unifying principle of life. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
331:8He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power 10on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
332:Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life. We must learn to pray. We have to. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
333:When one comes to know God and His Son Jesus Christ through the scriptures, the Spirit, and personal revelation, it is impossible to feel anything other than overwhelmed by the attributes so perfectly developed in them and so tentatively and superficially developed in oneself. Even so, we are told to strive to become like them. ~ Neal A Maxwell, #NFDB
334:To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
335:To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, #NFDB
336:For when we have learned to know God in the Son after apprehending the forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit, who clothes our hearts with joy and with the freedom from care because of which we despise sin and death, what is left? “Go, and do not keep silence, in order that the rest of the multitude may be saved too, not you alone. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
337:The Hermetic philosophy places man at the very centre of God's creation. Hermes declares that 'man is a marvel'. With his mind he may not only understand the universe, but even come to know God. He is not a mortal body which will live and die. He is an immortal soul which, through the experience of a spiritual rebirth, may become a god. ~ Tim Freke, #NFDB
338:I wanted to live more than I wanted to die. I didn’t know how to live. I didn’t know how I would be able to live life on life’s terms. But I know God carried me to the end of that journey so I could start a new one. In those few days, God brought me to the point of willingness again, to start down a path with an unknown destination. ~ Sharon E Rainey, #NFDB
339:Many people want guidance from God, but they don’t want to lay aside other things in order to hear His voice. But David narrowed down everything he wanted to just one thing—more of God all the days of his life. I believe the only thing that truly satisfies the longing within us is to know God more intimately today than we did yesterday. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
340:You know God does not manifest Himself,” Halgan shouted. “That is also heresy. The Revelation is not corporeal. You know this. Why do you persist in this perverted speech?”
“I like perverted. Maybe you would, too, if you gave it a chance.”
“Leave my men alone,” Rakan said coldly. “Degenerate.”
Ringil smooched a kiss at him. ~ Richard K Morgan,#NFDB
341:When we know God we do not cease to wonder, but we begin to be at home with wonders. Believe the promise of God’s grace, and believing, you shall live in a new world which shall be always wonder-land to you. It is a happy thing to have such faith in God as to expect as certain that which to mere human judgment is most unlikely. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, #NFDB
342:I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality. ~ Martin Luther King Jr, #NFDB
343:And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain. You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees. ~ Khalil Gibran, #NFDB
344:I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
345:Edwards refused to suppose an opposition between the understanding and the affections. In other words, if a person said, “I know God cares for me, but I am still paralyzed by fear,” Edwards would reply, “Then that means you don’t truly know that God cares for you. If you did, then the affection of confidence and hope would be rising within you. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
346:God bridges the infinite distances between Himself and the spirits created to love Him, by supernatural missions of His own life. The Father, dwelling in the depths of all things and in my own depths, communicates to me His Word and His Spirit. Receiving them I am drawn into His own life and know God in His own Love, being one with Him in His own Son. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
347:Don’t concern yourself with being right in others’ eyes. And don’t secretly hope that their lives will fall apart so that your opinion will be vindicated. Instead, concentrate on obeying God in your own life and, when possible, helping others to obey Him as well. You don’t have to prove others wrong to continue on the course you know God has shown you. ~ Joshua Harris, #NFDB
348:You have to get to know God on a very intimate level in order to have the kind of faith that will withstand the storms life throws at you. It’s a good thing that we only have to have the amount of a mustard seed. Sometimes that’s about all I can find. You won’t find even that much, though, if you treat him as the enemy or simply a passing acquaintance. ~ Lynette Eason, #NFDB
349:What makes the Bible God’s Word isn’t its uncanny historical accuracy, as some insist, but the sacred experiences these stories point to, beyond the words themselves. Watching these ancient pilgrims work through their faith, even wrestling with how they did that, models for us our own journeys of seeking to know God better and commune with him more deeply. ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
350:Life can get distorted and out of whack when you don’t know God. And you can’t really know Him in truth apart from the Word of God. Look around you at the lives people are living. Find out how important the Bible is in their lives and how much time they devote to studying it. Notice the relationship between their knowledge of God and the way they handle life. ~ Kay Arthur, #NFDB
351:There is no need to invent an ego that is separate from the divine if our basic human nature is trusted. If we trust ourselves, we know how to avoid interfering with nature and how to live in harmony. When we know God as an unseen, loving, and accepting power at the heart of everything, allowing us to make our own choices, then God is a trusted part of our nature. ~ Wayne Dyer, #NFDB
352:Come to the place of breaking free. The place where we truly know God and believe Him. The place where we seek His glory and forget our own. The place where satisfaction comes from the only true satisfier of our souls. The place where we experience His peace no matter what the world may throw our way. The place where His presence is our constant desire and daily joy. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
353:It may seem impossible to you, but a mere human can indeed come to know God — not merely about God, but to really know God. Listen while I explain how to do that: Through devoting your whole mind to Divinity (Me), loving only Me, meditating on Me, and depending wholly on Me as your only refuge, you will, without any doubt, come to know Me in My entirety. ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, #NFDB
354:When a man is born from above, the life of the Son of God is born in him, and he can either starve that life or nourish it. Prayer is the way the life of God is nourished. Our ordinary views of prayer are not found in the New Testament. We look upon prayer as a means of getting things for ourselves; the Bible's idea of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself. ~ Oswald Chambers, #NFDB
355:What exists is a godly existence, a divine existence. God not as a person but as a presence certainly exists. But to understand that presence, you have to understand your own inner presence first, because it is from there that you can take off, it is from there that you can have the first glimpse of what godliness is. If you have not known yourself you will never know God. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
356:The man who knows God but does not know his own misery, becomes proud. The man who knows his own misery but does not know God, ends in despair...the knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course because in him we find both God and our own misery. Jesus Christ is therefore a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair. ~ Blaise Pascal, #NFDB
357:Thus the covenant of grace forms the heart of salvation itself. Perkins wrote, “We are to know God, not as he is in himself, but as he hath revealed himself unto us in the covenant of grace; and therefore we must acknowledge the Father to be our Father, the Son to be our Redeemer, the holy Ghost to be our comforter, and seek to grow in the knowledge and experience of this. ~ Joel R Beeke, #NFDB
358:So many people concentrate on knowing who a good preacher or a bad preacher is and so many people concentrate on knowing what the word of God is! The former is good but the latter is noble. The latter is the best answer to the former. The real duty of man is never to know man but to know God through Christ Jesus! Knowing the word of God is the true way to knowing God! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
359:Another form that this tendency to tritheism takes concerns our views of other religions. Some people suggest that non-Christians can genuinely know God apart from Jesus- an idea sometimes called "anonymous Christianity". But the unity of the Trinity means we cannot know God without Jesus. They cannot be divided so that one person of the Trinity can be known apart from the others. ~ Tim Chester, #NFDB
360:The people who know God well - the mystics, the hermits, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is never found to be an abusive father or a tyrannical mother, but always a lover who is more than we dared hope for. How different than the "account manager" that most people seem to worship. God is a lover who receives and forgives everything. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
361:What is it, precisely, that Paul asks for? Paul’s prayer is that the Ephesians might know God better. That is what the text says. Of all the things Paul might have asked for, that is what he puts at the top of his list: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better” (1:17). ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
362:Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
363:Bhakti is the one essential thing. Who can ever know God through reasoning? I want love of God. What do I care about knowing His infinite glories? One bottle of wine makes me drunk. What do I care about knowing how many gallons there are in the grog-shop? One jar of water is enough to quench my thirst. I don't need to know the amount of water there is on earth. ~ Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Ramakrishna, #NFDB
364:Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them. But every time you do something for the glory of God, you will know God’s peace in your heart and find rest there. ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
365:I want women to know God can use everything the enemy meant for evil in their lives for good. He can take their stories of shame and redeem them-- first for their own freedom and then to help others.
I want women to know that they are not less than, weaker, second, or not enough. They are created in God's image-- greatly valued, loved, chose, wanted and adored by the Creator of the universe. ~ Christine Caine,#NFDB
366:It is far more difficult to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects. One can only know what one is capable of loving. There is no wisdom without love. Unless we learn to love God’s Creation, we can neither truly love nor truly know God. Yet to love God first and foremost, receiving Her Love, allows us to love all of God’s Creation unconditionally, and in its right place. ~ Padma Aon Prakasha, #NFDB
367:Among a rising tide of millions of Christians, how we label ourselves isn’t nearly as important as how we actually experience and demonstrate Yeshua’s incredible power in and as us, beginning with the power to love our enemies. To us, this is what it means to know God and the One He sent. Words only reflect an intellectual dogma, but the expression of our lives shows our true dogma, which matters far more. ~ Ted Dekker, #NFDB
368:The man who would know God must give time to Him. He must count no time wasted which is spent in the cultivation of His acquaintance. He must give himself to meditation and prayer hours on end. So did the saints of old, the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the prophets and the believing members of the holy church in all generations. And so must we if we would follow in their train. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
369:I know God lives everywhere, but I bet He spends a lot of time at Disney World. It's a place where no one uses big words and what anyone does for a day job doesn't matter. It's a place without titles and status and where no one is stuck being who they were, unless they want to be. It's where our imaginations get permission to go on all the rides and our fears aren't allowed to take cuts in front of us anymore. ~ Bob Goff, #NFDB
370:The ultimate test of my understanding of the scriptural teaching is the amount of time I spend in prayer. As theology is ultimately the knowledge of God, the more theology I know, the more it should drive me to seek to know God. Not to know about Him but to know Him! The whole object of salvation is to bring me to knowledge of God. If all my knowledge does not lead me to prayer there is something wrong somewhere. ~ Martyn, #NFDB
371:Inside his copy of The Social Contract he keeps a letter from a young Picard, an enthusiast called Antoine Saint-Just: “I know you, Robespierre, as I know God, by your works.”
When he suffers, as he does increasingly, from a distressing tightness of the chest and shortness of breath, and when his eyes seem too tired to focus on the printed page, the thought of the letter urges the weak flesh to more Works. ~ Hilary Mantel,#NFDB
372:I am convinced that the jealous, the angry, the bitter and the egotistical are the first to race to the top of mountains. A confident person enjoys the journey, the people they meet along the way and sees life not as a competition. They reach the summit last because they know God isn’t at the top waiting for them. He is down below helping his followers to understand that the view is glorious where ever you stand. ~ Shannon L Alder, #NFDB
373:That this network is complex explains much about our faith. It explains why people with higher activity in their frontal lobes will be drawn to apologetics or theology—they want to know how God works. On the other hand, people with higher activity in their limbic systems will know God through feelings and have little concern with rational justifications for God’s existence. They know God because they feel God. Either ~ Mike McHargue, #NFDB
374:Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God's name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor, #NFDB
375:Faith deals with the invisible things of God. It refuses to be ruled by the physical senses. Faith is able to say, 'You can do what you like, because I know God is going to take care of me. He has promised to bless me wherever he leads me.' Remember that even when every demon in hell stands against us, the God of Abraham remains faithful to all his promises. Jesus Christ can do anything but fail his own people who trust him. ~ Jim Cymbala, #NFDB
376:What is the right time [to discuss theology]? Whenever we are free from the mire and noise without, and our commanding faculty is not confused by illusory, wandering images, leading us, as it were, to mix fine script with ugly scrawling, or sweet-smelling scent with slime. We need actually 'to be still' (Ps. 46:10) in order to know God, and when we receive the opportunity, 'to judge uprightly' (Ps. 75:2) in theology. ~ Gregory of Nazianzus, #NFDB
377:Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the main way we experience deep change—the reordering of our loves. Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
378:Guariglia went to his children, who were playing by the brazier. "Look at them," he said. "I know they may not be as beautiful to you as they are to me..."
"They are," Alessandro interrupted.
"No," Guariglia insisted, "they're not beautiful in that way, but to me, Alessandro, they are all that is good and holy. I didn't know God until I saw them. It's funny, as soon as you lose faith, you have children, and life reawakens. ~ Mark Helprin,#NFDB
379:It is precisely women’s experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart. ~ Joan D Chittister, #NFDB
380:So it is that real, personal sacrifice never was placing an animal on the altar. Instead, it is a willingness to put the animal in us upon the altar and letting it be consumed! Such is the 'sacrifice unto the Lord... of a broken heart and a contrite spirit,' (D&C 59:8), a prerequisite to taking up the cross, while giving 'away all [our] sins' in order to 'know God' (Alma 22:18) for the denial of self precedes the full acceptance of Him. ~ Neal A Maxwell, #NFDB
381:What are these deaths and revivals? It is clear that I do not live whenever I lose my faith in the existence of God, and I would have killed myself long ago if I did not have some vague hope of finding God. I truly live only whenever I am conscious of him and seek him. "What, then, do I seek?" a voice cried out within me. "He is there, the one without whom there could be no life." To know God and to liVe come to one and the same thing. God is life. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
382:We do not hope for what we have. Therefore, to live in hope is to live in poverty, having nothing. And yet, if we abandon ourselves to economy of Divine Providence, we have everything we hope for. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. If we hope in God, by hope we already possess Him, since hope is a confidence which He creates in our souls as secret evidence that He has taken possession of us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
383:God will and can be known in no other way than in and through Christ according to the statement of John 1:18, "The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." Christ is the only means whereby we can know God and His will. In Christ we perceive that God is not a cruel judge, but a most loving and merciful Father who to bless and to save us "spared not his own Son, but gave him up for us all." This is truly to know God. ~ Martin Luther, #NFDB
384:Becoming and continuing as a Christian is about same pattern—becoming weak to become strong. Only those who admit they are unrighteous receive the righteousness of Christ. Only those who know their life and strength are theirs purely because of grace...Only those who know their own weakness are able to know God-given inner strength; the strength which enables us to avoid the pitfalls of Samson's life: pride, lust, anger, vengefulness and complacency. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
385:I believe it’s God’s will for us to live out our lives. The Bible says His plan is to give us long life. So why do some people die early? I have no idea. All I can tell you is this. I know God. But I also know evil. I’ve looked into its eyes. The devil is real. We’re in a war. No matter how hard soldiers try to stay safe, sometimes they get shot. It’s really important to remember that the enemy may win a battle, but the truth is, he’s already lost the war. ~ Nancy Mehl, #NFDB
386:The first step in personal revival is to get God in His rightful place. When God is recognized as being above me, beyond me, highly exalted, over me, and totally separate from me, I am getting in position for a downpour. When I embrace God for who He is and I understand who I am—when I know God's place, I can know my place—then things start to fall into place. That's what God's holiness does for us—it puts everything and everyone in their rightful place. ~ James MacDonald, #NFDB
387:The problem of knowing man is parallel to the religious problem of knowing God. In conventional Western theology the attempt is made to know God by thought, to make statements about God. It is assumed that I can know God in my thought. In mysticism, which is the consequent outcome of monotheism, the attempt is given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the experience of union with God in which there is no more room—and no need—for knowledge about God. ~ Erich Fromm, #NFDB
388:Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the main way we experience deep change—the reordering of our loves. Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life. We must learn to pray. We have to. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
389:In explaining the growth of his faith, psychiatrist Gerald May writes, "I know that God is loving and that God’s loving is trustworthy. I know this directly, through the experience of my life. There have been plenty of times of doubt, especially when I used to believe that trusting God's goodness meant I would not be hurt. But having been hurt quite a bit, I know God's goodness goes deeper than all pleasure and pain it embraces them both." Ruthless Trust, pg 22 ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
390:In explaining the growth of his faith, psychiatrist Gerald May writes, "I know that God is loving and that God’s loving is trustworthy. I know this directly, through the experience of my life. There have been plenty of times of doubt, especially when I used to believe that trusting God's goodness meant I would not be hurt. But having been hurt quite a bit, I know God's goodness goes deeper than all pleasure and pain it embraces them both." Ruthless Trust, pg 22 ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
391:It takes the entire Bible to help us understand all the reasons that Jesus’ death on the cross was not just a failure and a tragedy but was consummate wisdom. It takes a major part of Genesis to help us understand God’s purposes in Joseph’s tribulations. Sometimes we may wish that God would send us our book—a full explanation! But even though we cannot know all the particular reasons for our crosses, we can look at the cross and know God is working things out. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
392:only children know God. Children see God every day; they just don’t call it that. It’s the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It’s the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can’t get enough sugar from Chocolate. ~ Charles M Blow, #NFDB
393:Let us quake before the great Spirit, Who is my God, Who has made me know God, Who is God there above, and Who forms God here: almighty, imparting manifold gifts, Him Whom the holy choir hymns, Who brings life to those in heaven and on earth, and is enthroned on high, coming from the Father, the divine force, self-commandeered; He is not a Child (for there is one worthy Child of the One who is best), nor is He outside the unseen Godhead, but of identical honor. ~ Gregory of Nazianzus, #NFDB
394:...if we know God our knowledge of... everything will be brought to perfection, and, in so far as is possible, the infinite, divine and ineffable dwelling place (cf. Jn. 14:2) will be ours to enjoy. For this is what our sainted teacher said in his famous philosophical aphorism: 'Then we shall know as we are known' (I Cor. 13:12), when we mingle our god-formed mind and divine reason to what is properly its own and the image returns to the archetype for which it now longs. ~ Pope Dionysius, #NFDB
395:Do you know God as a God of mercy? Do you see your spouse as God sees him or her—through eyes of mercy? If your answer to either question is no, it is unlikely that your marriage is sweet. Mercy sweetens marriage. Where it is absent, two people flog one another over everything from failure to fix the faucet to phone bills. But where it is present, marriage grows sweeter and more delightful, even in the face of challenges, setbacks, and the persistent effects of our remaining sin. ~ Dave Harvey, #NFDB
396:We know God by cultivating a relationship, not by understanding a concept.
The relation constitutes the very subjectivity of of our existence. We participate in existence consciously and rationally, with subjective self-knowledge and identity, because the erotic drive of our nature is transformed into a personal relation when there arises in the space of the Other the first signifier of desire: the maternal presence. The subject is born with love's first leap of joy. ~ Christos Yannaras,#NFDB
397:4 But you belong to God, my dear children. You have already won a victory over those people, because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world. 5 Those people belong to this world, so they speak from the world’s viewpoint, and the world listens to them. 6 But we belong to God, and those who know God listen to us. If they do not belong to God, they do not listen to us. That is how we know if someone has the Spirit of truth or the spirit of deception. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
398:Preach in the name of God. The learned will smile; ask the learned what they have done for their country. The priests will excommunicate you; say to the priests that you know God better than all of them together do, and that between God and His law you have no need of any intermediary. The people will understand you, and repeat with you: We believe in God the Father, who is Intelligence and Love, Creator and Teacher of Humanity. And in this saying you and the People will conquer. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini, #NFDB
399:I would love to have a more earnest prayer life! In my life, prayer is the single most difficult discipline. I love God and there's something in me that would rather do things for God than talk to God. I'm not by nature a mystical, devotional person. I like to do things. And so it's a challenge for me to have a faithful prayer life, but I know God loves me and He's not mad at me. He just wishes I would slow down and turn things over to Him. And that's what I think you achieve through prayer. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
400:The main problem with those who deny the existence of God is not intellectual. It is not because of insufficient information, or that God's manifestation of himself in nature has been obscured. The atheists' problem is not that they cannot know God, rather it is they do not want to know him. Man's problem with the existence of God is not an intellectual problem; it is a moral problem." For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men - Rom. 1:18" ~ R C Sproul, #NFDB
401:No matter how much we may study, it is not possible to come to know God unless we live according to His commandments, for God is not know by science, but by the Holy Spirit. Many philosophers and learned men came to the belief that God exists, but they did not know God. It is one thing to belief that God exists and another to know Him. If someone has come to know God by the Holy Spirit, his soul will burn with love for God day and night, and his soul cannot be bound to any earthly thing. ~ Silouan the Athonite, #NFDB
402:The work of God in salvation is a supernatural work, but in the United States of America and among Baptists it's been reduced down to a few evangelical hoops that if we can get someone to jump through, we declare them popishly to be savedit has been the pulpit that's sending more people to Hell than any liberal organization on the face of the earthnot a liberal Methodist, not a liberal Episcopalian, but a Baptist who claims to know God's word and yet does not understand the gospel of Jesus Christ. ~ Paul Washer, #NFDB
403:It is one of the great ironies of human history that some mortals with incorrect understanding of God and life's purposes sometimes scold God because of the abundance of human misery and suffering-which, indeed, lies all about us. Such individuals almost dare God to demonstrate His existence by straightening things out-and at once! But He is a much different kind of Father than that. Surely it is requisite to eternal life that we come to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent (see John 17:3). ~ Neal A Maxwell, #NFDB
404:It's important to remember that Israel's story is a story of being in the process of getting to know God, all before Jesus presents himself as the ultimate revelation of God. It is not unlike other relationships where we need time to fully understand and appreciate the true self and identity of the other person in the relationship. The story involves moments when Israel truly sees God, and moments when they profoundly misunderstand God--both of which are normal parts of any relationship. ~ Benjamin L Corey, #NFDB
405:No shortcut exists. God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. It is well that we accept the hard truth now: The man who would know God must give time to Him. He must count no time wasted which is spent in the cultivation of His acquaintance. He must give himself to meditation and prayer hours on end. So did the saints of old, the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the prophets and the believing members of the holy church in all generations. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
406:"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Can we see God? Of course not. Can we know God? Of course not. If God can be known, He will be God no longer. Knowledge is limitation. But I and my Father are one: I find the reality in my soul. These ideas are expressed in some religions, and in others only hinted. In some they were expatriated. Christ's teachings are now very little understood in this country. If you will excuse me, I will say that they have never been very well understood. ~ Swami Vivekananda, #NFDB
407:The Sacrament of the Body of the Lord puts the demons to flight, defends us against the incentives to vice and to concupiscence, cleanses the soul from sin, quiets the anger of God, enlightens the understanding to know God, inflames the will and the affections with the love of God, fills the memory with spiritual sweetness, confirms the entire man in good, frees us from eternal death, multiplies the merits of a good life, leads us to our everlasting home, and re-animates the body to eternal life ~ Saint Thomas Aquinas, #NFDB
408:It is disastrous to suppose that the Church does not know God as He is, that she degenerates into idolatry, for if she declines from perfection [3] in a single iota, it is as an enduring mark on a comely face, destroying by its unsightliness the beauty of the whole. A small thing is not small when it leads to something great, nor indeed is it a thing of no matter to give up the ancient tradition of the Church held by our forefathers, whose conduct we should observe, and whose faith we should imitate. ~ John of Damascus, #NFDB
409:We shall never succeed in knowing ourselves unless we seek to know God; by looking at His purity we shall see our foulness; by meditating upon His humility, we shall see how far we are from being humble. There are two advantages in this. First, it is clear that anything white looks very much whiter against something black, just as the black looks blacker against the white. Secondly, if we turn from self towards God, our understanding and our will become nobler and readier to embrace all that is good. ~ Padma Aon Prakasha, #NFDB
410:True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to "know God" - not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
411:Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home. ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
412:Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a world where everybody said, 'We don't know?' The fact is that you're surrounded -God and you don't see God, because you KNOW ABOUT God. The final barrier to the vision of God is your God concept. You miss God because you think you know. The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable. All revelations, however divine, are never any more than a finger pointing at the moon. As we say in the East, 'When the sage points to the moon, all the idiot sees is the finger'. ~ Anthony de Mello, #NFDB
413:All my life, barriers had been erected that kept me from humbly approaching God and asking Him to reveal Himself to me. The arguments and apologetics tore down those barriers, positioning me to make a decision to pursue God or not. The work of my intellect was done. It had opened the way to His altar, but I had to decide whether I would approach it. If I did, and if I really wanted to know God, I had to cast myself upon His mercy and love, relying completely upon Him and His willingness to reveal Himself to me. ~ Nabeel Qureshi, #NFDB
414:Do you see the logic in this conclusion? First, God’s perfect qualities are excellent in themselves. Second, God’s works extend from his perfect qualities, and so they are also excellent in themselves. Third, the expression of God’s perfect qualities in his works are to be seen and known by other beings who obtain knowledge of these qualities. Finally, this knowledge is excellent in itself as well. So it follows that it is an excellent thing in itself for a society of created beings to know God and his works. ~ Jonathan Edwards, #NFDB
415:Right now we are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
416:We can know God only through his works. We cannot have a conception of any one attribute, but by following some principle that leads to it. We have only a confused idea of his power, if we have not the means of comprehending something of its immensity. We can have no idea of his wisdom, but by knowing the order and manner in which it acts. The principles of science lead to this knowledge; for the Creator of man is the Creator of science, and it is through that medium that man can see God, as it were, face to face. ~ Thomas Paine, #NFDB
417:21For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. + 22For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; + 23but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeksa foolishness, 24but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. + 25Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
418:Becoming and continuing as a Christian is about the same pattern—becoming weak to become strong. Only those who admit they are unrighteous receive the righteousness of Christ. Only those who know their life and strength are theirs purely because of grace are not living in the grip of fear, boredom, and despondency. Only those who know their own weakness are able to know God-given inner strength; the strength which enables us to avoid the pitfalls of Samson’s life: pride, lust, anger, vengefulness and complacency. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
419:Just supposing for the sake of the argument that there is a being of such a kind as that He may with any propriety be called "God", it does seem antecedently very improbable that weak and limited creatures of a day, such as we are, should discover Him by our own efforts.... who could be discovered in that way would hardly be worth discovering. I think we ought to stick to that principle rather firmly. I think we ought to be rather sure that we cannot know God unless God has been pleased to reveal Himself to us. ~ John Gresham Machen, #NFDB
420:What drove the Bible’s storytellers to recall the past the way they did was the quest to experience God in the present, a sometimes volatile and catastrophic present. What makes the Bible God’s Word isn’t its uncanny historical accuracy, as some insist, but the sacred experiences these stories point to, beyond the words themselves. Watching these ancient pilgrims work through their faith, even wrestling with how they did that, models for us our own journeys of seeking to know God better and commune with him more deeply. ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
421:So much of my life had been spent taking and taking and taking. Thinking it was all about me, believing that everything came down to me and how I felt, what I wanted. Even in my grasping attempts to know God, I did exactly that: I grasped. I sought. Sometimes I waited. But I never opened myself, spread my soul wide as an offering so He could come and capture me. I never let Him run strong fingers through my soil, watering it with His grace so my fruit could grow and grow above the weeds that threatened to choke it out. ~ Nicole Baart, #NFDB
422:Yet if we would know God and for other's sake tell what we know we must try to speak of his love. All Christians have tried but none has ever done it very well. I can no more do justice to that awesome and wonder-filled theme than a child can grasp a star. Still by reaching toward the star the child may call attention to it and even indicate the direction one must look to see it. So as I stretch my heart toward the high shining love of God someone who has not before known about it may be encouraged to look up and have hope. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
423:1277
You'Ll Know It—as You Know 'Tis Noon
420
You'll know it—as you know 'tis Noon—
By Glory—
As you do the Sun—
By Glory—
As you will in Heaven—
Know God the Father—and the Son.
By intuition, Mightiest Things
Assert themselves—and not by terms—
"I'm Midnight"—need the Midnight say—
"I'm Sunrise"—Need the Majesty?
Omnipotence—had not a Tongue—
His listp—is Lightning—and the Sun—
His Conversation—with the Sea—
"How shall you know"?
Consult your Eye!
~ Emily Dickinson,#NFDB
424:What joy is ours that the Lord not only forgives our sins ,but allows the soul to know Him, so soon as she humbles herself. The poorest wretch can humble himself and know God in the Holy Spirit. There is no need of money or posessions in order to know God, only humility. The Lord gives Himself freely, for His mercy's sake alone. I did not know this before but now every day and every hour every minute, I see clearly the mercy of God. The Lord gives peace even in sleep, but without God there is no peace in the soul. ~ Silouan the Athonite, #NFDB
425:Moses wanted to know God's name, and God tells him, 'I am that I am'; that is to say, 'I am called--or to be called-in accordance with my work in this world.' When I judge mankind I am אלהים Elohim, that being the title or designation for judgment. When I war with the wicked I am known as צבאות Zevooth. When I execute judgment for the sins of man I am known as אלשדי El Shadai, and when I am visiting the world with mercy I am אבני or יהוה Adonoi, the Eternal. ~ Exodus Rabbah 3, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash by Rev. Samuel Rapaport, (1907), p. 91, #NFDB
426:Your main question should always be whether something is lived with or without God. You have your own inner knowledge to answer that question. Every time you do something that comes from your needs for acceptance, affirmation, or affection, and every time you do something that makes these needs grow, you know that you are not with God. These needs will never be satisfied; they will only increase when you yield to them. But every time you do something for the glory of God, you will know God’s peace in your heart and find rest there. ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
427:It is not for us that the cow’s milk flows, but we drink it. The flower was not made for us to look at it or for us to smell its fragrance, and we look at it and smell it. The Milky Way does not exist for us to know of its existence, but we know of it. And we know God. And what we need from Him, we elicit. (I don’t know what I am calling God, but thus he may be called.) If we only know very little of God, that is because we need little: we only have of Him whatever is inevitably enough for us, we only have of God whatever fits inside us. ~ Clarice Lispector, #NFDB
428:20 Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. 22 For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks* foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
429:Jesus was willing to be despised. He was willing to face rejection. He was willing to subject himself to hatred and violence. He was even willing to have the Father turn his back on him. Why was he willing to do all this? He did it willingly so that, as his children, you and I would be able to live in the hope and peace of knowing that no matter what we face in the human community, we are perfectly and eternally loved by him. He endured rejection so that we would know God’s accepting love forever and ever and ever. How amazing is this grace! ~ Paul David Tripp, #NFDB
430:The difficulties of life do not have to be unbearable. It is the way we look at them - through faith or unbelief - that makes them seem so. We must be convinced that our Father is full of love for us and that He only permits trials to come our way for our own good.
Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy. ~ Brother Lawrence,#NFDB
431:when Jesus again and again says things like the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, and the poor are blessed, and the rich are cursed, and that prostitutes make great dinner guests, it makes me wonder if our need for pure black-and-white categories is not true religion but maybe actually a sin. Knowing what category to place hemlock in might help us know whether it’s safe to drink, but knowing what category to place ourselves and others in does not help us know God in the way that the church so often has tried to convince us it does. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
432:Every age has its own characteristics. Right now we are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
433:It is one step, and a giant one, to see clearly and participate in the love that flows between the persons of the Trinity, but even here, God is seen as the object of his own love. It is yet another step to realize that God is beyond all subject and object and is Himself love without subject or object. This is the step beyond our highest experiences of love and union, a step in which self is not around to divide, separate, objectify or claim anything for itself. Self does not know God; it cannot love him, and from the beginning has never done so. ~ Bernadette Roberts, #NFDB
434:My approach is that we are not searching for experiences here. We are trying to know the one who experiences all experiences. Our search is for the witness. Who is this observer? Who is this consciousness? Sometimes it feels sad, sometimes it feels happy; sometimes it is so high, flying in the sky, and sometimes so down. Who is this watcher of all these games? - high and low, happy, unhappy, in heaven and hell. Who is this watcher? To know this watcher is to know God. And you are already it - just a little awakening is needed... no search but only awakening. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
435:You cannot know yourself alone, any more than you can see your own face without a mirror. ... So it was now with all the world and God. Reality is the same for everyone, but your experience of reality is yours alone. You cannot know that experience fully by yourself, you cannot experience that experience fully by yourself. It must be reflected back to you by its source, its creator, and only his love can reflect it back to you as it actually is. you cannot know the truth about the world until you know God loves you, because that is the truth about the world. ~ Andrew Klavan, #NFDB
436:So often you blame God for the life you have, but you do not know what life you want. Certainly there is a dilemma here. The life you want may not be the life God wants for you. This is why the process must begin by loving God first. It is in loving God with all your heart and mind and soul that he begins to shape your passions. When God has your heart, you can trust your desires. His will is not a map; it is a match. He shows you the way by setting you on fire. You will know God’s desire for you by the fire in you! The fire in you will light the way. ~ Erwin Raphael McManus, #NFDB
437:9 That is what the Scriptures mean when they say, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.”[*] 10 But[*] it was to us that God revealed these things by his Spirit. For his Spirit searches out everything and shows us God’s deep secrets. 11 No one can know a person’s thoughts except that person’s own spirit, and no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit. 12 And we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given us. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
438:In Ephesians 1, Paul named specific blessings that can come through prayer. He prayed that his spiritual offspring would receive “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better” (v. 17). He asked God to open the eyes of their hearts so they could “know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe” (vv. 18–19). The better we know God (v. 17), the more we trust Him. The more we trust Him, the more we sense His peace when the wintry winds blow against us. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
439:Believers should be the happiest of people, for we know God, His wonderful love, covenant promises, abundant pardon, strong comfort, and abiding presence. We have sorrows, but no reason to be miserable. Although tempted to enjoy the company and pleasures of worldly people, God’s grace makes believers different from them and allows us to derive our enjoyment from Scripture and the Holy Spirit, which promote holiness in us. On judgment day we will escape the wrath of God, and discover how He has watched over us in love all our days. How does this encourage you to follow Christ? ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
440:Keep reminding the intellect—that the ability to picture is an attribute of God—the attribute of sight. The power to feel, experience, and associate with the perfected picture is God's power. The substance used in the world without—to make the forms in your picture and plan is God's pure substance. Then you must—know—God is the Doer, the Doing, and the Deed of every constructive form and action that ever has been sent forth—into the world of manifestation. When you thus use all the constructive processes—it is impossible for your plan—not—to come into your visible world. ~ Godfr Ray King, #NFDB
441:Dhyan means meditation. Meditation means awareness, watchfulness, a silent witnessing of all the processes of the mind. And the magic of watching is that as your watchfulness deepens, the mind starts evaporating. When the watchfulness is absolute mind becomes nil, a zero. And the disappearance of the mind gives you clarity, absolute clarity, transparency; you can see through and through, you become a mirror. And then life is reflected as it is - not according to any doctrine, not according to the Bible or the Koran or the Gita but as it is. And to know life as it is, is to know god. ~ Rajneesh, #NFDB
442:7Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
443:You can know God intimately while acknowledging the mystery, even the absurdity, of such a notion. You can experience the proven neurological benefits of prayer even as you contemplate how science shows prayer's limitations. You can be part of the global body of people who follow God without turning off your brain or believing things that go against your conscience. You can read he Bible without having to brush off its ancient portrayal of science or its all-too-fruquent brutality.
And you can meet a risen Son of God named Jesus while wondering how such a thing could ever be true. ~ Mike McHargue,#NFDB
444:Abraham saw God as Father. He proved Him to be the source of all things. Isaac received the inheritance as a son. It is a blessed thing to have a gift bestowed upon us by God. Yet even what we receive we may seize upon and spoil. Jacob attempted to do this, and was only saved from the consequences by having his natural strength undone. There must be a day in our experience when this happens. The characteristic of those who truly know God is that they have no faith in their own competence, no reliance upon themselves. When Jacob learned this lesson, then in truth there began to be an Israel of God. ~ Watchman Nee, #NFDB
445:Obedience to commandments is the way we build a foundation of truth. Here is the way that works, in words so simple that a child could understand: The truth of most worth is to know God our Heavenly Father, His Son, Jesus Christ, and Their plan for us to have eternal life with Them in families. When God communicates that priceless truth to us, He does it by the Spirit of Truth. We have to ask for it in prayer. Then He sends us a small part of that truth by the Spirit. It comes to our hearts and minds. It feels good, like the light from the sun shining through the clouds on a dark day. He sends... ~ Henry B Eyring, #NFDB
446:Abraham saw God as Father. He proved Him to be the source of all things. Isaac received the inheritance as a son. It is a blessed thing to have a gift bestowed upon us by God. Yet even what we receive we may seize upon and spoil. Jacob attempted to do this, and was only saved from the consequences by having his natural strength undone. There must be a day in our experience when this happens. The characteristic of those who truly know God is that they have no faith in their own competence, no reliance upon themselves. When Jacob learned this lesson, then in truth there began to be an Israel of God. . . ~ Watchman Nee, #NFDB
447:But Wyatt, the humiliation. Why? Why would God let him do this? It’s a cruel turn when he’s been so good his whole life. Why would God destroy his reputation for wisdom and good sense now?”
“I don’t pretend to know God’s purpose, but just look at how dealing with him has made you stronger. Look how you’ve changed. If he hadn’t needed help, you would have never come to Missouri. You would’ve stayed in Boston and lived the life you’d always lived, and I would’ve never met you.” He cupped the back of her head and held her against him. “God is still at work. He hasn’t forgotten you, or your grandpa. ~ Regina Jennings,#NFDB
448:It was then that I realized the value of apologetics and what the arguments had done for me. All my life, barriers had been erected that kept me from humbly approaching God and asking Him to reveal Himself to me. The arguments and apologetics tore down those barriers, positioning me to make a decision to pursue God or not. The work of my intellect was done. It had opened the way to His altar, but I had to decide whether I would approach it. If I did, and if I really wanted to know God, I had to cast myself upon His mercy and love, relying completely upon Him and His willingness to reveal Himself to me. ~ Nabeel Qureshi, #NFDB
449:Many times we recognize our weakness, but we fail to recognize what God can accomplish through it. It’s a giving up point for far too many people who claim to know the all-powerful God. “I just can’t” is a foolish statement for those who know God; it should not be in our vocabulary. “I can’t” should be replaced by “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). Weakness should cause us to surrender to Christ in a way we never have before, to cry out to the One who has also known weakness, who has been tempted in every way, who knows the pull to give up, to move on, to pursue His own way. ~ Francis Chan, #NFDB
450:In all of knowable reality, God is unique. He is knowable not like the multiplication table or the table of elements; he alone is knowable as the one totally in control of being known. He is not at the disposal of the human mind. He is known when he wills to be known. Yet he is known in and through created reality, which is known naturally. Therefore the glory of God is exalted most not when we know God apart from observation and reading and study, but when we know God as a result of his free and gracious self-revelation in and through our earnest observation of and meditation on his work and Word in history. ~ John Piper, #NFDB
451:Listen to yourself speak, saying, “The knowledge of God has no practical application.” Do you know why all your Christian bookstores are filled up with self-help books, and five ways to do this or that, and six ways to be godly, and 10 ways not to fall?—because people don’t know God! And so they have to be given all sorts of trivial little devices of the flesh to keep them walking as sheep ought to walk! “Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame” (1Co 15:34). Why the rampant sinning even among God’s people? It is a lack of the knowledge of God! ~ Paul David Washer, #NFDB
452:You are My witnesses,” declares the Lord, “that I am God. Yes, and from ancient days I am he.” Isaiah 43:12–13 (NIV) When she was in second grade, my daughter Amanda illustrated a truth about the centrality of God. She was telling me something she had prayed over at school that day. I said, “Oh, Amanda, do you know how much it means to Mommy for you to make God a part of your day?” I'll never forget her answer: “You're so silly, Mommy. You know God made the day. I'm just glad He made me a part of His.” I was stunned. She expressed through her childlike faith the meaning of God's wonderful name, the “Ancient of Days. ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
453:If you say: what is the ultimate point of knowledge attained by the 'knowers' of God the most high? We would say: the ultimate knowledge of the 'knowers' lies in their inability to know, in their realizing in fact that they do not know Him and that it is utterly impossible for them to know Him; indeed, that it is impossible for anyone except God to know God with an authentic knowledge comprehending the true nature of the divine attributes. If that is disclosed to them by proof, as we have mentioned, they will know it-that is, they will have attained the utmost to which creatures can possibly attain in knowing Him. ~ Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, #NFDB
454:Kids are wonderful,' the man was saying. 'Our four-year-old, the things he says! The other night he wouldn't go to sleep, you know. He was making a little fuss and saying he was afraid of the dark and all and mother here says to him, "Don't be afraid of the dark. God's in the room with you," and he says "I know God's here but I want somebody with skin on."'
The woman started to laugh. She was plump and blond and smelled like a rising cake.
'Isn't that a kid though,' the bartender said.
Pearl put her hand out and held on to the bar. She thought that this was the most horrible story she had ever heard in her life. ~ Joy Williams,#NFDB
455:There is something worse than holding our silence while the lost of this world run headlong into hell: the crime of preaching to a different gospel than the one passed down to the saints. For this reason, we must shun the gospel of contemporary evangelicalism, for it is a watered-down, culturally carved, truncated gospel that allows men to hold to a form of godliness while denying its power, to profess to know God while denying Him with their deeds, and to call Jesus “Lord, Lord,” while not doing the Father’s will.15 Woe to us if we do not preach the gospel, but even greater woe is due us if we preach it incorrectly!16 ~ Paul David Washer, #NFDB
456:God Is Love 7Beloved, j let us love one another, for love is from God, and k whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 l Anyone who does not love does not know God, because m God is love. 9In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that n God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10In this is love, o not that we have loved God n but that he loved us and sent his Son to be p the propitiation for our sins. 11Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 q No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and r his love is perfected in us. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
457:People often come to me and ask me to pray for them, that they would discover God’s will for their life. I already know God’s will for their life – heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out devils, cleanse lepers. They say, ‘Yes, but I need to know if I should be a schoolteacher or a missionary.’ I say, ‘Well, just pick one, and then heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out devils, cleanse lepers.’ Or they will say, ‘I just don’t know whether I should be married or should be single.’ I reply, ‘What do you want to be?’ ‘I really want to be married.’ ‘Then get married... and heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out devils, cleanse lepers. ~ Bill Johnson, #NFDB
458:we are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and the servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all. If we would find God amid all the religious externals we must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
459:Now, with regard to religion, you say where you want to go is to a place where you can truly know God and love God. I am simply observing that your religions do not take you there. Your religions have made God the Great Mystery, and caused you not to love God, but to fear God. Religion has done little, as well, to cause you to change your behaviors. You are still killing each other, condemning each other, making each other “wrong.” And, in fact, it is your religions which have been encouraging you to do so. So with regard to religion, I merely observe that you say you want it to take you to one place, and it is taking you to another. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
460:I am a child of God, therefore I don’t have to be afraid or dismayed. I know God is with me. He will strengthen me, help me, and uphold me with His hand (Isa. 41:10). I am a child of God, therefore no weapon formed against me shall succeed. God will disprove every tongue that rises against me in judgment (Isa. 54:17 ESV). I am a child of God, therefore God is in my midst, a mighty one who will save me; He will rejoice over me with gladness; He will quiet me with his love; He will exult over me with loud singing (Zeph. 3:17). I am a child of God, therefore God’s Word is there for me. It is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path (Ps. 119:105). ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
461:Personally, I think knowing the difference between a racist and a saint is kind of important. But when Jesus again and again says things like the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, and the poor are blessed, and the rich are cursed, and that prostitutes make great dinner guests, it makes me wonder if our need for pure black-and-white categories is not true religion but maybe actually a sin. Knowing what category to place hemlock in might help us know whether it's safe to drink, but knowing what category to place ourselves and others in does not help us know God in the way that the church so often has tried to convince us it does. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
462:Personally, I think knowing the difference between a racist and a saint is kind of important. But when Jesus again and again says things like the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, and the poor are blessed, and the rich are cursed, and that prostitutes make great dinner guests, it makes me wonder if our need for pure black-and-white categories is not true religion but maybe actually a sin. Knowing what category to place hemlock in might help us know whether it’s safe to drink, but knowing what category to place ourselves and others in does not help us know God in the way that the church so often has tried to convince us it does. ~ Nadia Bolz Weber, #NFDB
463:In the first place, Paul says, the utter bankruptcy of all the world’s efforts to know God was part of God’s wise design. It was “in the wisdom of God” that “the world through its wisdom did not know him” (1:21). Not only did the wise and the scholars and the philosophers fail to understand, God in his all-wise providence actually worked it out that way. Their failures are thoroughly blameworthy; their ignorance of God and their endless, self-centered preoccupation are culpable. Nevertheless, no evil, certainly not theirs, can escape the bounds of God’s sovereign providence—and it is God himself who ensures that the world in its wisdom does not know him. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
464:A true Master is not the one with the most students, but one who creates the most Masters. A true leader is not the one with the most followers, but one who creates the most leaders. A true king is not the one with the most subjects, but one who leads the most to royalty. A true teacher is not the one with the most knowledge, but one who causes the most others to have knowledge. And a true God is not One with the most servants, but One who serves the most, thereby making Gods of all others. For this is both the goal and the glory of God: that His subjects shall be no more, and that all shall know God not as the unattainable, but as the unavoidable. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
465:For example, if we ponder the very beginning of the Lord’s Prayer—“Our Father”—it could work like this: As instruction, it shows us that we cannot know God only on our own but must do so in community with others. Jesus did not teach us to pray “my father” but “our father.” We may go on to praise God for all the friends who have helped us in our spiritual journey and for being a God who creates community and bonds of love. We may go on to confess that we do not pray much with others and do not allow our friends to hold us accountable on the consistency of our Christian walk. Finally, we may begin to pray for more close friends with whom we can share our walk of faith. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
466:Permit me to bypass the entire nature vs. nurture “is gender really built-in?” debate with one simple observation: Men and women are made in the image of God as men or as women. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Now, we know God doesn’t have a body, so the uniqueness can’t be physical. Gender simply must be at the level of the soul, in the deep and everlasting places within us. God doesn’t make generic people; he makes something very distinct—a man or a woman. In other words, there is a masculine heart and a feminine heart, which in their own ways reflect or portray to the world God’s heart. ~ John Eldredge, #NFDB
467:He showed me a sketch he'd drawn once during meditation. It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face drawn over the heart.
To find the balance you want," Ketut spoke through his translator, "this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,#NFDB
468:As it was before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget Him, or disbelieve Him, and I died.
What is this animation and dying? I do not live when I lose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live, really live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. “What more do you seek?” exclaimed a voice within me. “This is He. He is that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.”
“Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.” And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me. ~ Leo Tolstoy,#NFDB
469:Whenever God thinks of you, he has your best interests in mind; he has plans to take you further, deeper, and higher than you ever dreamed. This process begins when you seek God and spend time with him. Look for every opportunity to know God. Consider your daily schedule. What does it include? A workout at the gym? A trip to the post office? A lunch hour? A commute? Look for ways to include God in your activities. Invite God to accompany you by talking together. Look for moments- even if it's only ten or twenty seconds- to steal away with him. God will reward your efforts as you reshape your inner life to be focused around him. As you seek God, you will find yourself abiding in him." -Hungry for God ~ Margaret Feinberg, #NFDB
470:I think our generation has been called to apathy just as our grandparents were called to defeat fascism and the baby boomers were called to get divorced and fuck around for most of their adult lives before bankrupting the entire goddamn country when they retire. But we have the chance to do something really special here. Imagine a world where people didn’t care enough to go to war over anything. Where some guy gets up in the morning and says, “I know God wants me to kill the infidels and keep gay people from marrying each other, but I just don’t give a shit. I’m going back to bed.” It would be paradise on earth. This is our mission. I think we can make it happen, but I really don’t care either way. And that’s called hope. ~ Paul Neilan, #NFDB
471:The yogi moving toward Divinity is deemed more highly evolved than ascetics who practice
severe penance, higher than the learned ones who know the scriptures, and above the ritualists who perform their rites seeking favors. All of these are to some extent still entangled in desire. So be a yogi, Arjuna!
“Know that the true yogi has chosen a great yet attainable ideal in life: to turn Godward, to constantly and consciously move toward Divinity — to not simply know about God, but to know God in the fullest sense, to literally become one with the Divine!
“This is the profound plan and purpose of creation that is hidden from most people. Arjuna, be the one who gives Me his whole heart. That yogi will be My very own. ~ Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa,#NFDB
472:When Jesus said eternal life is knowing God—including God the Son, Jesus Christ—He did not mean that eternal life is knowing about God. He was not referring to someone who has read many books and attended numerous seminars about God. He was talking about a firsthand, experiential knowledge. We come to truly know God as we experience Him in and around our lives. Many people have grown up attending church and hearing about God all their lives, but they do not have a personal, dynamic, growing relationship with God. They never hear His voice. They have no idea what God's will is. They do not encounter His love firsthand. They have no sense of divine purpose for their lives. They may know a lot about God, but they don't really know Him. ~ Henry T Blackaby, #NFDB
473:As a believer and a pantheist, I worship God not through fear and trembling but through awe and wonder at the workings of the universe—for the universe is God. I pray to God not to ask for things but to become one with God. I recognize that the knowledge of good and evil that the God of Genesis so feared humans might attain begins with the knowledge that good and evil are not metaphysical things but moral choices. I root my moral choices neither in fear of eternal punishment nor in hope of eternal reward. I recognize the divinity of the world and every being in it and respond to everyone and everything as though they were God—because they are. And I understand that the only way I can truly know God is by relying on the only thing I can truly know: myself. ~ Reza Aslan, #NFDB
474:I pray that in reading this story, not only have you gained greater insights and a different perspective of the orphan train movement, but that you're also been encouraged to know God is present in our weakest moments. He doesn't necessarily promise to give us courage of a lion or to make everything perfect. But He does promise that His strength is available and that His power will rest upon us. Perhaps that strength will be just enough to get out of bed for another difficult day. Or perhaps it will be just enough to face the illness or hurt or heartache we bear.
We can rest assured it will always be just enough. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. May His power rest on you today and always as you move forward each tiny step with His courage. ~ Jody Hedlund,#NFDB
475:Calvin famously began his Institutes with the words, “Nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”244 In other words, we cannot truly know God better without coming at the same time to know ourselves better. It also works the other way around. If I am in denial about my own weakness and sin, there will be a concomitant blindness to the greatness and glory of God. There is no greater example of this than Isaiah, who when he was given a vision in the temple of the holiness of God, said immediately in response, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Is 6:5). ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
476:Cultural and religious traditions that forbid cross-cultural unions prevent peace on earth. Instead of rejoicing that our sons and daughters are heart-driven and love other humans outside of their familiar religious, social or cultural domains, we punish and insult them. This is wrong. Honor killings are not honorable by God. They are driven by ignorance and ego and nothing more. The Creator favors the man who loves over the man who hates. If you think God will punish you or your child for allowing them to marry outside of your tribe or faith, then you do not know God. Love is his religion and the light of love sees no walls. Anybody who unconditionally loves another human being for the goodness of their heart and nothing more is already on the right side of God. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
477:we cannot truly know God better without coming at the same time to know ourselves better. It also works the other way around. If I am in denial about my own weakness and sin, there will be a concomitant blindness to the greatness and glory of God. There is no greater example of this than Isaiah, who when he was given a vision in the temple of the holiness of God, said immediately in response, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Is 6:5). It was because he’d seen the king in a new way that he saw himself in a new way. They must go together. If we are not open to the recognition of our smallness and sinfulness, we will never take in his greatness and holiness. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
478:28People did not think it was important to have a true knowledge of God. So God left them and allowed them to have their own worthless thinking and to do things they should not do. 29They are filled with every kind of sin, evil, selfishness, and hatred. They are full of jealousy, murder, fighting, lying, and thinking the worst about each other. They gossip 30and say evil things about each other. They hate God. They are rude and conceited and brag about themselves. They invent ways of doing evil. They do not obey their parents. 31They are foolish, they do not keep their promises, and they show no kindness or mercy to others. 32They know God’s law says that those who live like this should die. But they themselves not only continue to do these evil things, they applaud others who do them. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
479:We have got to realise the littleness of creation and to see it for the nothing that it is before we can love and possess God who is uncreated. This is the reason why we have no ease of heart or soul, for we are seeking our rest in trivial things which cannot satisfy, and not seeking to know God, almighty, all-wise, all-good. He is true rest. It is His will that we should know Him, and His pleasure that we should rest in Him. Nothing less will satisfy us. [...] We shall never cease wanting and longing until we possess Him in fullness and joy. Then we shall have no further wants. Meanwhile His will is that we go on knowing and loving until we are perfected in heaven. [...] The more clearly the soul sees the blessed face by grace and love, the more it longs to see it in its fullness. ~ Julian of Norwich, #NFDB
480:It is precisely this refusal of the Cartesian paradigm that characterizes Radical Orthodoxy, which seeks to reanimate the account of knowledge offered by Augustine and Aquinas. On this ancient-medieval-properly-postmodern model, we rightly give up pretensions to absolute knowledge or certainty, but we do not thereby give up on knowledge altogether. Rather, we can properly confess that we know God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but such knowledge rests on the gift of (particular, special) revelation, is not universally objective or demonstrable, and remains a matter of interpretation and perspective (with a significant appreciation for the role of the Spirit's regeneration and illumination as a condition for knowledge). We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity. ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
481:To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains personally unknown to the individual. "He must be," they say, "therefore we believe He is." Others do not go even so far as this; they know of Him only by hearsay. They have never bothered to think the matter out for themselves, but have heard about Him from others, and have put belief in Him into the back of their minds along with the various odds and ends that make up their total creed. To many others God is but an ideal, another name for goodness, or beauty, or truth; or He is law, or life, or the creative impulse back of the phenomena of existence. These notions about God are many and varied, but they who hold them have one thing in common: they do not know God in personal experience. ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
482:Second, a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ. Among men there is strife. ‘He is our peace’, says Paul of Jesus Christ (Eph. 2.14). Without Christ there is discord between God and man and between man and man. Christ became the Mediator and made peace with God and among men. Without Christ we should not know God and could not call upon him, nor come to him. But without Christ we would also not know our brother, nor could we come to him. The way is blocked by our own ego. Christ opened up the way to God and to our brother. Now Christians can live with one another in peace; they can love and serve one another; they can become one. But they can continue to do so only by way of Jesus Christ. Only in Jesus Christ are we one, only through him are we bound together. To eternity he remains the one Mediator. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, #NFDB
483:For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.
Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home. ~ Henri J M Nouwen,#NFDB
484:L'Avventura,' Dad said, 'has the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with, not only because they loathe anything left to the imagination-we're talking about the country that invented spandex-but also because they are a confident, self-assured nation. They know Family. They know Right from Wrong. They know God-many of them attest to daily chats with the man. And the idea that none of us can truly know anything at all-not the lives of our friends or family, not even ourselves-is a thought they'd rather be shot in the arm with their own semi-automatic rifle than face head-on. Personally, I think there's something terrific about not knowing, relinquishing man's feeble attempt to control. When you throw up your hands, say, "Who knows?" you can get on with the sheer gift of being alive. ~ Marisha Pessl, #NFDB
485:I recalled the hundreds of occasions when life had died within me only to be reborn. I remembered that I only lived during those times when I believed in God. Then, as now, I said to myself: I have only to believe in God in order to live. I have only to disbelieve in Him, or to forget Him, in order to die. What are these deaths and rebirths? It is clear that I do not live when I lose belief in God’s existence, and I should have killed myself long ago, were it not for a dim hope of finding Him. What then is it you are seeking? a voice exclaimed inside me. There He is! He, without whom it is impossible to live. To know God and to live are one and the same thing. God is life.
‘Live in search of God and there will be no life without God!’ And more powerfully than ever before everything within and around me came to light, and the light has not deserted me since. ~ Leo Tolstoy,#NFDB
486:No Spiritual Discipline is more important than the intake of God’s Word. Nothing can substitute for it. There simply is no healthy Christian life apart from a diet of the milk and meat of Scripture. The reasons for this are obvious. In the Bible God tells us about Himself, and especially about Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God. The Bible unfolds the Law of God to us and shows us how we’ve all broken it. There we learn how Christ died as a sinless, willing Substitute for breakers of God’s Law and how we must repent and believe in Him to be right with God. In the Bible we learn the ways and will of the Lord. We find in Scripture how God wants us to live, and what brings the most joy and satisfaction in life. None of this eternally essential information can be found anywhere else except the Bible. Therefore if we would know God and be godly, we must know the Word of God—intimately. ~ Donald S Whitney, #NFDB
487:Much has been made of an alleged distinction between revelation as propositional and revelation as personal. Since God is himself a person, so some say, revelation cannot be propositional (or at least, not primarily so). Revelation is God making himself known, the event of disclosing his person to other persons. But Packer is certainly correct in pointing out that this distinction should not be pressed too far. He notes: Personal friendship between God and man, grows just as human friendships do—namely, through talking; and talking means making informative statements, and informative statements are propositions. . . . [Indeed] to say that revelation is non-propositional is actually to depersonalize it. . . . To maintain that we may know God without God actually speaking to us in words is really to deny that God is personal, or at any rate that knowing Him is a truly personal relationship.7 ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
488:10.: I do not know whether I have put this clearly; self-knowledge is of such consequence that I would not have you careless of it, though you may be lifted to heaven in prayer, because while on earth nothing is more needful than humility. Therefore, I repeat, not only a good way, but the best of all ways, is to endeavour to enter first by the room where humility is practised, which is far better than at once rushing on to the others. This is the right road;-if we know how easy and safe it is to walk by it, why ask for wings with which to fly? Let us rather try to learn how to advance quickly. I believe we shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavouring to know God, for, beholding His greatness we are struck by our own baseness, His purity shows our foulness, and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are from being humble. ~ Saint Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, 1.02, #NFDB
489:C. S. Lewis, who called pride “the great sin,” and “spiritual cancer,” wrote: It is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began . . . Pride always means enmity—it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God. In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and therefore know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God.1 ~ John F MacArthur Jr, #NFDB
490:If your lifestyle makes you wonder if Jesus really is your King, that is actually a good thing. You are understanding the truth. But you should also be amazed that the King never stops inviting you to himself and his kingdom. That is either very weird, or it’s holy. If someone kept offering you a free invitation to a grand and expensive party, and you kept shoving it back in his face, at some point the host would stop making the offer. But God loves to invite you. He loves to invite those who can’t pay the cover charge, so that he can pay it for them. That way, you and everyone else know that God himself did it all. You added nothing to make the relationship possible. That is what people mean by grace. There is no room for boasting. If you know God as Holy Father, King, and Lord, you are moving in a direction from astonishment to devotion, devotion to reverence, and reverence to worship that delights in obeying him. ~ Edward T Welch, #NFDB
491:My mother told me that when she knew I was traveling, she would pray that the Lord would be with me. I would finish a meeting in California and then travel straight through until I got home. She would just stay awake worrying, waiting for the telephone to ring, announcing bad news. I told her that she was wasting her time, that she might as well not pray if she was going to keep on worrying. She would pray that God would protect me, and then she would stay awake worrying. That’s the way many people act when they pray. But worry can hinder you from receiving answers to prayers. Worry can stop God from being able to move on your behalf. Thank God, prayer means more than that. John 16:24 says, “. . . ask, and ye SHALL RECEIVE, that your joy may be full.” When you pray in faith, according to God’s Word, you are full of joy and rejoicing even before the answer materializes because you know God heard you. You have His Word for it. ~ Kenneth E Hagin, #NFDB
492:But, if we want our churches to thrive and our devotional lives to flourish, we absolutely must let God be God. We cannot settle for warm, fuzzy, "feel good movie of the year" versions of God. We cannot settle for a God who exists only to meet our needs and make us happy. We cannot settle for a God who is boring and irrelevant. We cannot settle for a God of our own imagination. We must know the ferocious, untamable God. We must let God out of the boxes we have created. We must come face to face with God as he really is, with all his sharp edges and blazing glory and heart-rending beauty. We must encounter the God who makes mountains melt like wax and the angels cover their eyes and the rivers leap for joy. If we are going to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we must truly know God. We must know him as he truly is, not as we imagine him to be. We must come to grips with the God who has revealed himself in scripture. ~ Stephen Altrogge, #NFDB
493:Has anyone by fussing before the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? If fussing can’t even do that, why fuss at all? Walk into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They don’t fuss with their appearance — but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. If God gives such attention to the wildflowers, most of them never even seen, don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? 29-32 “What I’m trying to do here is get you to relax, not be so preoccupied with getting so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep yourself in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met. Don’t be afraid of missing out. You’re my dearest friends! The Father wants to give you the very kingdom itself. ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
494:I have been arguing that Christians recognize the culture-relatedness of all truth, but that this does not jeopardize the objectivity of the revelation God has graciously provided in his Son Jesus Christ and in the Bible; that there are ways of thinking through how people come to know this truth, and the God who is its ultimate source; and that failure to recognize it for what it is—in short, failure to know God—is morally reprehensible, and marks a rebellion against the authority of the one who created us and who governs us. Several times I have hinted at the importance of adopting “the whole counsel of God,” of recognizing the distinctiveness of an entire Christian worldview if the parts within it are to make much sense. That means not less than following and adopting the Bible’s plot-line. In other words (to use the contemporary jargon), the Bible provides us with a metanarrative, a comprehensive “story” that provides the framework for a comprehensive explanation, a comprehensive worldview. ~ D A Carson, #NFDB
495:as a man comes to know God in the unitive vision, he knows in that some moment, his own true Self. This intriguing fact is expressed most succinctly in a passage from the ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana; in it, Rama, who represents the Godhead incarnate, asks his servant, Hanuman, “How do you regard me?” And Hanuman replies: dehabhavena daso’smi jivabhavena twadamshakah atmabhave twamevaham (When I identify with the body, I am Thy servant; When I identify with the soul, I am a part of Thee; But when I identify with the Self, I am truly Thee.)1 These three attitudes represent progressively subtler stages of self-identification: from the identification with the body, to identification with the soul, until, finally, one comes to know the Divine, and thereby one’s eternal Self. While each of these three relational attitudes finds expression as the prevailing attitude within various individual religious traditions, they are essentially representative of the viewpoint from these different stages of self-awareness. ~ Swami Abhayananda, #NFDB
496:The God of the Christians is indeed the God of the heathens, but with a wide difference … The Christians know God personally, face to face. The heathens know only … 'what,' and not 'who,' God is; … Christians … are distinguished from the heathens; … they are Christians in virtue of their special knowledge of God; … their mark of distinction is God. … [T]his God is unknown to the heathens, and to unbelievers in general; he does not exist for them. He is, indeed, said to exist for the heathens; but mediately, on condition that they cease to be heathens and become Christians. … Faith is imprisoned within itself. It is true that the philosophical, or … any scientific theorist, also limits himself by a definite system. But theoretic limitation, however fettered, short-sighted and narrow-hearted it may be, has still a freer character than faith, because the domain of theory is itself a free one … [F]aith refers … to … a special, personal Being, urging himself on recognition, and making salvation dependent on that recognition. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach, #NFDB
497:we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
498:Cynicism is a powerful anesthetic we use to numb ourselves to pain, but which also, by its nature, numbs us to truth and joy. Grief is healthy. Even anger can be healthy. But numbing ourselves with cynicism in an effort to avoid feeling those things is not. When I write off all evangelicals as hateful and ignorant, I am numbing myself with cynicism. When I jeer at their foibles, I am numbing myself with cynicism. When I roll my eyes and fold my arms and say, “Well, I know God can’t be present over there,” I am numbing myself with cynicism. And I am missing out. I am missing out on a God who surprises us by showing up where we don’t think God belongs. I am missing out on a God whose grace I need just as desperately, just as innately as the lady who dropped her child sponsorship in a protest against gay marriage. Cynicism may help us create simpler storylines with good guys and bad guys, but it doesn’t make us any better at telling the truth, which is that most of us are a frightening mix of good and evil, sinner and saint. ~ Rachel Held Evans, #NFDB
499:Prayer is therefore not a strictly private thing. As much as we can, we should pray with others both formally in gathered worship and informally. Why? If the substance of prayer is to continue a conversation with God, and if the purpose of it is to know God better, then this can happen best in community. C. S. Lewis argues that it takes a community of people to get to know an individual person. Reflecting on his own friendships, he observed that some aspects of one of his friend’s personality were brought out only through interaction with a second friend. That meant if he lost the second friend, he lost the part of his first friend that was otherwise invisible. “By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”221 If it takes a community to know an ordinary human being, how much more necessary would it be to get to know Jesus alongside others? By praying with friends, you will be able to hear and see facets of Jesus that you have not yet perceived. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
500:If you complain, you will remain. You’ll stay right there. If you become negative and soured on life, you won’t pass the test. There was promotion available. There was opportunity for new growth, but because you didn’t count it all joy, you missed out. The good news is this: God will give you another opportunity. He can still take you where you need to be. For instance, when someone offends you, your attitude should be, I won’t be upset. I’ll count it all joy. I know this is simply a test, and on the other side of this challenge I’ll be promoted.
When business is slow, instead of griping, count it all joy. Tell yourself, This, too, shall pass. I know God is supplying all of my needs. Or when you face a disappointment, your negative emotions will tell you to be down and discouraged. You’ll feel self-pity trying to set in. But instead of submitting to those negative emotions, encourage yourself: Get up. Be strong. There are good days up ahead.
That’s how you pass the test. That’s how you count it all joy. ~ Joel Osteen,#NFDB
501:It is dangerous for us to allow our difficulties to reside in the forefront of our thinking. Rather, our focus should always remain on our matchless God, who can triumph over any trouble we bring to Him.
When God said no to one blessing, it was so I could experience a greater one later on.
God speaks to you and me through every situation, but hearing Him is dependent upon our anticipating and paying attention to His instruction.
Regardless of the circumstances we experience, we know God is teaching us something, and we will intentionally and eagerly learn and apply whatever it is.
There are many days when I cannot wait to get home and be alone with the Father. I am eager to leave behind all the stresses and decisions, change out of my suit and tie, go into my prayer closet, open God’s Word, and relax in His loving arms. Many times I don’t need to say a word. I simply want to hear from the Lord, experiencing His peaceful wisdom and loving presence. There is nothing better in life than just being with Him. ~ Charles F Stanley,#NFDB
502:Not for years and years had Janet been to church; she had long been unable to walk so far; and having no book but the best, and no help to understand it but the highest, her faith was simple, strong, real, all-pervading. Day by day she pored over the great gospel -- I mean just the good news according to Matthew and Mark and Luke and John -- until she had grown to be one of the noble ladies of the kingdom of heaven -- one of those who inherit the earth, and are ripening to see God. For the Master, and his mind in hers, was her teacher. She had little or no theology save what he taught her, or rather, what he is. And of any other than that, the less the better; for no theology, except the Theou logos, is worth the learning, no other being true. To know him is to know God. And he only who obeys him, does or can know him; he who obeys him cannot fail to know him. To Janet, Jesus Christ was no object of so-called theological speculation, but a living man, who somehow or other heard her when she called to him, and sent her the help she needed. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
503:Life's greatest philosophy is not handed down in stoic texts and dusty tomes, but lived, in each breath and act of human compassion. For love has always demanded sacrifice, and no greater love is there than that for which our lives are traded. And in this great cause of spiritual evolution we are all called to be martyrs, to die each of us, in the quest of a higher realm and loftier ideals, that we may know God. And what if there is nothing else? What if all life ends in the silent void of death? Then is it all in vain? I think not, for love, for the sake of love, will always be enough. And if our lives are but a single flash in the dark hollow of eternity, then if, but for the briefest of moments, we shine - then how brilliantly our light has burned. And as starlight knows no boundary of space or time, so too, our illumination will shine forth throughout all eternity, for darkness has no power to quell such light. And this is a lesson we must all learn and take to heart - that all light is eternal and all love is light. And it must forever be so. ~ Richard Paul Evans, #NFDB
504:That’s the ground motive of Spirit-directed, Christ-mediated prayer—to simply know him better and enjoy his presence. Consider how different this is from the normal way we use prayer. In our natural state we pray to God to get things. We may believe in God, but our deepest hopes and happiness reside in things as in how successful we are or in our social relationships. We therefore pray mainly when our career or finances are in trouble, or when some relationship or social status is in jeopardy. When life is going smoothly, and our truest heart treasures seem safe, it does not occur to us to pray. Also, ordinarily our prayers are not varied—they consist usually of petitions, occasionally some confession (if we have just done something wrong). Seldom or never do we spend sustained time adoring and praising God. In short, we have no positive, inner desire to pray. We do it only when circumstances force us. Why? We know God is there, but we tend to see him as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, he has not become our happiness. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
505:O Holy Spirit of Fire, life in the life of all life, holy are you, enlivening all things. Holy are you, a healing balm to the broken. Holy are you, washing blistered wounds. O Holy Breath, O Fire of Life, O Sweetness in my breast infusing my heart with the fine scent of truth. O Pure Fountain through which we know God unites strangers and gathers the lost. O Heart's Shield, guarding life and hope, joining the many members into one body; Belt of Truth, wrap them in beauty. Protect those ensnared by the enemy, and free the worthy from their fetters. O Great Way that runs through all, from the heights, across the earth, and in the depths, you encompass all and unify all. From you the clouds stream and the ether rises; from your stones precious water pours, springs well and birth waterways, and the earth sweats green with life. And eternally do you bring forth knowledge by the breath of wisdom. All praise to you, you who are the song of praise and the joy of life, you who are hope and the greatest treasure, bestowing the gift of Light.
~ Saint Hildegard von Bingen, O ignis Spiritus Paracliti
,#NFDB
506:Some who desire to be teachers of the Word, but who understand neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm, insist upon “naked” faith as the only way to know spiritual things. By this they mean a conviction of the trustworthiness of the Word of God (a conviction, it may be noted, which the devils share with them). But the man who has been taught even slightly by the Spirit of Truth will rebel at this perversion. His language will be, “I have heard Him and observed Him. What have I to do any more with idols?” For he cannot love a God who is no more than a deduction from a text. He will crave to know God with a vital awareness that goes beyond words and to live in the intimacy of personal communion. To seek our divinity merely in books and writings is to seek the living among the dead; we do but in vain many times seek God in these, where His truth too often is not so much enshrined as entombed. He is best discerned by an intellectual touch of Him. We must see with our eyes, and hear with our ears, and our hands must handle of the Word of Life. Nothing can take the place of the touch of God in the ~ A W Tozer, #NFDB
507:The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him. 1 Corinthians 2:14 It has pleased God to say many things which leave room for misunderstanding, and not to explain them. Often in the Bible there seem to be conflicting statements or statements that seem to violate the known facts of life, and it has pleased Him to leave them there. There are many scriptures we cannot clearly explain. Had we been writing, we would have put things far more plainly so that men should have before them all the doctrine in foolproof systematic order. But would they have had the life? The mighty eternal truths of God are half obscured in Scripture so that the natural man may not lay hold of them. God has hidden them from the wise to reveal them to babes, for they are spiritually discerned. His Word is not a study book. It is intended to meet us in the course of our day-to-day walk in the Spirit and to speak to us there. It is designed to give us knowledge that is experimental because related to life. If we are trying through systematic theology to know God, we are absolutely on the wrong road. ~ Watchman Nee, #NFDB
508:No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.” But it was to us that God revealed these things by his Spirit. For his Spirit searches out everything and shows us God’s deep secrets. No one can know a person’s thoughts except that person’s own spirit, and no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit. And we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given us. When we tell you these things, we do not use words that come from human wisdom. Instead, we speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths. But people who aren’t spiritual can’t receive these truths from God’s Spirit. It all sounds foolish to them and they can’t understand it, for only those who are spiritual can understand what the Spirit means. Those who are spiritual can evaluate all things, but they themselves cannot be evaluated by others. For, “Who can know the LORD’s thoughts? Who knows enough to teach him?” But we understand these things, for we have the mind of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2:9–16 ~ Mary E DeMuth, #NFDB
509:Sow the seeds of hard work and you will reap the fruits of success. Find something to do, do it with all your concentration. You will excel.
Show the world you are not here to just pass through. Leave great footprints wherever you pass and be remembered for the change you initiated.
Flow wherever you go. You can’t be limited. Dare to rise above all limitations and become better than you were. Strive to arrive at the top.
Glow wherever you go and let the light of God reflect in the world around you. You carry the light of God and wherever you pass, darkness must flee.
Grow your talents and skills through a consistent practice and progressive learning. Learn to relearn and unlearn. Raise the bar for yourself always.
Blow out all negative attitudes and live true to your dreams. Talks less and act more. Be confident and see yourself wining even before the victory comes.
Know God and let Him be known. You were saved by grace for greater works apportioned for you even before you were born. Share the good news.
I am proud of you because greater things that eyes have not seen yet, the Lord will do through you. ~ Israelmore Ayivor,#NFDB
510:IF I CAN’T SEE YOU FOR SOME REASON but can only hear you, you don’t exist for me in space, which is where seeing happens, but in time, which is where hearing happens. Your words follow one after the other the way tock follows tick. When I have only the sound of you to go by, I don’t experience you as an object the way I would if you stood before me—something that I can walk around, inspect from all angles, more or less define. I experience you more the way I experience the beating of my own heart or the flow of my own thoughts. A deaf man coming upon me listening to you would think that nothing of importance was going on. But something of extraordinary importance is going on. I am taking you more fully into myself than I can any other way. Hearing you speak brings me by the most direct of all routes something of the innermost secret of who you are. It is no surprise that the Bible uses hearing, not seeing, as the predominant image for the way human beings know God. They can’t walk around God and take God in like a cathedral or an artichoke. They can only listen to time for the sound of God—to the good times and bad times of their own lives for the words God is addressing to, of all people, them. ~ Frederick Buechner, #NFDB
511:He came to bind up the brokenhearted—no matter what broke the heart. He came to open the eyes of the blind—no matter what veiled their vision. part ii BENEFITS AND OBSTACLES You have examined the rule of the four kings of Isaiah's day and compared the reign of the King of kings. You may already be recognizing the symptoms of captivity in your life. Now we are ready to begin the core of our journey. In the following chapters you will get to know your birthright. God intends five benefits to be the daily experience of every child of God. They are not prizes for an elite few believers. He wants you to live and breathe each of these blessings. Since many Christians today obviously are not living in the five benefits, we will also consider five primary obstacles. These are hindrances that keep us from the birthright God intends. I hope you have been working on hiding God's Word in your heart. And because the five benefits are so important to our journey, I want to ask you to begin to memorize them also: To know God and believe Him To glorify God To find satisfaction in God To experience God's peace To enjoy God's presence Five obstacles block our access to the benefits God wants for us: Unbelief, which hinders knowing God Pride, which prevents us from glorifying ~ Beth Moore, #NFDB
512:Often, you have difficulties not because you’re doing something wrong but because you’re doing something right. It’s because you are making a difference. It’s because you are taking new ground for your family. It’s because you are a threat to the enemy. He would leave you alone if you weren’t advancing the kingdom. He wouldn’t bother you if he didn’t know God had something amazing planned for you in your future. That’s why he is trying to make you discouraged and bitter and blaming God, to keep you from the new levels that God has in store for you.
Darkness never likes the light, but don’t worry about it. Light will always overtake the darkness. Just keep shining. Keep smiling. Hold on to your happiness and your joy. Keep treating people well even though they mistreat you. Do the right thing even though the wrong things happen to you again and again. Your troubles are a sure sign that God has something amazing planned in your future. Your happiness will be restored, in abundance.
The enemy will not roll out the red carpet and allow you to fulfill your destiny unopposed. He will throw out unexpected challenges, unexpected trouble, and unexpected difficulties. But know this: The God we serve has unexpected favor, unexpected healing, unexpected breakthroughs, and unexpected turnarounds. ~ Joel Osteen,#NFDB
513:John sums up the matter bluntly. “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars” (1 John 4:20). To truly love God includes loving others with the same love God has for us and the same love God has for them. This is part of what it means to be a participant in the divine nature. It is, in fact, what it means to be Christian (Christ-like). “Whoever does not love,” John wrote, “does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). Our capacity to love—to fulfill the greatest two commandments—is the definitive evidence that we are in fact abiding in Christ and participating in the perfect love of the triune God. Christians sometimes try to assess how they or others are doing on the basis of such things as how successfully they conquer a particular sin, how much prayer and Bible study they do, how regularly they attend and give to church, and so forth. But rarely do we honestly ask the question that Scripture places at the center of everything: Are we growing in our capacity to love all people? Do we have an increasing love for our sisters and brothers in Christ as well as for those for whom Christ died who are yet outside the church? Are we increasing in our capacity to ascribe unsurpassable worth to people whom society judges to have no worth? If there is any distinguishing mark of the true disciple from a biblical perspective, this is it! ~ Gregory A Boyd, #NFDB
514:Prayer is therefore not a strictly private thing. As much as we can, we should pray with others both formally in gathered worship and informally. Why? If the substance of prayer is to continue a conversation with God, and if the purpose of it is to know God better, then this can happen best in community. C. S. Lewis argues that it takes a community of people to get to know an individual person. Reflecting on his own friendships, he observed that some aspects of one of his friend’s personality were brought out only through interaction with a second friend. That meant if he lost the second friend, he lost the part of his first friend that was otherwise invisible. “By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”221 If it takes a community to know an ordinary human being, how much more necessary would it be to get to know Jesus alongside others? By praying with friends, you will be able to hear and see facets of Jesus that you have not yet perceived. That is why, Lewis thinks, that the angels in Isaiah 6 are crying, “Holy, Holy, Holy” to one another. Each angel is communicating to all the rest the part of the glory it sees. Knowing the Lord is communal and cumulative, we must pray and praise together. That way “the more we share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
515:I love the way David put it in Psalm 23, verse 5: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies” (NKJV). God will not only avenge you and make your wrongs right, but He will also bless you in front of your enemies. He could promote you anywhere, but He’ll promote you in front of those trying to make you look bad. He’ll give you favor, honor, and recognition. One day those who stabbed you in the back will watch you receive the credit you deserve.
Knowing that God prepares the table for us in the presence of our enemies keeps me from being discouraged when people talk unfavorably of me. You see, I know God just sent the angels to the grocery store. If somebody lies about you, no big deal. You can see Gabriel setting the table.
Your critics can see the meal on God’s table, but they aren’t invited to the party. They’ll have to watch you enjoy what God has prepared for you. They will watch as you are promoted.
Be ready. If you’ve done the right thing and overlooked offenses and negative words and blessed your enemies, then know God’s table is set. Your dinner is ready. It’s just a matter of time before you’re seated at the table.
Your enemies may try to spoil the party by stealing your joy. They’ll plant doubts, but shake them off. The dinner bell will ring for you at any moment. Those hindering you, trying to bring you down, will see you stepping to a new level. They will see God’s favor and goodness enter your life in a greater way. ~ Joel Osteen,#NFDB
516:Is Christian ethics merely a specific set of Christian answers to the question of good and evil, right and wrong? To make it no more than this is to forget that man’s fall was a fall into the knowledge of good and evil, reinforced by the inexorable knowledge of a condemning law, and that man’s restoration in Christ is a restoration to freedom and grace, to a love that needs no law since it knows and does only what is in accord with love and with God. To imprison ethics in the realm of division, of good and evil, right and wrong, is to condemn it to sterility, and rob it of its real reason for existing, which is love. Love cannot be reduced to one virtue among many others prescribed by ethical imperatives. When love is only “a virtue” among many, man forgets that “God is love” and becomes incapable of that all-embracing love by which we secretly begin to know God as our Creator and Redeemer - who has saved us from the limitations of a purely restrictive and aimless existence “under a law.”
So Bonhoeffer says very rightly: “In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all…. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
517:Why do some people, take Christ, for example, seem to hear more of Your communication than others? Because some people are willing to actually listen. They are willing to hear, and they are willing to remain open to the communication even when it seems scary, or crazy, or downright wrong. We should listen to God even when what’s being said seems wrong? Especially when it seems wrong. If you think you are right about everything, who needs to talk with God? Go ahead and act on all that you know. But notice that you’ve all been doing that since time began. And look at what shape the world is in. Clearly, you’ve missed something. Obviously, there is something you don’t understand. That which you do understand must seem right to you, because “right” is a term you use to designate something with which you agree. What you’ve missed will, therefore, appear at first to be “wrong.” The only way to move forward on this is to ask yourself, “What would happen if everything I thought was ‘wrong’ was actually ‘right’?” Every great scientist knows about this. When what a scientist does is not working, a scientist sets aside all of the assumptions and starts over. All great discoveries have been made from a willingness, and ability, to not be right. And that’s what’s needed here. You cannot know God until you’ve stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking that you’ve already heard God. I cannot tell you My Truth until you stop telling ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
518:How to Know God God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 God so loved the world God loves you! “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” — Jeremiah 31:3 “Indeed the very hairs of your head are numbered.” — Luke 12:7 That He gave His only Son Who is God’s son? “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” — John 14:6 That whoever believes in Him Whosoever? Even me? No matter what you’ve done, God will receive you into His family. He will change you, so come as you are. “I am the Lord, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me?” — Jeremiah 32:27 “The Spirit of the Lord will come upon you in power, … and you will be changed into a different person.” — 1 Samuel 10:6 Should not perish but have eternal life Can I have that “blessed hope” of spending eternity with God? “I write these things to you who believe in the name of Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.” - 1 John 5:13 To know Jesus, come as you are and humbly admit you’re a sinner. A sinner is someone who has missed the target of God’s perfect holiness. I think we all qualify to be sinners. Open the door of your heart and let Christ in. He’ll cleanse you from all sins. He says he stands at the door of your heart and knocks. Let Him in. Talk to Jesus like a friend…because when you open the door of your heart, you have a friend eager to come inside. Bless you! Karen Anna Vogel ~ Karen Anna Vogel, #NFDB
519:Oh, she say. God loves all them feelings. That's some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves 'em you enjoys 'em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that's going, and praise God by liking what you like.
God don't think it dirty? I ast.
Naw, she say. God made it. Listen, God love everything you love-- and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
What it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
Well, us talk and talk about God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.
Now that my eyes opening, I feels like a fool. ~ Alice Walker,#NFDB
520:Come close to God and He will come close to you. (JAMES 4:8) Not everyone is willing to pay the price required to be close to God. Not everyone is willing to simply take the time required or make the investments needed for spiritual growth. God doesn’t ask for all of our time. He certainly wants us to do things we don’t consider “spiritual.” He designed us with bodies, souls (minds, wills, and emotions), and spirits, and He expects us to take care of all these areas. Exercising our bodies and caring for our souls takes time and effort. Our emotions need to be ministered to; we need to have fun and be entertained, and we need to enjoy being with other people. Our minds need to grow and be renewed daily. In addition, we have a spiritual nature that needs attention. To stay balanced and healthy, we must take time to take care of our entire being. I believe the whole issue of intimacy with God is a matter of time. We say we don’t have time to seek God, but the truth is that we take time to do the things that are most important to us. Even though we all have to fight distractions every day, if knowing God and hearing from Him is important to us then we will find time to do it. Don’t try to work God into your schedule, but instead work your schedule around time with Him. Getting to know God is a long-term investment, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t get instant results. Be determined to honor Him with your time and you will reap the benefits. GOD’S WORD FOR YOU TODAY: Just like physical exercise, spiritual exercise needs to be done regularly. You’re sure to see the results. ~ Joyce Meyer, #NFDB
521:Most people don’t “choose” fiery tempers or alcoholic binges or torturing prisoners of war or exploiting Third-World workers or dumping toxic chemicals into their community’s water supply. Most people don’t first conclude that adultery is right and then start fantasizing about their neighbor swinging from a stripper pole. Most people don’t first learn to praise gluttony and then start drizzling bacon grease over their second helping of chicken-fried steak. It happens in reverse. First, you do what you want to do, even though you “know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die,” and only then do you “give approval to those who practice them” (Rom. 1:32). You start to see yourself as either special or as hopeless, and thus the normal boundaries don’t seem to apply. It might be that you are involved in certain patterns right now and that you would, if asked, be able to tell me exactly why they are morally and ethically wrong. It’s not that you are deficient in the cognitive ability to diagnose the situation. It’s instead that you slowly grow to believe that your situation is exceptional (“I am a god”), and then you find all kinds of reasons why this technically isn’t theft or envy or hatred or fornication or abuse of power or whatever (“I am able to discern good and evil”). Or you believe you are powerless before what you want (“I am an animal”) and can therefore escape accountability (“I will not surely die”). You’ve forgotten who you are. You are a creature. You are also a king or a queen. You are not a beast, and you are not a god. That issue is where temptation begins. ~ Russell D Moore, #NFDB
522:THE MEANS OF GOSPEL RENEWAL While the ultimate source of a revival is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit ordinarily uses several “instrumental,” or penultimate, means to produce revival. EXTRAORDINARY PRAYER To kindle every revival, the Holy Spirit initially uses what Jonathan Edwards called “extraordinary prayer” — united, persistent, and kingdom centered. Sometimes it begins with a single person or a small group of people praying for God’s glory in the community. What is important is not the number of people praying but the nature of the praying. C. John Miller makes a helpful and perceptive distinction between “maintenance” and “frontline” prayer meetings.1 Maintenance prayer meetings are short, mechanical, and focused on physical needs inside the church. In contrast, the three basic traits of frontline prayer are these: 1. A request for grace to confess sins and to humble ourselves 2. A compassion and zeal for the flourishing of the church and the reaching of the lost 3. A yearning to know God, to see his face, to glimpse his glory These distinctions are unavoidably powerful. If you pay attention at a prayer meeting, you can tell quite clearly whether these traits are present. In the biblical prayers for revival in Exodus 33; Nehemiah 1; and Acts 4, the three elements of frontline prayer are easy to see. Notice in Acts 4, for example, that after the disciples were threatened by the religious authorities, they asked not for protection for themselves and their families but only for boldness to keep preaching! Some kind of extraordinary prayer beyond the normal services and patterns of prayer is always involved. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
523:We all live as if it is better to seek peace instead of war, to tell the truth instead of lying, to care and nurture rather than to destroy. We believe that these choices are not pointless, that it matters which way we choose to live. Yet if the Cosmic Bench is truly empty, then “who sez” that one choice is better than the others? We can argue about it, but it’s just pointless arguing, endless litigation. If the Bench is truly empty, then the whole span of human civilization, even if it lasts a few million years, will be just an infinitesimally brief spark in relation to the oceans of dead time that preceded it and will follow it. There will be no one around to remember any of it. Whether we are loving or cruel in the end would make no difference at all.
Once we realize this situation there are two options. One is that we can simply refuse to think out the implications of all this. We can hold on to our intellectual belief in an empty Bench and yet live as if our choices are meaningful and as if there is a difference between love and cruelty. Why would we do that? A cynic might say that this is a way of “having one’s cake and eating it, too.” That is, you can get the benefit of having a God without the cost of following him. But there is no integrity in that.
The other option is to recognize that you do know there is a God. You could accept the fact that you live as if beauty and love have meaning, as if there is meaning in life, as if human beings have inherent dignity—all because you know God exists. It is dishonest to live as if he is there and yet fail to acknowledge the one who has given you all these gifts. ~ Timothy J Keller,#NFDB
524:Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are. As he is the subject of our study, and our helper in it, so he must himself be the end of it. We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God. It was for this purpose that revelation was given, and it is to this use that we must put it. Meditating on the Truth How are we to do this? How can we turn our knowledge about God into knowledge of God? The rule for doing this is simple but demanding. It is that we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God. We have some idea, perhaps, what prayer is, but what is meditation? Well may we ask, for meditation is a lost art today, and Christian people suffer grievously from their ignorance of the practice. Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God. Its purpose is to clear one’s mental and spiritual vision of God, and to let his truth make its full and proper impact on one’s mind and heart. It is a matter of talking to oneself about God and oneself; it is, indeed, often a matter of arguing with oneself, reasoning oneself out of moods of doubt and unbelief into a clear apprehension of God’s power and grace. ~ J I Packer, #NFDB
525:Supernatural hope is the virtue that strips us of all things in order to give us possession of all things. We do not hope for what we have. Therefore, to live in hope is to live in poverty, having nothing. And yet, if we abandon ourselves to economy of Divine Providence, we have everything we hope for. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. If we hope in God, by hope we already possess Him, since hope is a confidence which He creates in our souls as secret evidence that He has taken possession of us. So the soul that hopes in God already belongs to Him, and to belong to Him is the same as to possess Him, since He gives Himself completely to those who give themselves to Him. The only thing faith and hope do not give us is the clear vision of Him Whom we possess. We are united to Him in darkness, because we have to hope. Spes quae videtur non est spes.* Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment. It brings our souls into the state of the most perfect detachment. In doing so, it restores all values by setting them in their right order. Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them. It shows us that we have something to work for, and teaches us how to work for it. Without hope, our faith gives us only an acquaintance with God. Without love and hope, faith only knows Him as a stranger. For hope casts us into the arms of His mercy and of His providence. If we hope in Him, we will not only come to know that He is merciful but we will experience His mercy in our own lives. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
526:Get your hopes up
I was talking to a reporter one time, and I could tell he didn’t like the fact that my message is so positive and so hopeful. He asked what I would tell a person who lost a job and was about to lose a home and had no place to go and all sorts of other problems. He painted the worst possible situation.
I said, “First of all, I would encourage that person to get up and find something to be grateful for, and secondly, I would encourage the person to expect things to turn around, expect new doors to open, expect breakthroughs.”
The scripture says, “When darkness overtakes the righteous, light will come bursting in.” When you don’t see a way out, and it’s dark, you’re in prime position for God’s favor to come bursting in.
The reporter said, “Wouldn’t that be giving them false hope?”
Here’s the alternative: I could tell them be negative, bitter, give up, complain, and be depressed. All that would do is make matters worse.
You may be in a difficult situation, but instead of being negative just dig in your heels and say, “I refuse to live with a negative attitude. I’m not giving up on my dreams. I’m not living without passion or zeal. I may not see a way, but I know God has a way. It may be dark, but I’m expecting the light to come bursting in. I’m setting my mind for victory.”
That’s what allows God to work. It’s not just mind over matter. It’s not just having a positive attitude. It’s your faith being released. When you believe, it gets God’s attention. When you expect your dreams to come to pass, your health restored, and good breaks and divine connections coming your way, then the Creator of the universe goes to work. ~ Joel Osteen,#NFDB
527:We find this even more clearly expressed in Paul, who stresses that justification is apart from works of the law. We might be surprised, then, to see that Paul also emphasizes the necessity of good works for final salvation. God repays every person “according to his works” (Rom 2:6). Those who do evil will suffer “wrath and indignation” (2:8) and “affliction and distress” (2:9), while those who do good will enjoy “eternal life” (2:7, 10). Some have taken these verses to be hypothetical, but the conclusion to Romans 2 shows that the hypothetical reading isn’t convincing, for we see that those who obey do so because of the work of the Spirit in them (2:26 – 29). Their obedience isn’t self-generated but the result of the supernatural work of the Spirit in their lives. Hence, their obedience doesn’t earn or merit eternal life but is the result of the new life they already possess, showing that God’s grace has transformed them in Jesus Christ. It is important to recognize that obedience isn’t motivated by a desire to be accepted by God. Acceptance with God is by faith alone through the work of Christ alone and to the glory of God alone. Obedience, then, stems from joy, from a delight in God, from a desire to do what pleases him. Obedience is necessary, for those who don’t obey reveal that they haven’t truly been accepted by God and show that they don’t know God’s love. But the obedience of believers isn’t animated by a desire to receive God’s love. On the contrary, it is a response to his love. All Christian obedience enshrines the principle: “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). So too, we obey because we know his love. Obedience, then, flows out of our freedom and joy. Though it is required, it isn’t simply a duty, it is a delight. ~ Thomas R Schreiner, #NFDB
528:+ 21Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn’t worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result, their minds became dark and confused. + 22Claiming to be wise, they instead became utter fools. + 23And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshiped idols made to look like mere people and birds and animals and reptiles. + 24So God abandoned them to do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other’s bodies. + 25They traded the truth about God for a lie. So they worshiped and served the things God created instead of the Creator himself, who is worthy of eternal praise! Amen. 26That is why God abandoned them to their shameful desires. Even the women turned against the natural way to have sex and instead indulged in sex with each other. + 27And the men, instead of having normal sexual relations with women, burned with lust for each other. Men did shameful things with other men, and as a result of this sin, they suffered within themselves the penalty they deserved. + 28Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. 29Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip. 30They are backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful. They invent new ways of sinning, and they disobey their parents. + 31They refuse to understand, break their promises, are heartless, and have no mercy. + 32They know God’s justice requires that those who do these things deserve to die, yet they do them anyway. Worse yet, they encourage others to do them, too. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
529:You have to give yourself permission to accomplish your dreams, permission to get out of debt, and permission to overcome the obstacle. Your better days begin in your thinking.
Studies show that when you are negative and think said, discouraging thoughts, your serotonin level goes down, and that causes you to feel sad. It’s not just in your head. It affects your moods. But when you get up each day in a positive frame of mind, feeling hopeful and expecting good things, endorphins are released that make you feel happy. You will have more energy, because being positive puts a spring in your step.
If you go around with negative thoughts, they will drain you of your faith, your energy, and your zeal. It’s just like a big vacuum pulling out all the good things that God put in you. You’d be amazed at how much better you’d feel, how much more you’d accomplish, and how much further you’d go if you’d just switch over to this positive mind-set.
You have to think positive thoughts on purpose. “This is going to be a great day. This is my year. I’m expecting an abundance of favor.”
The scripture says, “Put on a fresh new attitude.” I’ve found yesterday’s attitude is not good enough for today. Every morning you have to consciously adopt a fresh attitude by thinking things like: “I’m going to be happy today. I’m going to be good to people. I’m going to go with the flow and not get upset. I know God is in control. He’s directing my steps. No obstacle is too big. No dream is too great. I am well able to do what I’m called to do.”
That fresh new attitude will put you in God’s jet stream. You will accomplish things that you could not accomplish on your own. You’ll be more productive. You’ll have more wisdom, creativity, and good ideas. You will overcome obstacles that were bigger, stronger, and more powerful. ~ Joel Osteen,#NFDB
530:Discussion of theology is not for everyone, I tell you, not for everyone-it is no such inexpensive or effortless pursuit. Nor, I would add, is it for every occasion, or every audience; neither are all its aspects open to inquiry. It must be reserved for certain occasions, for certain audiences, and certain limits must be observed. It is not for all people, but only for those who have been tested and have found a sound footing in study, and, more importantly, have undergone, or at the very least are undergoing purification of body and soul. For one who is not pure to lay hold of pure things is dangerous, just as it is for weak eyes to look at the sun's brightness. What is the right time? Whenever we are free from the mire and noise without, and our commanding faculty is not confused by illusory, wandering images, leading us, as it were, to mix fine script with ugly scrawling, or sweet-smelling scent with slime. We need actually "to be still" in order to know God, and when we receive the opportunity, "to judge uprightly" in theology. Who should listen to discussions of theology? Those for whom it is a serious undertaking, not just another subject like any other for entertaining small-talk, after the races, the theater, songs, food, and sex: for there are people who count chatter on theology and clever deployment of arguments as one of their amusements. What aspects of theology should be investigated, and to what limit? Only aspects within our grasp, and only to the limit of the experience and capacity of our audience. Just as excess of sound or food injures the hearing or general health, or, if you prefer, as loads that are too heavy injure those who carry them, or as excessive rain harms the soil, we too must guard against the danger that the toughness, so to speak, of our discourses may so oppress and overtax our hearers as actually to impair the powers they had before. ~ Gregory of Nazianzus, #NFDB
531:I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this. ~ Charles Bukowski,#NFDB
532:Will we see the human behind the ink? The heart that dared to hold the brush dripping with color. Remember that she was the courageous one. That she was the one who showed up. Took the risk. Braved the secret disappointments of others. And lived. And made her mark.
I love her for doing that.
And therefore I can love her work.....
There is a burst of courage that will explode off the canvas if we don't shrink back afraid. The moment the painter laid down her brush and stepped back, pleased, is when she allowed that painting to steal a few beats of her vey own heart for you.The viewer. Close your eyes and receive this very human gift without any demand for more or better. And just show up and live.
Show up.
People need you. People need me. People need to know God's compassion is alive and winning the epic battle of good verses evil.
Put some paint on the emptiness. Color-correct your perspective. Forget the cravings for comfort zones. Trade your comfort for compassion. Don't welcome hardness of heat as easiness of life. Get wet with paint. Put the brush to the canvas. Own it. Declare yourself a painter. And when someone steals all the lines from your coloring book, determine to color the world anyhow with the same generosity of compassion that God offers every day.
Be like Him. The creator, the Master Artist.
Don't be like them. The hard-hearted haters. The ones who refuse to admit that their coloring books are missing lines too. The ones that refuse to break secrets with their fellow humans. The ones who would rather criticize than comfort. The ones who are loud with their opinions but who have never suffered with a blank canvas.
Grab the brush, and light the world with your color and attempts at creation. Don't try to be perfect. Don't pretend it's even possible. Don't apologize or strategize. And don't minimize that you are crushing fear and judgment with every stroke. You are walking the way of the artist. You are simply showing up with compassion. I love you for that. I love whatever is about to come to life on your canvas to the glory of our Almighty Creator. God. The redeemer of dust. The redeemer of us. ~ Lysa TerKeurst,#NFDB
533:I heard all these birds singing and singing so loud and so cheerful. Little birds were chirping and chirping. Big birds were making a melody. It was like they were having a big party. I wanted to say to them, “Hey, birds. Have you read the newspapers lately? Did you see the stock market last year? You’re not supposed to be singing, enjoying life. What’s wrong with you? You’re acting like everything will be all right.”
What was it with those birds? They know a secret. They know their heavenly Father is in control. They know God has promised to take care of them, so they go through the day singing and enjoying life, regardless of the circumstances.
That’s how to start off each day. Get up in the morning and have a song of praise in your heart. Put a smile on your face. Go out into the day and be determined to enjoy it. The apostle Paul wrote: “Be happy [in your faith] and rejoice and be glad-hearted continually (always)” (1 Thessalonians 5:16 AMP).
How long are we supposed to be glad-hearted? How long are we supposed to have a smile on our faces? As long as people treat us right? As long as we feel okay? As long as the economy is up? No, the Scripture says, “Be glad-hearted continually (always).” That means in the good times and in the tough times, when it’s sunny and when it’s raining.
When dark clouds are over your head and you feel like life is depressing and gloomy, always remember that right above those dark clouds the sun is shining. You may not be able to see the sun in your life right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s not up there. It’s just blocked by the dark clouds. The good news is, the clouds are temporary. The clouds will not last forever. The sun will shine in your life once again.
In the meantime, keep your joy. Be glad-hearted continually. Don’t let a few clouds darken your life. The rain falls on the just and the unjust. That means we all face disappointments, unfair situations, tests, trials, and temptation. But know this: Right past the test is promotion. On the other side of every difficulty is increase. If you go through adversity with a smile on your face and a song in your heart, on the other side there will be a reward. ~ Joel Osteen,#NFDB
534:Often we are told, and rightly so, that we can know God by knowing ourselves, for we are made in His image. We are not base, it is said, but divine. Yet this, perhaps, is saying too much. For even in our baseness—in our excrement—we might discern the work of our Creator. All things come from God, Crivano says. Even shit can be sublimed. But should it be? Tristão fixes Crivano with a fierce glare. Then he steps to the windows, and with a smooth sudden motion slings the chamberpot’s contents into the canal below. The liquid strikes the surface with a weak slap. Should it be sublimed? Tristão says. Should it be transcended? When we seek to do this, is our desire truly to know God? Or is it to know that God truly is as we always have imagined him: the perfect distillate of our corrupt selves? So—we are made in the image of God. Have we considered what this might mean? Innumerable are the egos in man, Paracelsus writes, and in him are angels and devils, heaven and hell. Perhaps God too is like this. Pure and impure. Is it so difficult to imagine? A God of flesh and bone? A God that shits? His voice chokes off, as if overwhelmed by some passion: rage, sorrow, Crivano can’t guess which. Tristão drifts away, toward his own approaching form in the mirror-talisman; the image of his torso gradually fills the glass. With the silver window eclipsed the room seems to grow smaller; Crivano shuffles his feet to keep his balance. I want to know, Tristão says, how God is unlike us. I want to know how our eyes become traitors. To know what they refuse to see. I no longer seek to transcend, nor even to understand. I want only to dirty my hands. To smell. To feel. Like a child who plays with mud. I believe the key is here— His fingers brush the flat glass before him; they’re met by fingers from the opposite side. —but not in the way that others have said. The Nolan warned us of this. Do you remember? He said the image in the mirror is like the image in a dream: only fools and infants mistake it for the true likeness of the world, but likewise it is foolish to ignore what it shows us. Therein lies the danger. Do we look upon these reflections without delusion, like bold Actaeon? Or, like Narcissus, do we see only what we wish to see? How can we be certain? With love in our hearts, we creep toward each shining surface, but we are all haunted, always, by ourselves. ~ Martin Seay, #NFDB
535:I do not understand,”said Pierre, feeling with dismay doubts reawakening. He was afraid of any want of clearness, any weakness, in the Mason’s arguments; he dreaded not to be able to believe in him. “I don’t understand,”he said, “how it is that the mind of man cannot attain the knowledge of which you speak.”The Mason smiled with his gentle fatherly smile. “The highest wisdom and truth are like the purest liquid we may wish to imbibe,”he said. “Can I receive that pure liquid into an impure vessel and judge of its purity? Only by the inner purification of myself can I retain in some degree of purity the liquid I receive.”“Yes, yes, that is so,”said Pierre joyfully. “The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the science explaining the whole creation and man’s place in it. To receive that science it is necessary to purify and renew one’s inner self, and so before one can know, it is necessary to believe and to perfect one’s self. And to attain this end, we have the light called conscience that God has implanted in our souls.”“Yes, yes,”assented Pierre. “Look then at thy inner self with the eyes of the spirit, and ask thyself whether thou art content with thyself. What hast thou attained relying on reason only? What art thou? You are young, you are rich, you are clever, you are well educated. And what have you done with all these good gifts? Are you content with yourself and with your life?”“No, I hate my life,”Pierre muttered, wincing. “Thou hatest it. Then change it, purify thyself; and as thou art purified, thou wilt gain wisdom. Look at your life, my dear sir. How have you spent it? In riotous orgies and debauchery, receiving everything from society and giving nothing in return. You have become the possessor of wealth. How have you used it? What have you done for your neighbor? Have you ever thought of your tens of thousands of slaves? Have you helped them physically and morally? No! You have profited by their toil to lead a profligate life. That is what you have done. Have you chosen a post in which you might be of service to your neighbor? No! You have spent your life in idleness. Then you married, my dear sir—took on yourself responsibility for the guidance of a young woman; and what have you done? You have not helped her to find the way of truth, my dear sir, but have thrust her into an abyss of deceit and misery. A man offended you and you shot him, and you say you do not know God and hate your life. There is nothing strange in that, my dear sir! ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
536:Section 3. Confirmed also by the vain endeavours of the wicked to banish all fear of God from their minds. Conclusion, that the knowledge of God is naturally implanted in the human mind. All men of sound judgement will therefore hold, that a sense of Deity is indelibly engraven on the human heart. And that this belief is naturally engendered in all, and thoroughly fixed as it were in our very bones, is strikingly attested by the contumacy of the wicked, who, though they struggle furiously, are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God. Though Diagoras[4], and others of like stamps make themselves merry with whatever has been believed in all ages concerning religion, and Dionysus scoffs at the judgement of heaven, it is but a Sardonian grin; for the worm of conscience, keener than burning steel, is gnawing them within. I do not say with Cicero, that errors wear out by age, and that religion increases and grows better day by day. For the world (as will be shortly seen) labours as much as it can to shake off all knowledge of God, and corrupts his worship in innumerable ways. I only say, that, when the stupid hardness of heart, which the wicked eagerly court as a means of despising God, becomes enfeebled, the sense of Deity, which of all things they wished most to be extinguished, is still in vigour, and now and then breaks forth. Whence we infer, that this is not a doctrine which is first learned at school, but one as to which every man is, from the womb, his own master; one which nature herself allows no individual to forget, though many, with all their might, strive to do so. Moreover, if all are born and live for the express purpose of learning to know God, and if the knowledge of God, in so far as it fails to produce this effect, is fleeting and vain, it is clear that all those who do not direct the whole thoughts and actions of their lives to this end fail to fulfil the law of their being. This did not escape the observation even of philosophers. For it is the very thing which Plato meant (in Phoed. et Theact.) when he taught, as he often does, that the chief good of the soul consists in resemblance to God; i.e., when, by means of knowing him, she is wholly transformed into him. Thus Gryllus, also, in Plutarch, (lib. guod bruta anim. ratione utantur,) reasons most skilfully, when he affirms that, if once religion is banished from the lives of men, they not only in no respect excel, but are, in many respects, much more wretched than the brutes, since, being exposed to so many forms of evil, they continually drag on a troubled and restless existence: that the only thing, therefore, which makes them superior is the worship of God, through which alone they aspire to immortality. ~ John Calvin, #NFDB
537:The mighty sound of forests murmuring
In answer to the dread command;
The stars that shudder when their king
extends his hand,
His awful hand to bless, to curse; or moves
Toward the dimmest den
In the thick leaves, not known of loves
Or nymphs or men;
(Only the sylph's frail gossamer may wave
Their quiet frondage yet,
Only her dewy tears may lave
The violet
The mighty answer of the shaken sky
To his supreme behest; the call
Of Ibex that behold on high
Night's funeral,
And see the pale moon quiver and depart
Far beyond space, the sun ascend
And draw earth's globe unto his heart
To make an end;
The shriek of startled birds; the sobs that tear
With sudden terror the sharp sea
That slept, and wove its golden hair
Most mournfully;
The rending of the earth at his command
Who wields the wrath of heaven, and is dumb;
Hell starts up - and before his hand
Is overcome.
I heard these voices, and beheld afar
These dread works wrought at his behest:
And on his forehead, lo! a star,
And on his breast.
And on his feet I knew the sandals were
More beautiful than flame, and white,
And on the glory of his hair
The crown of night.
And I beheld his robe, and on its hem
Were writ unlawful words to say,
Broidered like lilies, with a gem
More clear than day.
And round him shone so wonderful a light
As when on Galilee
Jesus once walked, and clove the night,
And calmed the sea.
I scarce could see his features for the fire
That dwelt about his brow,
Yet, for the whiteness of my own desire,
I see him now;
Because my footsteps follow his, and tread
The awful bounds of heaven, and make
The very graves yield up their dead,
And high thrones shake;
Because my eyes still steadily behold
And dazzle not, nor shun the night,
The foam - born lamp of beaten gold
And secret might;
Because my forehead bears the sacred Name,
And my lips bear the brand
Of Him whose heaven is one flame,
Whose holy hand
Gathers this earth, who built the vaults of space,
Moulded the stars, and fixed the iron sea,
Because His love lights through my face
And all of me.
Because my hand may fasten on the sword
Of my heart falter not, and smite
Those lampless limits most abhorred
Of iron night,
And pass beyond their horror to attack
Fresh foemen, light and truth to bring
Through their untrodden fields of black,
A victor king.
I know all must be well, all must be free;
I know God as I know a friend;
I conquer, and most silently
Await the end.
~ Aleister Crowley, Power
,#NFDB
538:Power
The mighty sound of forests murmuring
In answer to the dread command;
The stars that shudder when their king
extends his hand,
His awful hand to bless, to curse; or moves
Toward the dimmest den
In the thick leaves, not known of loves
Or nymphs or men;
(Only the sylph's frail gossamer may wave
Their quiet frondage yet,
Only her dewy tears may lave
The violet;)
The mighty answer of the shaken sky
To his supreme behest; the call
Of Ibex that behold on high
Night's funeral,
And see the pale moon quiver and depart
Far beyond space, the sun ascend
And draw earth's globe unto his heart
To make an end;
The shriek of startled birds; the sobs that tear
With sudden terror the sharp sea
That slept, and wove its golden hair
Most mournfully;
The rending of the earth at his command
Who wields the wrath of heaven, and is dumb;
Hell starts up - and before his hand
Is overcome.
I heard these voices, and beheld afar
These dread works wrought at his behest:
And on his forehead, lo! a star,
And on his breast.
53
And on his feet I knew the sandals were
More beautiful than flame, and white,
And on the glory of his hair
The crown of night.
And I beheld his robe, and on its hem
Were writ unlawful words to say,
Broidered like lilies, with a gem
More clear than day.
And round him shone so wonderful a light
As when on Galilee
Jesus once walked, and clove the night,
And calmed the sea.
I scarce could see his features for the fire
That dwelt about his brow,
Yet, for the whiteness of my own desire,
I see him now;
Because my footsteps follow his, and tread
The awful bounds of heaven, and make
The very graves yield up their dead,
And high thrones shake;
Because my eyes still steadily behold
And dazzle not, nor shun the night,
The foam - born lamp of beaten gold
And secret might;
Because my forehead bears the sacred Name,
And my lips bear the brand
Of Him whose heaven is one flame,
Whose holy hand
Gathers this earth, who built the vaults of space,
Moulded the stars, and fixed the iron sea,
Because His love lights through my face
And all of me.
Because my hand may fasten on the sword
54
Of my heart falter not, and smite
Those lampless limits most abhorred
Of iron night,
And pass beyond their horror to attack
Fresh foemen, light and truth to bring
Through their untrodden fields of black,
A victor king.
I know all must be well, all must be free;
I know God as I know a friend;
I conquer, and most silently
Await the end.
~ Aleister Crowley,#NFDB
539:If we take God’s Word seriously, we should avoid debt when possible. In those rare cases where we go into debt, we should make every effort to get out as soon as we can. We should never undertake debt without prayerful consideration and wise counsel. Our questions should be, Why go into debt? Is the risk called for? Will the benefits of becoming servants to the lender really outweigh the costs? What should we ask ourselves before going into debt? Before we incur debt, we should ask ourselves some basic spiritual questions: Is the fact that I don’t have enough resources to pay cash for something God’s way of telling me it isn’t his will for me to buy it? Or is it possible that this thing may have been God’s will but poor choices put me in a position where I can’t afford to buy it? Wouldn’t I do better to learn God’s lesson by foregoing it until—by his provision and my diligence—I save enough money to buy it? What I would call the “debt mentality” is a distorted perspective that involves invalid assumptions: • We need more than God has given us. • God doesn’t know best what our needs are. • God has failed to provide for our needs, forcing us to take matters into our own hands. • If God doesn’t come through the way we think he should, we can find another way. • Just because today’s income is sufficient to make our debt payments, tomorrow’s will be too (i.e., our circumstances won’t change). Those with convictions against borrowing will normally find ways to avoid it. Those without a firm conviction against going into debt will inevitably find the “need” to borrow. The best credit risks are those who won’t borrow in the first place. The more you’re inclined to go into debt, the more probable it is that you shouldn’t. Ask yourself, “Is the money I’ll be obligated to repay worth the value I’ll receive by getting the money or possessions now? When it comes time for me to repay my debt, what new needs will I have that my debt will keep me from meeting? Or what new wants will I have that will tempt me to go further into debt?” Consider these statements of God’s Word: • “True godliness with contentment is itself great wealth. After all, we brought nothing with us when we came into the world, and we can’t take anything with us when we leave it. So if we have enough food and clothing, let us be content” (1 Timothy 6:6-8). • “Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness!” (Ecclesiastes 5:10). • “My child, don’t lose sight of common sense and discernment. Hang on to them, for they will refresh your soul. They are like jewels on a necklace. They keep you safe on your way, and your feet will not stumble. You can go to bed without fear; you will lie down and sleep soundly. You need not be afraid of sudden disaster or the destruction that comes upon the wicked, for the LORD is your security. He will keep your foot from being caught in a trap” (Proverbs 3:21-26). • “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:2). ~ Randy Alcorn, #NFDB
540:When I Want to Be More Like Jesus Whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him. He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked. 1 JOHN 2:5-6 NOTHING REVEALS to a woman how close or far away she is from being like Jesus than the relationship she has with her husband. The way she thinks, talks, acts, and reacts around him—or in response to him—shows her how far she has to go in order to become all that God wants her to be. Marriage is one of the true testing grounds for what is in all of us. Any selfishness, inconsideration, or lack of love in either a husband or wife will be revealed as they live together day after day, year after year. But if ever a woman doesn’t like what she sees happening in herself with regard to her marriage relationship, she can seek to be more like Jesus, so that His love, selflessness, and kindness will grow in her and be revealed to those around her—especially her husband. (A man can and should do the same thing, of course, but this is about you right now.) Ask God to help you walk as Jesus walked. The only way to actually do that is by the power of the Holy Spirit. If you have received Jesus, then you have His Holy Spirit in you, and you can live God’s way because the Holy Spirit enables you to do so. The way to have the perfect love of Jesus grow in you is to be daily in God’s Word so you can hear from Him about how to live, and you can read about the way Jesus lived, and you can let the Word live in you so you can be led by God’s Spirit to make the right choices about how to live your life. The Bible says if we say we know God and do not keep His commandments, we have no truth in us (1 John 2:4). Thank God that you have the mind of Christ and therefore all you need to become more Christlike. Ask the Holy Spirit to lead you and teach you and enable you to have the same compassion, selflessness, forgiveness, mercy, and love toward your husband that Jesus has toward you. Ask Him to fill you with His truth. My Prayer to God LORD, help me to think like You, act like You, and talk like You—with compassion, love, grace, and mercy. Take away everything in me that is not of You—all anger, bitterness, criticism, and lack of love. Remove every tendency in me to function in the flesh and lash out with my words or actions. Take away any desire in me to withdraw from my husband, whether physically, emotionally, or mentally. I know that holding myself apart from him is not what You want me to do, for Your nature is to have us draw close to each other as You draw close to us, and I want to imitate You. Lead me in Your ways, Lord. Teach me what Your unconditional love means and help me to display it. Fill me so full of Your love and forgiveness that it overflows from me to my husband. Mold my heart into the way You want it to be. Change me every time I read Your Word. Help me to be so sold out to You that I cannot move or speak apart from the love You put in my heart. Lord, You are beautiful, kind, gentle, faithful, true, unselfish, wise, lovely, peaceful, good, and holy. You are light and life. Enable me to be more like You. In Jesus’ name I pray. ~ Stormie Omartian, #NFDB
541:Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.
It? I ast.
Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It.
But what do it look like? I ast.
Don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.
Shug a beautiful something, let me tell you. She frown a little, look out cross the yard, lean back in her chair, look like a big rose. She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate
at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it. It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh.
Shug! I say.
Oh, she say. God love all them feelings. That's some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves 'em you enjoys 'em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that's going, and praise God by liking what you like.
God don't think it dirty? I ast.
Naw, she say. God made it. Listen, God love everything you love? and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
What it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing. Now that my eyes opening, I feels like a fool. Next to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr. s evil sort of shrink. But not altogether. Still, it is like Shug say, You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a'tall.
Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere.
Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind,water, a big rock.
But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don't want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.
Amen ~ Alice Walker,#NFDB
542:Adventists urged to study women’s ordination for themselves Adventist Church President Ted N. C. Wilson appealed to members to study the Bible regarding the theology of ordination as the Church continues to examine the matter at Annual Council next month and at General Conference Session next year. Above, Wilson delivers the Sabbath sermon at Annual Council last year. [ANN file photo] President Wilson and TOSC chair Stele also ask for prayers for Holy Spirit to guide proceedings September 24, 2014 | Silver Spring, Maryland, United States | Andrew McChesney/Adventist Review Ted N. C. Wilson, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, appealed to church members worldwide to earnestly read what the Bible says about women’s ordination and to pray that he and other church leaders humbly follow the Holy Spirit’s guidance on the matter. Church members wishing to understand what the Bible teaches on women’s ordination have no reason to worry about where to start, said Artur A. Stele, who oversaw an unprecedented, two-year study on women’s ordination as chair of the church-commissioned Theology of Ordination Study Committee. Stele, who echoed Wilson’s call for church members to read the Bible and pray on the issue, recommended reading the study’s three brief “Way Forward Statements,” which cite Bible texts and Adventist Church co-founder Ellen G. White to support each of the three positions on women’s ordination that emerged during the committee’s research. The results of the study will be discussed in October at the Annual Council, a major business meeting of church leaders. The Annual Council will then decide whether to ask the nearly 2,600 delegates of the world church to make a final call on women’s ordination in a vote at the General Conference Session next July. Wilson, speaking in an interview, urged each of the church’s 18 million members to prayerfully read the study materials, available on the website of the church’s Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. "Look to see how the papers and presentations were based on an understanding of a clear reading of Scripture,” Wilson said in his office at General Conference headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. “The Spirit of Prophecy tells us that we are to take the Bible just as it reads,” he said. “And I would encourage each church member, and certainly each representative at the Annual Council and those who will be delegates to the General Conference Session, to prayerfully review those presentations and then ask the Holy Spirit to help them know God’s will.” The Spirit of Prophecy refers to the writings of White, who among her statements on how to read the Bible wrote in The Great Controversy (p. 598), “The language of the Bible should be explained according to its obvious meaning, unless a symbol or figure is employed.” “We don’t have the luxury of having the Urim and the Thummim,” Wilson said, in a nod to the stones that the Israelite high priest used in Old Testament times to learn God’s will. “Nor do we have a living prophet with us. So we must rely upon the Holy Spirit’s leading in our own Bible study as we review the plain teachings of Scripture.” He said world church leadership was committed to “a very open, fair, and careful process” on the issue of women’s ordination. Wilson added that the crucial question facing the church wasn’t whether women should be ordained but whether church members who disagreed with the final decision on ordination, whatever it might be, would be willing to set aside their differences to focus on the church’s 151-year mission: proclaiming Revelation 14 and the three angels’ messages that Jesus is coming soon. 3 Views on Women’s Ordination In an effort to better understand the Bible’s teaching on ordination, the church established the Theology of Ordination Study Committee, a group of 106 members commonly referred to by church leaders as TOSC. It was not organized ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
543:As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task.
If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance.
For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.
Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith.
Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you.
Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basis of our faith, for that is supplied by the witness of the Holy Spirit Himself. Even if there were no arguments in defense of the faith, our faith would still have its firm foundation.
The more I learn, the more desperately ignorant I feel. Further study only serves to open up to one's consciousness all the endless vistas of knowledge, even in one's own field, about which one knows absolutely nothing.
Don't let your doubts just sit there: pursue them and keep after them until you drive them into the ground.
We should be cautious, indeed, about thinking that we have come upon the decisive disproof of our faith. It is pretty unlikely that we have found the irrefutable objection. The history of philosophy is littered with the wrecks of such objections. Given the confidence that the Holy Spirit inspires, we should esteem lightly the arguments and objections that generate our doubts.
These, then, are some of the obstacles to answered prayer: sin in our lives, wrong motives, lack of faith, lack of earnestness, lack of perseverance, lack of accordance with God’s will. If any of those obstacles hinders our prayers, then we cannot claim with confidence Jesus’ promise, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it”.
And so I was led to what was for me a radical new insight into the will of God, namely, that God’s will for our lives can include failure. In other words, God’s will may be that you fail, and He may lead you into failure! For there are things that God has to teach you through failure that He could never teach you through success.
So many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, is and always will be the true priority for every human being — that is, learning to know God in Christ.
My greatest fear is that I should some day stand before the Lord and see all my works go up in smoke like so much “wood, hay, and stubble”.
The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but knowledge of God.
People tend naturally to assume that if God exists, then His purpose for human life is happiness in this life. God’s role is to provide a comfortable environment for His human pets. But on the Christian view, this is false. We are not God’s pets, and the goal of human life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God—which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfilment. Many evils occur in life which may be utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper knowledge of God. ~ William Lane Craig,#NFDB
544:I.
You're my friend:
I was the man the Duke spoke to;
I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke, too;
So here's the tale from beginning to end,
My friend!
II.
Ours is a great wild country:
If you climb to our castle's top,
I don't see where your eye can stop;
For when you've passed the cornfield country,
Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed,
And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract,
And cattle-tract to open-chase,
And open-chase to the very base
Of the mountain where, at a funeral pace,
Round about, solemn and slow,
One by one, row after row,
Up and up the pine-trees go,
So, like black priests up, and so
Down the other side again
To another greater, wilder country,
That's one vast red drear burnt-up plain,
Branched through and through with many a vein
Whence iron's dug, and copper's dealt;
Look right, look left, look straight before,-
Beneath they mine, above they smelt,
Copper-ore and iron-ore,
And forge and furnace mould and melt,
And so on, more and ever more,
Till at the last, for a bounding belt,
Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore,
-And the whole is our Duke's country.
III.
I was born the day this present Duke was-
(And O, says the song, ere I was old!)
In the castle where the other Duke was-
(When I was happy and young, not old!)
I in the kennel, he in the bower:
We are of like age to an hour.
My father was huntsman in that day;
Who has not heard my father say
That, when a boar was brought to bay,
Three times, four times out of five,
With his huntspear he'd contrive
To get the killing-place transfixed,
And pin him true, both eyes betwixt?
And that's why the old Duke would rather
He lost a salt-pit than my father,
And loved to have him ever in call;
That's why my father stood in the hall
When the old Duke brought his infant out
To show the people, and while they passed
The wondrous bantling round about,
Was first to start at the outside blast
As the Kaiser's courier blew his horn
Just a month after the babe was born.
``And,'' quoth the Kaiser's courier, ``since
``The Duke has got an heir, our Prince
``Needs the Duke's self at his side: ''
The Duke looked down and seemed to wince,
But he thought of wars o'er the world wide,
Castles a-fire, men on their march,
The toppling tower, the crashing arch;
And up he looked, and awhile he eyed
The row of crests and shields and banners
Of all achievements after all manners,
And ``ay,'' said the Duke with a surly pride.
The more was his comfort when he died
At next year's end, in a velvet suit,
With a gilt glove on his hand, his foot
In a silken shoe for a leather boot,
Petticoated like a herald,
In a chamher next to an ante-room,
Where he breathed the breath of page and groom,
What he called stink, and they, perfume:
-They should have set him on red Berold
Mad with pride, like fire to manage!
They should have got his cheek fresh tannage
Such a day as to-day in the merry sunshine!
Had they stuck on his fist a rough-foot merlin!
(Hark, the wind's on the heath at its game!
Oh for a noble falcon-lanner
To flap each broad wing like a banner,
And turn in the wind, and dance like flame!)
Had they broached a white-beer cask from Berlin
-Or if you incline to prescribe mere wine
Put to his lips, when they saw him pine,
A cup of our own Moldavia fine,
Cotnar for instance, green as May sorrel
And ropy with sweet,-we shall not quarrel.
IV.
So, at home, the sick tall yellow Duchess
Was left with the infant in her clutches,
She being the daughter of God knows who:
And now was the time to revisit her tribe.
Abroad and afar they went, the two,
And let our people rail and gibe
At the empty hall and extinguished fire,
As loud as we liked, but ever in vain,
Till after long years we had our desire,
And back came the Duke and his mother again.
V.
And he came back the pertest little ape
That ever affronted human shape;
Full of his travel, struck at himself.
You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways?
-Not he! For in Paris they told the elf
Our rough North land was the Land of Lays,
The one good thing left in evil days;
Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time,
And only in wild nooks like ours
Could you taste of it yet as in its prime,
And see true castles, with proper towers,
Young-hearted women, old-minded men,
And manners now as manners were then.
So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it;
'Twas not for the joy's self, but the joy of his showing it,
Nor for the pride's self, but the pride of our seeing it,
He revived all usages thoroughly worn-out,
The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out:
And chief in the chase his neck he perilled
On a lathy horse, all legs and length,
With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;
-They should have set him on red Berold
With the red eye slow consuming in fire,
And the thin stiff ear like an abbey-spire!
VI.
Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:
And out of a convent, at the word,
Came the lady, in time of spring.
-Oh, old thoughts they cling, they cling!
That day, I know, with a dozen oaths
I clad myself in thick hunting-clothes
Fit for the chase of urochs or buffle
In winter-time when you need to muffle.
But the Duke had a mind we should cut a figure,
And so we saw the lady arrive:
My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!
She was the smallest lady alive,
Made in a piece of nature's madness,
Too small, almost, for the life and gladness
That over-filled her, as some hive
Out of the bears' reach on the high trees
Is crowded with its safe merry bees:
In truth, she was not hard to please!
Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead,
Straight at the castle, that's best indeed
To look at from outside the walls:
As for us, styled the ``serfs and thralls,''
She as much thanked me as if she had said it,
(With her eyes, do you understand?)
Because I patted her horse while I led it;
And Max, who rode on her other hand,
Said, no bird flew past but she inquired
What its true name was, nor ever seemed tired-
If that was an eagle she saw hover,
And the green and grey bird on the field was the plover.
When suddenly appeared the Duke:
And as down she sprung, the small foot pointed
On to my hand,-as with a rebuke,
And as if his backbone were not jointed,
The Duke stepped rather aside than forward,
And welcomed her with his grandest smile;
And, mind you, his mother all the while
Chilled in the rear, like a wind to Nor'ward;
And up, like a weary yawn, with its pullies
Went, in a shriek, the rusty portcullis;
And, like a glad sky the north-wind sullies,
The lady's face stopped its play,
As if her first hair had grown grey;
For such things must begin some one day.
VII.
In a day or two she was well again;
As who should say, ``You labour in vain!
``This is all a jest against God, who meant
``I should ever be, as I am, content
`` And glad in his sight; therefore, glad I will be.''
So, smiling as at first went she.
VIII.
She was active, stirring, all fire-
Could not rest, could not tire-
To a stone she might have given life!
(I myself loved once, in my day)
-For a shepherd's, miner's, huntsman's wife,
(I had a wife, I know what I say)
Never in all the world such an one!
And here was plenty to be done,
And she that could do it, great or small,
She was to do nothing at all.
There was already this man in his post,
This in his station, and that in his office,
And the Duke's plan admitted a wife, at most,
To meet his eye, with the other trophies,
Now outside the hall, now in it,
To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen,
At the proper place in the proper minute,
And die away the life between.
And it was amusing enough, each infraction
Of rule-(but for after-sadness that came)
To hear the consummate self-satisfaction
With which the young Duke and the old dame
Would let her advise, and criticise,
And, being a fool, instruct the wise,
And, child-like, parcel out praise or blame:
They bore it all in complacent guise,
As though an artificer, after contriving
A wheel-work image as if it were living,
Should find with delight it could motion to strike him!
So found the Duke, and his mother like him:
The lady hardly got a rebuff-
That had not been contemptuous enough,
With his cursed smirk, as he nodded applause,
And kept off the old mother-cat's claws.
IX.
So, the little lady grew silent and thin,
Paling and ever paling,
As the way is with a hid chagrin;
And the Duke perceived that she was ailing,
And said in his heart, ``'Tis done to spite me,
``But I shall find in my power to right me!''
Don't swear, friend! The old one, many a year,
Is in hell, and the Duke's self . . . you shall hear.
X.
Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning,
When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,
A drinking-hole out of the fresh tender ice
That covered the pond till the sun, in a trice,
Loosening it, let out a ripple of gold,
And another and another, and faster and faster,
Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled:
Then it so chanced that the Duke our master
Asked himself what were the pleasures in season,
And found, since the calendar bade him be hearty,
He should do the Middle Age no treason
In resolving on a hunting-party.
Always provided, old books showed the way of it!
What meant old poets by their strictures?
And when old poets had said their say of it,
How taught old painters in their pictures?
We must revert to the proper channels,
Workings in tapestry, paintings on panels,
And gather up woodcraft's authentic traditions:
Here was food for our various ambitions,
As on each case, exactly stated-
To encourage your dog, now, the properest chirrup,
Or best prayer to Saint Hubert on mounting your stirrup-
We of the house hold took thought and debated.
Blessed was he whose back ached with the jerkin
His sire was wont to do forest-work in;
Blesseder he who nobly sunk ``ohs''
And ``ahs'' while he tugged on his grand-sire's trunk-hose;
What signified hats if they had no rims on,
Each slouching before and behind like the scallop,
And able to serve at sea for a shallop,
Loaded with lacquer and looped with crimson?
So that the deer now, to make a short rhyme on't,
What with our Venerers, Prickers and Yerderers,
Might hope for real hunters at length and not murderers,
And oh the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't!
XI.
Now you must know that when the first dizziness
Of flap-hats and buff-coats and jack-boots subsided,
The Duke put this question, ``The Duke's part provided,
``Had not the Duchess some share in the business?''
For out of the mouth of two or three witnesses
Did he establish all fit-or-unfitnesses:
And, after much laying of heads together,
Somebody's cap got a notable feather
By the announcement with proper unction
That he had discovered the lady's function;
Since ancient authors gave this tenet,
``When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege,
``Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet,
``And, with water to wash the hands of her liege
``In a clean ewer with a fair toweling,
`` Let her preside at the disemboweling.''
Now, my friend, if you had so little religion
As to catch a hawk, some falcon-lanner,
And thrust her broad wings like a banner
Into a coop for a vulgar pigeon;
And if day by day and week by week
You cut her claws, and sealed her eyes,
And clipped her wings, and tied her beak,
Would it cause you any great surprise
If, when you decided to give her an airing,
You found she needed a little preparing?
-I say, should you be such a curmudgeon,
If she clung to the perch, as to take it in dudgeon?
Yet when the Duke to his lady signified,
Just a day before, as he judged most dignified,
In what a pleasure she was to participate,-
And, instead of leaping wide in flashes,
Her eyes just lifted their long lashes,
As if pressed by fatigue even he could not dissipate,
And duly acknowledged the Duke's forethought,
But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught,
Of the weight by day and the watch by night,
And much wrong now that used to be right,
So, thanking him, declined the hunting,-
Was conduct ever more affronting?
With all the ceremony settled-
With the towel ready, and the sewer
Polishing up his oldest ewer,
And the jennet pitched upon, a piebald,
Black-barred, cream-coated and pink eye-balled,-
No wonder if the Duke was nettled
And when she persisted nevertheless,-
Well, I suppose here's the time to confess
That there ran half round our lady's chamber
A balcony none of the hardest to clamber;
And that Jacynth the tire-woman, ready in waiting,
Stayed in call outside, what need of relating?
And since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, a fervent
Adorer of Jacynth of course was your servant;
And if she had the habit to peep through the casement,
How could I keep at any vast distance?
And so, as I say, on the lady's persistence,
The Duke, dumb-stricken with amazement,
Stood for a while in a sultry smother,
And then, with a smile that partook of the awful,
Turned her over to his yellow mother
To learn what was held decorous and lawful;
And the mother smelt blood with a cat-like instinct,
As her cheek quick whitened thro' all its quince-tinct.
Oh, but the lady heard the whole truth at once!
What meant she?Who was she?-Her duty and station,
The wisdom of age and the folly of youth, at once,
Its decent regard and its fitting relation-
In brief, my friend, set all the devils in hell free
And turn them out to carouse in a belfry
And treat the priests to a fifty-part canon,
And then you may guess how that tongue of hers ran on!
Well, somehow or other it ended at last
And, licking her whiskers, out she passed;
And after her,-making (he hoped) a face
Like Emperor Nero or Sultan Saladin,
Stalked the Duke's self with the austere grace
Of ancient hero or modern paladin,
From door to staircase-oh such a solemn
Unbending of the vertebral column!
XII.
However, at sunrise our company mustered;
And here was the huntsman bidding unkennel,
And there 'neath his bonnet the pricker blustered,
With feather dank as a bough of wet fennel;
For the court-yard walls were filled with fog
You might have cut as an axe chops a log-
Like so much wool for colour and bulkiness;
And out rode the Duke in a perfect sulkiness,
Since, before breakfast, a man feels but queasily,
And a sinking at the lower abdomen
Begins the day with indifferent omen.
And lo, as he looked around uneasily,
The sun ploughed the fog up and drove it asunder
This way and that from the valley under;
And, looking through the court-yard arch,
Down in the valley, what should meet him
But a troop of Gipsies on their march?
No doubt with the annual gifts to greet him.
XIII.
Now, in your land, Gipsies reach you, only
After reaching all lands beside;
North they go, South they go, trooping or lonely,
And still, as they travel far and wide,
Catch they and keep now a trace here, trace there,
That puts you in mind of a place here, a place there.
But with us, I believe they rise out of the ground,
And nowhere else, I take it, are found
With the earth-tint yet so freshly embrowned:
Born, no doubt, like insects which breed on
The very fruit they are meant to feed on.
For the earth-not a use to which they don't turn it,
The ore that grows in the mountain's womb,
Or the sand in the pits like a honeycomb,
They sift and soften it, bake it and burn it-
Whether they weld you, for instance, a snaffle
With side-bars never a brute can baffle;
Or a lock that's a puzzle of wards within wards;
Or, if your colt's fore-foot inclines to curve inwards,
Horseshoes they hammer which turn on a swivel
And won't allow the hoof to shrivel.
Then they cast bells like the shell of the winkle
That keep a stout heart in the ram with their tinkle;
But the sand-they pinch and pound it like otters;
Commend me to Gipsy glass-makers and potters!
Glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear,
Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear,
As if in pure water you dropped and let die
A bruised black-blooded mulberry;
And that other sort, their crowning pride,
With long white threads distinct inside,
Like the lake-flower's fibrous roots which dangle
Loose such a length and never tangle,
Where the bold sword-lily cuts the clear waters,
And the cup-lily couches with all the white daughters:
Such are the works they put their hand to,
The uses they turn and twist iron and sand to.
And these made the troop, which our Duke saw sally
Toward his castle from out of the valley,
Men and women, like new-hatched spiders,
Come out with the morning to greet our riders.
And up they wound till they reached the ditch,
Whereat all stopped save one, a witch
That I knew, as she hobbled from the group,
By her gait directly and her stoop,
I, whom Jacynth was used to importune
To let that same witch tell us our fortune.
The oldest Gipsy then above ground;
And, sure as the autumn season came round,
She paid us a visit for profit or pastime,
And every time, as she swore, for the last time.
And presently she was seen to sidle
Up to the Duke till she touched his bridle,
So that the horse of a sudden reared up
As under its nose the old witch peered up
With her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes
Of no use now but to gather brine,
And began a kind of level whine
Such as they used to sing to their viols
When their ditties they go grinding
Up and down with nobody minding:
And then, as of old, at the end of the humming
Her usual presents were forthcoming
-A dog-whistle blowing the fiercest of trebles,
(Just a sea-shore stone holding a dozen fine pebbles,)
Or a porcelain mouth-piece to screw on a pipe-end,-
And so she awaited her annual stipend.
But this time, the Duke would scarcely vouchsafe
A word in reply; and in vain she felt
With twitching fingers at her belt
For the purse of sleek pine-martin pelt,
Ready to ptlt what he gave in her pouch safe,-
Till, either to quicken his apprehension,
Or possibly with an after-intention,
She was come, she said, to pay her duty
To the new Duchess, the youthful beauty.
No sooner had she named his lady,
Than a shine lit up the face so shady,
And its smirk returned with a novel meaning-
For it struck him, the babe just wanted weaning;
If one gave her a taste of what life was and sorrow,
She, foolish to-day, would be wiser tomorrow;
And who so fit a teacher of trouble
As this sordid crone bent well-nigh double?
So, glancing at her wolf-skin vesture,
(If such it was, for they grow so hirsute
That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit)
He was contrasting, 'twas plain from his gesture,
The life of the lady so flower-like and delicate
With the loathsome squalor of this helicat.
I, in brief, was the man the Duke beckoned
From out of the throng, and while I drew near
He told the crone-as I since have reckoned
By the way he bent and spoke into her ear
With circumspection and mystery-
The main of the lady's history,
Her frowardness and ingratitude:
And for all the crone's submissive attitude
I could see round her mouth the loose plaits tightening,
And her brow with assenting intelligence brightening,
As though she engaged with hearty good-will
Whatever he now might enjoin to fulfil,
And promised the lady a thorough frightening.
And so, just giving her a glimpse
Of a purse, with the air of a man who imps
The wing of the hawk that shall fetch the hernshaw,
He bade me take the Gipsy mother
And set her telling some story or other
Of hill or dale, oak-wood or fernshaw,
To wile away a weary hour
For the lady left alone in her bower,
Whose mind and body craved exertion
And yet shrank from all better diversion.
XIV.
Then clapping heel to his horse, the mere curveter,
Out rode the Duke, and after his hollo
Horses and hounds swept, huntsman and servitor,
And back I turned and bade the crone follow.
And what makes me confident what's to be told you
Had all along been of this crone's devising,
Is, that, on looking round sharply, behold you,
There was a novelty quick as surprising:
For first, she had shot up a full head in stature,
And her step kept pace with mine nor faltered,
As if age had foregone its usurpature,
And the ignoble mien was wholly altered,
And the face looked quite of another nature,
And the change reached too, whatever the change meant,
Her shaggy wolf-skin cloak's arrangement:
For where its tatters hung loose like sedges,
Gold coins were glittering on the edges,
Like the band-roll strung with tomans
Which proves the veil a Persian woman's.
And under her brow, like a snail's horns newly
Come out as after the rain he paces,
Two unmistakeable eye-points duly
Live and aware looked out of their places.
So, we went and found Jacynth at the entry
Of the lady's chamber standing sentry;
I told the command and produced my companion,
And Jacynth rejoiced to admit any one,
For since last night, by the same token,
Not a single word had the lady spoken:
They went in both to the presence together,
While I in the balcony watched the weather.
XV.
And now, what took place at the very first of all,
I cannot tell, as I never could learn it:
Jacynth constantly wished a curse to fall
On that little head of hers and burn it
If she knew how she came to drop so soundly
Asleep of a sudden and there continue
The whole time sleeping as profoundly
As one of the boars my father would pin you
'Twixt the eyes where life holds garrison,
-Jacynth forgive me the comparison!
But where I begin asy own narration
Is a little after I took my station
To breathe the fresh air from the balcony,
And, having in those days a falcon eye,
To follow the hunt thro' the open country,
From where the bushes thinlier crested
The hillocks, to a plain where's not one tree.
When, in a moment, my ear was arrested
By-was it singing, or was it saying,
Or a strange musical instrument playing
In the chamber?-and to be certain
I pushed the lattice, pulled the curtain,
And there lay Jacynth asleep,
Yet as if a watch she tried to keep,
In a rosy sleep along the floor
With her head against the door;
While in the midst, on the seat of state,
Was a queen-the Gipsy woman late,
With head and face downbent
On the lady's head and face intent:
For, coiled at her feet like a child at ease,
The lady sat between her knees
And o'er them the lady's clasped hands met,
And on those hands her chin was set,
And her upturned face met the face of the crone
Wherein the eyes had grown and grown
As if she could double and quadruple
At pleasure the play of either pupil
-Very like, by her hands' slow fanning,
As up and down like a gor-crow's flappers
They moved to measure, or bell-clappers.
I said ``Is it blessing, is it banning,
``Do they applaud you or burlesque you-
``Those hands and fingers with no flesh on?''
But, just as I thought to spring in to the rescue,
At once I was stopped by the lady's expression:
For it was life her eyes were drinking
From the crone's wide pair above unwinking,
-Life's pure fire received without shrinking,
Into the heart and breast whose heaving
Told you no single drop they were leaving,
-Life, that filling her, passed redundant
Into her very hair, back swerving
Over each shoulder, loose and abundant,
As her head thrown back showed the white throat curving;
And the very tresses shared in the pleasure,
Moving to the mystic measure,
Bounding as the bosom bounded.
I stopped short, more and more confounded,
As still her cheeks burned and eyes glistened,
As she listened and she listened:
When all at once a hand detained me,
The selfsame contagion gained me,
And I kept time to the wondrous chime,
Making out words and prose and rhyme,
Till it seemed that the music furled
Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped
From under the words it first had propped,
And left them midway in the world:
Word took word as hand takes hand,
I could hear at last, and understand,
And when I held the unbroken thread,
The Gipsy said:-
``And so at last we find my tribe.
``And so I set thee in the midst,
``And to one and all of them describe
``What thou saidst and what thou didst,
``Our long and terrible journey through,
``And all thou art ready to say and do
``In the trials that remain:
``I trace them the vein and the other vein
``That meet on thy brow and part again,
``Making our rapid mystic mark;
``And I bid my people prove and probe
``Each eye's profound and glorious globe
``Till they detect the kindred spark
``In those depths so dear and dark,
``Like the spots that snap and burst and flee,
``Circling over the midnight sea.
``And on that round young cheek of thine
``I make them recognize the tinge,
``As when of the costly scarlet wine
``They drip so much as will impinge
``And spread in a thinnest scale afloat
``One thick gold drop from the olive's coat
``Over a silver plate whose sheen
``Still thro' the mixture shall be seen.
``For so I prove thee, to one and all,
``Fit, when my people ope their breast,
``To see the sign, and hear the call,
``And take the vow, and stand the test
``Which adds one more child to the rest-
``When the breast is bare and the arms are wide,
``And the world is left outside.
``For there is probation to decree,
``And many and long must the trials be
``Thou shalt victoriously endure,
``If that brow is true and those eyes are sure;
``Like a jewel-finder's fierce assay
``Of the prize he dug from its mountain-tomb-
``Let once the vindicating ray
``Leap out amid the anxious gloom,
``And steel and fire have done their part
``And the prize falls on its finder's heart;
`'So, trial after trial past,
``Wilt thou fall at the very last
``Breathless, half in trance
``With the thrill of the great deliverance,
``Into our arms for evermore;
``And thou shalt know, those arms once curled
``About thee, what we knew before,
``How love is the only good in the world.
``Henceforth be loved as heart can love,
``Or brain devise, or hand approve!
``Stand up, look below,
``It is our life at thy feet we throw
``To step with into light and joy;
``Not a power of life but we employ
``To satisfy thy nature's want;
``Art thou the tree that props the plant,
``Or the climbing plant that seeks the tree-
``Canst thou help us, must we help thee?
``If any two creatures grew into one,
``They would do more than the world has done.
``Though each apart were never so weak,
``Ye vainly through the world should seek
``For the knowledge and the might
``Which in such union grew their right:
``So, to approach at least that end,
``And blend,-as much as may be, blend
``Thee with us or us with thee,-
``As climbing plant or propping tree,
``Shall some one deck thee, over and down,
``Up and about, with blossoms and leaves?
``Fix his heart's fruit for thy garland crown,
``Cling with his soul as the gourd-vine cleaves,
``Die on thy boughs and disappear
``While not a leaf of thine is sere?
``Or is the other fate in store,
``And art thou fitted to adore,
``To give thy wondrous self away,
``And take a stronger nature's sway?
``I foresee and could foretell
``Thy future portion, sure and well:
``But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,
``Let them say what thou shalt do!
``Only be sure thy daily life,
``In its peace or in its strife,
``Never shall be unobserved:
``We pursue thy whole career,
``And hope for it, or doubt, or fear,-
``Lo, hast thou kept thy path or swerved,
``We are beside thee in all thy ways,
``With our blame, with our praise,
``Our shame to feel, our pride to show,
``Glad, angry-but indifferent, no!
``Whether it be thy lot to go,
``For the good of us all, where the haters meet
``In the crowded city's horrible street;
``Or thou step alone through the morass
``Where never sound yet was
``Save the dry quick clap of the stork's bill,
``For the air is still, and the water still,
``When the blue breast of the dipping coot
``Dives under, and all is mute.
``So, at the last shall come old age,
``Decrepit as befits that stage;
``How else wouldst thou retire apart
``With the hoarded memories of thy heart,
``And gather all to the very least
``Of the fragments of life's earlier feast,
``Let fall through eagerness to find
``The crowning dainties yet behind?
``Ponder on the entire past
``Laid together thus at last,
``When the twilight helps to fuse
``The first fresh with the faded hues,
``And the outline of the whole,
``As round eve's shades their framework roll,
``Grandly fronts for once thy soul.
``And then as, 'mid the dark, a glean
``Of yet another morning breaks,
``And like the hand which ends a dream,
``Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
``Touches the flesh and the soul awakes,
``Then''
Ay, then indeed something would happen!
But what? For here her voice changed like a bird's;
There grew more of the music and less of the words;
Had Jacynth only been by me to clap pen
To paper and put you down every syllable
With those clever clerkly fingers,
All I've forgotten as well as what lingers
In this old brain of mine that's but ill able
To give you even this poor version
Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering
-More fault of those who had the hammering
Of prosody into me and syntax,
And did it, not with hobnails but tintacks!
But to return from this excursion,-
Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest,
The peace most deep and the charm completest,
There came, shall I say, a snap-
And the charm vanished!
And my sense returned, so strangely banished,
And, starting as from a nap,
I knew the crone was bewitching my lady,
With Jacynth asleep; and but one spring made I
Down from the casement, round to the portal,
Another minute and I had entered,-
When the door opened, and more than mortal
Stood, with a face where to my mind centred
All beauties I ever saw or shall see,
The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy.
She was so different, happy and beautiful,
I felt at once that all was best,
And that I had nothing to do, for the rest,
But wait her commands, obey and be dutiful.
Not that, in fact, there was any commanding;
I saw the glory of her eye,
And the brow's height and the breast's expanding,
And I was hers to live or to die.
As for finding what she wanted,
You know God Almighty granted
Such little signs should serve wild creatures
To tell one another all their desires,
So that each knows what his friend requires,
And does its bidding without teachers.
I preceded her; the crone
Followed silent and alone;
I spoke to her, but she merely jabbered
In the old style; both her eyes had slunk
Back to their pits; her stature shrunk;
In short, the soul in its body sunk
Like a blade sent home to its scabbard.
We descended, I preceding;
Crossed the court with nobody heeding,
All the world was at the chase,
The courtyard like a desert-place,
The stable emptied of its small fry;
I saddled myself the very palfrey
I remember patting while it carried her,
The day she arrived and the Duke married her.
And, do you know, though it's easy deceiving
Oneself in such matters, I can't help believing
The lady had not forgotten it either,
And knew the poor devil so much beneath her
Would have been only too glad for her service
To dance on hot ploughshares like a Turk dervise,
But, unable to pay proper duty where owing it,
Was reduced to that pitiful method of showing it:
For though the moment I began setting
His saddle on my own nag of Berold's begetting,
(Not that I meant to be obtrusive)
She stopped me, while his rug was shifting,
By a single rapid finger's lifting,
And, with a gesture kind but conclusive,
And a little shake of the head, refused me,-
I say, although she never used me,
Yet when she was mounted, the Gipsy behind her,
And I ventured to remind her,
I suppose with a voice of less steadiness
Than usual, for my feeling exceeded me,
-Something to the effect that I was in readiness
Whenever God should please she needed me,-
Then, do you know, her face looked down on me
With a look that placed a crown on me,
And she felt in her bosom,-mark, her bosom-
And, as a flower-tree drops its blossom,
Dropped me . . . ah, had it been a purse
Of silver, my friend, or gold that's worse,
Why, you see, as soon as I found myself
So understood,-that a true heart so may gain
Such a reward,-I should have gone home again,
Kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned myself!
It was a little plait of hair
Such as friends in a convent make
To wear, each for the other's sake,-
This, see, which at my breast I wear,
Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment),
And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment.
And then,-and then,-to cut short,-this is idle,
These are feelings it is not good to foster,-
I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle,
And the palfrey bounded,-and so we lost her.
XVI.
When the liquor's out why clink the cannikin?
I did think to describe you the panic in
The redoubtable breast of our master the mannikin,
And what was the pitch of his mother's yellowness,
How she turned as a shark to snap the spare-rib
Clean off, sailors say, from a pearl-diving Carib,
When she heard, what she called the flight of the feloness
-But it seems such child's play,
What they said and did with the lady away!
And to dance on, when we've lost the music,
Always made me-and no doubt makes you-sick.
Nay, to my mind, the world's face looked so stern
As that sweet form disappeared through the postern,
She that kept it in constant good humour,
It ought to have stopped; there seemed nothing to do more.
But the world thought otherwise and went on,
And my head's one that its spite was spent on:
Thirty years are fled since that morning,
And with them all my head's adorning.
Nor did the old Duchess die outright,
As you expect, of suppressed spite,
The natural end of every adder
Not suffered to empty its poison-bladder:
But she and her son agreed, I take it,
That no one should touch on the story to wake it,
For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery,
So, they made no search and small inquiry-
And when fresh Gipsies have paid us a visit, I've
Noticed the couple were never inquisitive,
But told them they're folks the Duke don't want here,
And bade them make haste and cross the frontier.
Brief, the Duchess was gone and the Duke was glad of it,
And the old one was in the young one's stead,
And took, in her place, the household's head,
And a blessed time the household had of it!
And were I not, as a man may say, cautious
How I trench, more than needs, on the nauseous,
I could favour you with sundry touches
Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess
Heightened the mellowness of her cheek's yellowness
(To get on faster) until at last her
Cheek grew to be one master-plaster
Of mucus and focus from mere use of ceruse:
In short, she grew from scalp to udder
Just the object to make you shudder.
XVII.
You're my friend-
What a thing friendship is, world without end!
How it gives the heart and soul a stir-up
As if somebody broached you a glorious runlet,
And poured out, all lovelily, sparklingly, sunlit,
Our green Moldavia, the streaky syrup,
Cotnar as old as the time of the Druids-
Friendship may match with that monarch of fluids;
Each supples a dry brain, fills you its ins-and-outs,
Gives your life's hour-glass a shake when the thin sand doubts
Whether to run on or stop short, and guarantees
Age is not all made of stark sloth and arrant ease.
I have seen my little lady once more,
Jacynth, the Gipsy, Berold, and the rest of it,
For to me spoke the Duke, as I told you before;
I always wanted to make a clean breast of it:
And now it is made-why, my heart's blood, that went trickle,
Trickle, but anon, in such muddy driblets,
Is pumped up brisk now, through the main ventricle,
And genially floats me about the giblets.
I'll tell you what I intend to do:
I must see this fellow his sad life through-
He is our Duke, after all,
And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall.
My father was born here, and I inherit
His fame, a chain he bound his son with;
Could I pay in a lump I should prefer it,
But there's no mine to blow up and get done with:
So, I must stay till the end of the chapter.
For, as to our middle-age-manners-adapter,
Be it a thing to be glad on or sorry on,
Some day or other, his head in a morion
And breast in a hauberk, his heels he'll kick up,
Slain by an onslaught fierce of hiccup.
And then, when red doth the sword of our Duke rust,
And its leathern sheath lie o'ergrown with a blue crust,
Then I shall scrape together my earnings;
For, you see, in the churchyard Jacynth reposes,
And our children all went the way of the roses:
It's a long lane that knows no turnings.
One needs but little tackle to travel in;
So, just one stout cloak shall I indue:
And for a stall, what beats the javelin
With which his boars my father pinned you?
And then, for a purpose you shall hear presently,
Taking some Cotnar, a tight plump skinful,
I shall go journeying, who but I, pleasantly!
Sorrow is vain and despondency sinful.
What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.
When we mind labour, then only, we're too old-
What age had Methusalem when he begat Saul?
And at last, as its haven some buffeted ship sees,
(Come all the way from the north-parts with sperm oil)
I hope to get safely out of the turmoil
And arrive one day at the land of the Gipsies,
And find my lady, or hear the last news of her
From some old thief and son of Lucifer,
His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop,
Sunburned all over like an thiop.
And when my Cotnar begins to operate
And the tongue of the rogue to run at a proper rate,
And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent,
I shall drop in with-as if by accident-
``You never knew, then, how it all ended,
``What fortune good or bad attended
``The little lady your Queen befriended?''
-And when that's told me, what's remaining?
This world's too hard for my explaining.
The same wise judge of matters equine
Who still preferred some slim four-year-old
To the big-boned stock of mighty Berold,
And, fur strong Cotnar, drank French weak wine,
He also umst be such a lady's scorner!
Smooth Jacob still rubs homely Esau:
Now up, now down, the world's one see-saw.
-So, I shall find out some snug corner
Under a hedge, like Orson the wood-knight,
Turn myself round and bid the world good night;
And sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet's blowing
Wakes me (unless priests cheat us laymen)
To a world where will be no furtiner throwing
Pearls befare swine that Can't value them. Amen!
~ Robert Browning, The Flight Of The Duchess
,#NFDB
23 Yoga
9 Integral Yoga
4 Philosophy
4 Christianity
3 Sufism
3 Poetry
2 Psychology
2 Occultism
2 Baha i Faith
24 Sri Ramakrishna
9 Sri Aurobindo
4 The Mother
4 Aldous Huxley
3 Al-Ghazali
2 Sri Ramana Maharshi
2 Satprem
2 Saint Augustine of Hippo
2 Nolini Kanta Gupta
2 Carl Jung
2 Baha u llah
2 Anonymous
23 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
5 Talks
4 The Perennial Philosophy
4 Kena and Other Upanishads
3 The Alchemy of Happiness
3 Essays Divine And Human
2 The Bible
2 Record of Yoga
2 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
2 Essays On The Gita
2 City of God
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Without being formally initiated into their doctrines, Sri Ramakrishna thus realized the ideals of religions other than Hinduism. He did not need to follow any doctrine. All barriers were removed by his overwhelming love of God. So he became a Master who could speak with authority regarding the ideas and ideals of the various religions of the world. "I have practised", said he, "all religions — Hinduism, Islam, Christianity — and I have also followed the paths of the different Hindu sects. I have found that it is the same God toward whom all are directing their steps, though along different paths. You must try all beliefs and traverse all the different ways once. Wherever I look, I see men quarrelling in the name of religion — Hindus, Mohammedans, Brahmos, Vaishnavas, and the rest. But they never reflect that He who is called Krishna is also called Siva, and bears the name of the Primal Energy, Jesus, and Allah as well — the same Rama with a thousand names. A lake has several ghats. At one the Hindus take water in pitchers and call it 'jal'; at another the Mussalmans take water in leather bags and call it pani'. At a third the Christians call it 'water'. Can we imagine that it is not 'jal', but only 'pani' or 'water'? How ridiculous! The substance is One under different names, and everyone is seeking the same substance; only climate, temperament, and name create differences. Let each man follow his own path. If he sincerely and ardently wishes to know God, peace be unto him! He will surely realize Him."
In 1867 Sri Ramakrishna returned to Kamarpukur to recuperate from the effect of his austerities. The peaceful countryside, the simple and artless companions of his boyhood, and the pure air did him much good. The villagers were happy to get back their playful, frank, witty, kind-hearted, and truthful Gadadhar, though they did not fail to notice the great change that had come over him during his years in Calcutta. His wife, Sarada Devi, now fourteen years old, soon arrived at Kamarpukur. Her spiritual development was much beyond her age and she was able to understand immediately her husband's state of mind. She became eager to learn from him about God and to live with him as his attendant. The Master accepted her cheerfully both as his disciple and as his spiritual companion. Referring to the experiences of these few days, she once said: "I used to feel always as if a pitcher full of bliss were placed in my heart. The joy was indescribable."
01.11 - Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
"To its heights we can always come. For those of us who are still splashing about in the lower ooze, the phrase has a rather ironical ring. Nevertheless, in the light of even the most distant acquaintance with the heights and the fullness, it is possible to understand what its author means. To discover the Kingdom of God exclusively within oneself is easier than to discover it, not only there, but also in the outer worlds of minds and things and living creatures. It is easier because the heights within reveal themselves to those who are ready to exclude from their purview all that lies without. And though this exclusion may be a painful and mortificatory process, the fact remains that it is less arduous than the process of inclusion, by which we come to know the fullness as well as the heights of spiritual life. Where there is exclusive concentration on the heights within, temptations and distractions are avoided and there is a general denial and suppression. But when the hope is to know God inclusivelyto realise the divine Ground in the world as well as in the soul, temptations and distractions must not be avoided, but submitted to and used as opportunities for advance; there must be no suppression of outward-turning activities, but a transformation of them so that they become sacramental."
The neatness of the commentary cannot be improved upon. Only with regard to the "ironical ring" of which Huxley speaks, it has just to be pointed out, as he himself seems to understand, that the "we" referred to in the phrase does not mean humanity in general that 'splashes about in the lower ooze' but those who have a sufficiently developed inner spiritual life.
0 1964-07-18, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The one safety for man lies in learning to live from within outward, not depending on institutions and machinery to perfect him, but out of his growing inner perfection availing to shape a more perfect form and frame of life; for by this inwardness we shall best be able both to see the truth of the high things which we now only speak with our lips and form into outward intellectual constructions, and to apply their truth sincerely to all our outward living. If we are to found the kingdom of God in humanity, we must first know God and see and live the diviner truth of our being in ourselves; otherwise how shall a new manipulation of the constructions of the reason and scientific systems of efficiency which have failed us in the past, avail to establish it? It is because there are plenty of signs that the old error continues and only a minority, leaders perhaps in light, but not yet in action, are striving to see more clearly, inwardly and truly, that we must expect as yet rather the last twilight which divides the dying from the unborn age than the real dawning. For a time, since the mind of man is not yet ready, the old spirit and method may yet be strong and seem for a short while to prosper; but the future lies with the men and nations who first see beyond both the glare and the dusk the gods of the morning and prepare themselves to be fit instruments of the Power that is pressing towards the light of a greater ideal.
Sri Aurobindo
0 1971-05-01, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is in the wide peace of an absolute and devoted sincerity free from fixed ideas and preferences that we can realize the conditions required to know Gods Will and it is with a fearless discipline that we must execute it.
April 30, 1971
05.12 - The Revealer and the Revelation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
How the horizontal view limits and maims one's spiritual perception is further illustrated in the case of the famous Gloomy Dean. Dean Inge is a divine and as spiritual a person as one can hope to be in the modern world. He has, however, voluntarily clipped his wings and in the name of a surer rational knowledge and saner spirituality prefers a lower flight among known, familiar and nameable ranges to a transcendent soaring in mystic regions beyond. He has made a somewhat trenchant distinction between the Revelation and the Revealer. He says we can know God only by his qualities: what he is, if anything, besides his qualities none can define. In the words of the poet,
These are His works and His veils and His shadows;
06.02 - The Way of Fate and the Problem of Pain, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And know God's darkness as he knows his Sun.
For this he must go down into the pit,
1.01 - MASTER AND DISCIPLE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M. had yet to learn the distinction between knowledge and ignorance. Up to this time his conception had been that one got knowledge from books and schools. Later on he gave up this false conception. He was taught that to know God is knowledge, and not to know Him, ignorance. When Sri Ramakrishna exclaimed, "And you are a man of knowledge!", M.'s ego was again badly shocked.
God with and without form
1.01 - On knowledge of the soul, and how knowledge of the soul is the key to the knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
If you wish, O seeker of the way! to know your own soul, know that the blessed and glorious God created you of two things: the one is a visible body, and the other is a something internal, that is called spirit and heart, which can only be perceived by the mind. But when we speak of heart, we do not mean the piece of flesh which is in the left side of the breast of a man, for that is found in a dead body and in animals: it may be seen with the eyes, and belongs to the visible world. That heart, which is emphatically called spirit, does not belong to this world, and although it has come to this world, it has only come to leave it. It is the sovereign of the body, which is its vehicle, and all the external and internal organs of the body are its subjects. Its especial attribute is to know God and to [16] enjoy the vision of the beauty of the Lord God. The invitation to salvation is addressed to the spirit. The commandment is also addressed to it, for it is capable of happiness or misery. The knowledge of what it is in reality, is the key to the knowledge of God. Beloved, strive to obtain this knowledge, for there is no more precious jewel. In its origin it comes from God, and again returns to him. It has come hither but for a time for intercourse and action.
Be sure, O seeker after knowledge! that it is impossible to obtain a knowledge of the heart, until you know its essence and its true nature, its faculties, and its relations with its faculties,-nor until you know its attributes, and how through them the knowledge of God is obtained, and what happiness is, and how happiness is to be secured. Know then, that the existence of the spirit is evident and is not involved in doubt. Still, it is not body, which is found in corpses and in animals generally. If a person with his eyes wide open should look upon the world and upon his own body, and then shut his eyes, everything would be veiled from his view, so that he could not see even his own body. But the existence of his spirit would not be at the same time shut out from his view. Again, at death, the body turns to earth, but the spirit undergoes no corruption. Still it is not permitted to us to know what the spirit is in its real nature and in its essence, as God says in his Holy Word : "They will ask you about the spirit. Answer, the spirit is a creation by decree of the Lord."1 The spirit belongs to the world of decrees.
1.01 - THAT ARE THOU, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
It is because we dont know Who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our eternal Ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been. Plato speaks in the same sense when he says, in the Republic, that the virtue of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains. And in the Theaetetus he makes the point, so frequently insisted upon\by those who have practised spiritual religion, that it is only by becoming Godlike that we can know Godand to become Godlike is to identify ourselves with the divine element which in fact constitutes our essential nature, but of which, in our mainly voluntary ignorance, we choose to remain unaware.
They are on the way to truth who apprehend God by means of the divine, Light by the light.
1.02 - IN THE COMPANY OF DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
was taking him. He had only been told: "If you want to see a grog-shop, then come with me. You will see a huge jar of wine there." M. related this to Sri Ramakrishna, who laughed about it. The Master said: "The bliss of worship and communion with God is the true wine, the wine of ecstatic love. The goal of human life is to love God, Bhakti is the one essential thing. To know God through jnna and reasoning is extremely difficult."
Then the Master sang:
1.02 - On the Knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
Know, that God exists exempt from and independent of the notions that enter the mind, and the forms that are produced in the imagination, that he is not subjected to reasoning, and time and place cannot be ascribed to him. Still his exercise of power and the manifestation of his glory are not independent of place. But in the same manner, this independence and freedom is possible in your soul. The spirit, for example, which we call heart is exempt from the entrance of fancies and imaginations, and also from size and divisibility. Nor has it form or color, for if it had, it could be seen by the eye, and would enter into the sphere of fancy and imagination, and its beauty or ugliness, its greatness or littleness would be known. If any one ask you about your soul, you may answer, "It exists by the will of God: it has neither quantity or physical quality; it is exempt from being known." Beloved, since you are incapable of knowing the spirit which is in your body, how should it be possible for you to know God, who created spirits, bodies and all things, who is himself foreign to all of them, and who is not of their class and kind ? It is one of the most important things, yea, a most necessary duty, to treat of God as holy, independent and free.
How many things there are in your body in reference to which you do not know their reality and essence, such as [46] desire, love, misery and pleasure. Their existence is admitted, but their quantity and quality cannot be measured. If you desire to learn the absolute truth about them, you cherish a vain longing; and it is the same, if you desire to know the absolute nature of voice, nutrition or hearing. As that which is perceived by the eye has no relation to voice, and as that which is perceived by the ear has no relation to form, and as that which is perceived by the sense of smelling has no relation to taste, so that the one can be known by means of the other, in the same manner that which is perceived through the medium of the mind or of divine power, cannot be perceived by the senses. Again, as the spirit exists and controls the body, and yet we know not the mode and essence of it, so God is present in all things, and controls and governs all things, but his form, essence and quality are exempt from being known. Exemption and freedom may be illustrated in still another manner. In the same way that the spirit pervades all the limbs and the body, and the body is entirely subject to its control, and that the spirit is indivisible, while the body is divisible, so also in relation to God, all that exists, springs from him, all creatures exist by his word, and in all possible things his operations are seen, yet still he is not related to place, nor does he reason about anything, and he is free from relation or affinity to any quality of bodies or to quantity.
--
Thus, let us suppose that a person bad been born and brought up in darkness, where he had never seen the rays or light of the sun, but had merely heard a description of the sun. If such a person should ask to have the light and mode of shining of the sun explained to him, how would it be possible in any way to explain to him what it is? If however, there should happen to be in that dark place many glow worms, the person addressed, taking one of them up in his hands, might say, "the light of the sun resembles this," although in reality it has not a particle or an atom of resemblance. Take another example : suppose a child incapable of making distinctions, should inquire of us about the pleasure derived from exercising authority and sovereignty. We, knowing the impossibility of explaining the matter to him, might answer that the pleasure of ruling was like that obtained from playing with nuts or at ball, although it does not resemble them in any particular. From these examples we may learn that it is impossible for any being, except God himself, to know God. "God is witness ! God is witness! No one knows God, except God himself."
Finally, seeker after divine mysteries, know that the paths to the knowledge of God, are as numerous as the souls of creatures, and their number is known to God alone. But we have spoken so much as is found above, for the sake of both warning and stimulating the seeker after the knowledge and love of God.
1.02 - The Human Soul, #The Interior Castle or The Mansions, #Saint Teresa of Avila, #Christianity
10.: I do not know whether I have put this clearly; self-knowledge is of such consequence that I would not have you careless of it, though you may be lifted to heaven in prayer, because while on earth nothing is more needful than humility. Therefore, I repeat, not only a good way, but the best of all ways, is to endeavour to enter first by the room where humility is practised, which is far better than at once rushing on to the others. This is the right road;-if we know how easy and safe it is to walk by it, why ask for wings with which to fly? Let us rather try to learn how to advance quickly. I believe we shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavouring to know God, for, beholding His greatness we are struck by our own baseness, His purity shows our foulness, and by meditating on His humility we find how very far we are from being humble.
11.: Two advantages are gained by this practice. First, it is clear that white looks far whiter when placed near something black, and on the contrary, black never looks so dark as when seen beside something white. Secondly, our understanding and will become more noble and capable of good in every way when we turn from ourselves to God: it is very injurious never to raise our minds above the mire of our own faults. I described how murky and fetid are the streams that spring from the source of a soul in mortal sin.25' Thus (although the case is not really the same, God forbid! this is only a comparison), while we are continually absorbed in contemplating the weakness of our earthly nature, the springs of our actions will never flow free from the mire of timid, weak, and cowardly thoughts, such as: 'I wonder whether people are noticing me or not! If I follow this course, will harm come to me? Dare I begin this work? Would it not be presumptuous? Is it right for any one as faulty as myself to speak on sublime spiritual subjects?26' Will not people think too well of me, if I make myself singular? Extremes are bad, even in virtue; sinful as I am I shall only fall the lower. Perhaps I shall fail and be a source of scandal to good people; such a person as I am has no need of peculiarities.'
1.03 - VISIT TO VIDYASAGAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Can one know God through reasoning? Be His servant, surrender yourself to Him, and then pray to Him.
(To Vidyasagar, with a smile) "Well, what is your attitude?"
1.04 - GOD IN THE WORLD, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
To its heights we can always come. For those of us who are still splashing about in the lower ooze, the phrase has a rather ironical ring. Nevertheless, in the light of even the most distant acquaintance with the heights and the fulness, it is possible to understand what its author means. To discover the Kingdom of God exclusively within oneself is easier than to discover it, not only there, but also in the outer world of minds and things and living creatures. It is easier because the heights within reveal themselves to those who are ready to exclude from their purview all that lies without. And though this exclusion may be a painful and mortificatory process, the fact remains that it is less arduous than the process of inclusion, by which we come to know the fulness as well as the heights of spiritual life. Where there is exclusive concentration on the heights within, temptations and distractions are avoided and there is a general denial and suppression. But when the hope is to know God inclusivelyto realize the divine Ground in the world as well as in the soul, temptations and distractions must not be avoided, but submitted to and used as opportunities for advance; there must be no suppression of outward-turning activities, but a transformation of them so that they become sacramental. Mortification becomes more searching and more subtle; there is need of unsleeping awareness and, on the levels of thought, feeling and conduct, the constant exercise of something like an artists tact and taste.
It is in the literature of Mahayana and especially of Zen Buddhism that we find the best account of the psychology of the man for whom Samsara and Nirvana, time and eternity, are one and the same. More systematically perhaps than any other religion, the Buddhism of the Far East teaches the way to spiritual Knowledge in its fulness as well as in its heights, in and through the world as well as in and through the soul. In this context we may point to a highly significant fact, which is that the incomparable landscape painting of China and Japan was essentially a religious art, inspired by Taoism and Zen Buddhism; in Europe, on the contrary, landscape painting and the poetry of nature worship were secular arts which arose when Christianity was in decline, and derived little or no inspiration from Christian ideals.
1.04 - On Knowledge of the Future World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
The necessities of the constitution of the spirit are to know God and to contemplate his beauty and excellence. But if stupidity and blindness, which are opposed to this tendency of the spirit, become predominant, the soul will be vexed and tormented, and there will be no end to the torment. If it were not that the body is subject to maladies in the world, the fact of this blindness and stupidity would have been visible and apparent to the soul in this world also, and it would also have been the source of immense anguish, and torment would at no moment have ceased to afflict men. Just as when a person has a severe sore upon the hand or foot, if besides it should be cut with a knife or fire should be put upon it, he would not feel the pain of the knife or the fire, on account of the pain of the sore, so likewise the maladies of the body, such as hunger and thirst, or such maladies as love of possessions and family, combined with the absorbed attention of the senses to these things, prevent the soul from being conscious of its disquiet and distress. But when in death, the torment to which the body was subject is taken away, it will be seen how excruciating is the torment of the soul. And thus also God announces in his holy word : "Ah ! if you knew it with infallible assurance. But you will see hell: you will see it with the eyes of certainty."1
You should know, O inquirer, that the many arguments we have adduced to prove that spiritual torment is more severe than material torment, and the many illustrations of it that we have developed, are understood by intelligent and discerning minds, but the mass of the people understand nothing about them. Suppose, for example, that the sou of a prince has begun to go to school, and he is admonished that if he do not study, his father will not give him the principality. The boy does not understand the [97] import of the warning, and continues busy in playing with tops and nuts. But, if he is told instead, if you do not learn to read and write, your master will whip you or pull your ears, from that moment, understanding the force of the admonition, he leaves his sport and play, and is diligent in his studies. Since, therefore, the commonalty cannot understand the torment of being forbidden and shut out from the vision of the beauty of God, the doctors of the law and the preachers, frighten them with serpents and scorpions, and with the fire of hell; for they are not capable of understanding anything else. In the other case, how should the "look out! take care !" from the mouth of the master, with the pain of one or two boxes on the ear, have any relation or resemblance in the mind of the boy with the loss of the principality? ...
1.05 - The Destiny of the Individual, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
4:So strongly was this truth perceived in the ancient times that the Vedantic Seers, even after they had arrived at the crowning idea, the convincing experience of Sachchidananda as the highest positive expression of the Reality to our consciousness, erected in their speculations or went on in their perceptions to an Asat, a Non-Being beyond, which is not the ultimate existence, the pure consciousness, the infinite bliss of which all our experiences are the expression or the deformation. If at all an existence, a consciousness, a bliss, it is beyond the highest and purest positive form of these things that here we can possess and other therefore than what here we know by these names. Buddhism, somewhat arbitrarily declared by the theologians to be an un-Vedic doctrine because it rejected the authority of the Scriptures, yet goes back to this essentially Vedantic conception. Only, the positive and synthetic teaching of the Upanishads beheld Sat and Asat not as opposites destructive of each other, but as the last antinomy through which we look up to the Unknowable. And in the transactions of our positive consciousness, even Unity has to make its account with Multiplicity; for the Many also are Brahman. It is by Vidya, the Knowledge of the Oneness, that we know God; without it Avidya, the relative and multiple consciousness, is a night of darkness and a disorder of Ignorance. Yet if we exclude the field of that Ignorance, if we get rid of Avidya as if it were a thing non-existent and unreal, then Knowledge itself becomes a sort of obscurity and a source of imperfection. We become as men blinded by a light so that we can no longer see the field which that light illumines.
5:Such is the teaching, calm, wise and clear, of our most ancient sages. They had the patience and the strength to find and to know; they had also the clarity and humility to admit the limitation of our knowledge. They perceived the borders where it has to pass into something beyond itself. It was a later impatience of heart and mind, vehement attraction to an ultimate bliss or high masterfulness of pure experience and trenchant intelligence which sought the One to deny the Many and because it had received the breath of the heights scorned or recoiled from the secret of the depths. But the steady eye of the ancient wisdom perceived that to know God really, it must know Him everywhere equally and without distinction, considering and valuing but not mastered by the oppositions through which He shines.
6:We will put aside then the trenchant distinctions of a partial logic which declares that because the One is the reality, the Many are an illusion, and because the Absolute is Sat, the one existence, the relative is Asat and non-existent. If in the Many we pursue insistently the One, it is to return with the benediction and the revelation of the One confirming itself in the Many.
1.06 - THE MASTER WITH THE BRAHMO DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Bhakti is the one essential thing. Who can ever know God through reasoning? I want love of God. What do I care about knowing His infinite glories? One bottle of wine makes me drunk. What do I care about knowing how many gallons there are in the grog-shop?
One jar of water is enough to quench my thirst. I don't need to know the amount of water there is on earth."
1.07 - TRUTH, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
To find or know God in reality by any outward proofs, or by anything but by God Himself made manifest and self-evident in you, will never be your case either here or hereafter. For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any otherwise knowable in you or by you but by their own existence and manifestation in you. And all pretended knowledge of any of these things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that hath never entered into him.
William Law
1.08 - The Depths of the Divine, #Sex Ecology Spirituality, #Ken Wilber, #Philosophy
Neither space nor time touch this place. Nothing so much hinders the soul's understanding of God as time and space. Time and space are parts of the whole, but God is one. So if the soul is to recognize God, it must do so beyond space and time. For God is neither this nor that ["neti, neti"] in the way of the manifold things of earth, since God is one. If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God.
Know then that all our perfection and all our bliss depend on the fact that the individual goes through and beyond all creation and all temporality and all being, and enters the foundation that is without foundation.
1.1.05 - The Siddhis, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And even that wonder ceases when we know God and realise that the most wonderful movements of the cosmos are but trifles and "conjuring-tricks" compared with His infinite Reality. And as it is with this siddhi of science which we call wireless telegraphy and with this other siddhi of nature which is exampled in the momentary or rapid spread of a single thought or emotion in a mob, a nation, an army, so it is with the Yogic siddhis. Explain
& master their processes, put them in their proper relation to the rest of the economy of the universe and we shall find that they are neither miraculous nor marvellous nor supernatural. They are supernormal only in the way in which aviation is supernormal or motoring or the Chinese alphabet. Nor is there anything magical in them except in so far as magic, the science of the Persian Magi, means originally & properly the operations of superior power or superior knowledge. And in that sense the occultism of the
1.11 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "The fact is, all men may look alike from the outside, but some of them have fillings of 'condensed milk'. Cakes may have fillings of condensed milk or powdered black grams, but they all look alike from the outside. The desire to know God, ecstatic love of Him, and such other spiritual qualities are the 'condensed milk'."
Reassurance to the devotees & Parable of the tigress Sri Ramakrishna spoke reassuringly to the devotees.
1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
not know God. Therefore they see the victory as their own,
the greatness as their own. This opulent efflorescence of the
1.14 - IMMORTALITY AND SURVIVAL, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
Having achieved human birth, a rare and blessed incarnation, the wise man, leaving all vanity to those who are vain, should strive to know God, and Him only, before life passes into death.
Srimad Bhagavatam
1.14 - INSTRUCTION TO VAISHNAVS AND BRHMOS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "Do not reason. Who can ever know God? I have heard it from Nangta, once for all, that this whole universe is only a fragment of Brahman.
"Hazra is given to too much calculation. He says, 'This much of God has become the universe and this much is the balance.' My head aches at his calculations. I know that I know nothing. Sometimes I think of God as good, and sometimes as bad. What can I know of Him?"
M: "It is true, sir. Can anyone ever know God? Each thinks, with his little bit of intelligence, that he has understood all of God. As you say, an ant went to a sugar hill and, finding that one grain of. sugar filled its stomach, thought that the next time it would take the entire hill into its hole."
Surrender to the Divine Mother
MASTER: "Who can ever know God? I don't even try. I only call on Him as Mother. Let Mother do whatever She likes. I shall know Her if it is Her will; but I shall be happy to remain ignorant if She wills otherwise. My nature is that of a kitten. It only cries, 'Mew, mew!' The rest it leaves to its mother. The mother cat puts the kitten sometimes in the kitchen and sometimes on the master's bed. The young child wants only his mother. He doesn't know how wealthy his mother is, and he doesn't even want to know. He knows only, 'I have a mother; why should I worry?' Even the child of the maidservant knows that he has a mother. If he quarrels with the son of the master, he says: 'I shall tell my mother. I have a mother.' My attitude, too, is that of a child."
Suddenly Sri Ramakrishna caught M.'s attention and said, touching his own chest: "Well, there must be something here. Isn't that so?"
1.15 - LAST VISIT TO KESHAB, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "Discrimination is the reasoning by which one knows that God alone is real and all else is unreal. Real means eternal, and unreal means impermanent. He who has acquired discrimination knows that God is the only Substance and all else is non-existent. With the awakening of this spirit of discrimination a man wants to know God.
On the contrary, if a man loves the unreal-such things as creature comforts, name, fame, and wealth, then he doesn't want to know God, who is of the very nature of Reality. Through discrimination between the Real and the unreal one seeks to know God.
"Listen to a song:
--
NEIGHBOUR: "Who can know God?"
MASTER: "Right. Who can really know Him? But as for us, it is enough to know as much of Him as we need. What need have I of a whole well of water? One jar is more than enough for me. An ant went to a sugar hill. Did it need the entire hill? A grain or two of sugar was more than enough."
--
"As is the disease, so must the remedy be. The Lord says in the Git: 'O Arjuna, take refuge in Me. I shall deliver you from all sins.' Take shelter at His feet: He will give you right understanding. He will take entire responsibility for you. Then you will get rid of the typhoid. Can one ever know God with such a mind as this? Can one pour four seers of milk into a oneseer pot? Can we ever know God unless He lets us know Him?
Therefore I say, take shelter in God. Let Him do whatever He likes. He is self-willed.
1.17 - M. AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"One needs spiritual practice in order to know God and recognize Divine Incarnations.
Big fish live in the large lake, but to see them one must throw spiced bait in the water.
1.18 - M. AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"That alone is knowledge through which one is able to know God. All else is futile. Well, what is your idea about God?"
SHRISH: "Sir, I feel that there is an All-knowing Person. We get an indication of His Knowledge by looking at His creation. Let me give an illustration. God has made devices to keep fish and other aquatic animals alive in cold regions. As water grows colder, it gradually shrinks. But the amazing thing is that, just before turning into ice, the water becomes light and expands. In the freezing cold, fish can easily live in the water of a lake: the surface of the lake may be frozen, but the water below is all liquid.
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: How does the world appear? How are we? Knowing this, you know God. You will know if He is Siva, or Vishnu or any other or all put together.
D.: Is Vaikuntha in Paramapada, i.e., in the transcendent Self?
1.25 - On Religion, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.
Rather look about you and you shall see
1.26 - FESTIVAL AT ADHARS HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"An aspirant entitled to the Knowledge of God is very rare. It is said in the Git that one in thousands desires to know God, and again, that among thousands who have such a desire, only one is able to know Him."
A devotee quoted the text from the Git.
1.2 - Katha Upanishads, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
is the listener who can know God even when taught of Him
by the knower.
--
Who other than I is fit to know God, even Him who is
rapture and the transcendence of rapture?
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: How does the world appear? How are we? Knowing this, you know God. You will know if He is Siva, or Vishnu or any other or all put together.
D.: Is Vaikuntha in Paramapada, i.e., in the transcendent Self?
1.30 - Concerning the linking together of the supreme trinity among the virtues., #The Ladder of Divine Ascent, #Saint John of Climacus, #unset
23. The Word of the Lord which is from God the Father is pure, and remains so eternally. But he who has not come to know God merely speculates.
24. Purity makes its disciple a theologian, who of himself grasps the dogmas of the Trinity.
1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: Leave God alone. Speak for yourself. You do not know God. He is only what you think of Him. Is he apart from you? He is that
Pure Consciousness in which all ideas are formed. You are that
1.450 - 1.500 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: Leave God alone. Speak for yourself. You do not know God. He is only what you think of Him. Is he apart from you? He is that
Pure Consciousness in which all ideas are formed. You are that
1.4 - Readings in the Taittiriya Upanishad, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
world because we do not know God; we are aware of the law
of appearances, but not of the law and truth of being.
1960 02 03, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Is it possible to know God, even with ones physical mind, once one has experienced identification?
After consciously identifying itself with the Divine, the entire being even in its external partsmental, vital and physicalundergoes the consequences of this identification, and a change occurs which is sometimes even perceptible in the physical appearance. An influence is at work on the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations and even the actions. Sometimes, in all its movements, the being has a concrete and constant impression of the Divine Presence and its action through the outer instrument. But one cannot say that the physical mind knows God, for the very way of knowing that is characteristic of the mind is foreign to the Divine; one could even say that it is contrary to it. The physical mind itself can receive the divine influence and be transformed by it, but so long as it remains the physical mind, it can neither understand nor explain God, much less know Him; for to know God one must be identified with Him and for that the physical mind must cease to be what it is now, and consequently cease to be the physical mind.
The capacity to know God can be achieved in the lower triplicity the mind, the vital and the physicalonly with the supramental transformation, and this comes only just before the ultimate realisation which consists in becoming divine.
3 February 1960
1970 02 23, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
350How shall I know Gods will with me? I have to put egoism out of me, hunting it from every lair and burrow, and ba the my purified and naked soul in His infinite workings; then He himself will reveal it to me.
351Only the soul that is naked and unashamed can be pure and innocent, even as Adam was in the primal garden of humanity.
1.ac - Power, #Crowley - Poems, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I know God as I know a friend;
I conquer, and most silently
1.rb - The Flight Of The Duchess, #Browning - Poems, #Robert Browning, #Poetry
You know God Almighty granted
Such little signs should serve wild creatures
1.shvb - O ignis Spiritus Paracliti, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Ivan M. Granger Original Language Latin O Holy Spirit of Fire, life in the life of all life, holy are you, enlivening all things. Holy are you, a healing balm to the broken. Holy are you, washing blistered wounds. O Holy Breath, O Fire of Life, O Sweetness in my breast infusing my heart with the fine scent of truth. O Pure Fountain through which we know God unites strangers and gathers the lost. O Heart's Shield, guarding life and hope, joining the many members into one body; Belt of Truth, wrap them in beauty. Protect those ensnared by the enemy, and free the worthy from their fetters. O Great Way that runs through all, from the heights, across the earth, and in the depths, you encompass all and unify all. From you the clouds stream and the ether rises; from your stones precious water pours, springs well and birth waterways, and the earth sweats green with life. And eternally do you bring forth knowledge by the breath of wisdom. All praise to you, you who are the song of praise and the joy of life, you who are hope and the greatest treasure, bestowing the gift of Light. <
2.03 - THE MASTER IN VARIOUS MOODS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"The Vednta says that a man does not even desire to know God unless he has a pure mind. One cannot be guileless and liberal-minded without much tapasya or unless it is one's last birth."
Master's guilelessness
2.06 - Works Devotion and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This integral turning of the soul Godwards bases royally the Gita's synthesis of knowledge and works and devotion. To know God thus integrally is to know him as One in the self and in all manifestation and beyond all manifestation, - and all this unitedly and at once. And yet even so to know him is not enough unless it is accompanied by an intense uplifting of the heart and soul Godwards, unless it kindles a one-pointed and at the same time all-embracing love, adoration, aspiration. Indeed the knowledge which is not companioned by an aspiration and vivified by an uplifting is no true knowledge, for it can be only an intellectual seeing and a barren cognitive endeavour. The vision of God brings infallibly the adoration and passionate seeking of the Divine, - a passion for the Divine in his self-existent being, but also for the Divine in ourselves and for the Divine in all that is. To know with the intellect is simply to understand and may be an effective starting-point, - or, too, it may not be, and it will not be if there is no sincerity in the knowledge, no urge towards inner realisation in the will, no power upon the soul, no call in the spirit: for that would mean that the brain has
Works, Devotion and Knowledge
2.07 - BANKIM CHANDRA, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"If you can somehow get yourself introduced to Jadu Mallick, then you will be able to learn, if you want to, the number of his houses and gardens and the amount of his money invested in government securities. Jadu Mallick himself will tell you all about them. But if you haven't met him and if you are stopped by his door-keepers when you try to enter his house, then how will you get the correct information about his houses, gardens, and government securities? When you know God you know all else; but then you don't care to know small things. The same thing is stated in the Vedas. You talk about the virtues of a person as long as you haven't seen him, but no sooner does he appear before you than all such talk stops. You are beside yourself with joy simply to be with him. You feel overwhelmed by simply conversing with him. You don't talk about his virtues any more.
"First realize God, then think of the creation and other things. Valmiki was given the name of Rma to repeat as his mantra, but was told at first to repeat 'mara'. 'Ma' means God and 'ra' the world. First God and then the world. If you know one you know all. If you put fifty zeros after a one, you have a large sum; but erase the one and nothing remains. It is the one that makes the many. First one, then many. First God, then His creatures and the world.
2.08 - AT THE STAR THEATRE (II), #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "Do you know what that means? People like the author of this book believe that knowledge is impossible without the study of books. They think that first comes the knowledge of books and then comes the knowledge of God. In order to know God one must read books! But if I want to know Jadu Mallick, must I first know the number of his houses and the amount of money he has in government securities? Do I really need all this information? Rather I should somehow enter his house, be it by flattering his gate-keepers or by disregarding their rough treatment, and talk to Jadu Mallick himself. Then, if I want to know about his wealth or possessions, I shall only have to ask him about them. Then it will be a very easy matter for me.
First God and then the world
--
A DEVOTEE: "Sir, can one know God's attributes through the intellect?"
MASTER: "Certainly not by this ordinary intellect. Can one know God so easily? One must practise sdhan. One must also adopt a particular attitude toward God, for instance, the attitude of a servant toward his master. The rishis of old had the attitude of nta. Do you know the attitude of the jnanis? It is to meditate on one's own Self. (To a devotee, with a smile) What is your attitude?"
The devotee gave no answer.
2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: On its highest plane the Jiva is the true Divine Being. But it is on every plane. When you realise the Divine you know your true being and also you know God and His purpose in your Jiva. One can get into contact with it through the central being.
Disciple: I wanted to understand how belief is known on the different levels mental, vital, and physical.
2.1.01 - God The One Reality, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is the same when we think we know God or have possession of our highest inmost Self or have entered intimately into the inmost and supreme Spirit. What we know and possess is power or some powers of God, an aspect or appearance or formulation of the Self; what we have entered into is only one wideness or one depth of the Spirit.
This is because we know and possess by the mind or even what is below the mind, and when we find ourselves most spiritual, it is the mind spiritualised that conceives of itself as spirit. Imagining that we have left mind behind us, we take it with us into its own spiritual realms and cover with it the
2.11 - WITH THE DEVOTEES IN CALCUTTA, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
The discussion came to a close. Sri Ramakrishna said to M.: "I have observed that a man acquires one kind of knowledge about God through reasoning and another kind through meditation; but he acquires a third kind of Knowledge about God when God reveals Himself to him, His devotee. If God Himself reveals to His devotee the nature of Divine Incarnation-how He plays in human form-, then the devotee doesn't have to, reason about the problem or need an explanation. Do you know what it is like? Suppose a man is in a dark room. He goes on rubbing a match against a match-box and all of a sudden light comes. Likewise, if God gives us this flash of divine light, all our doubts are destroyed. Can one ever know God by mere reasoning?"
Sri Ramakrishna asked Narendra to sit by his side. He tenderly inquired about his health and showed him much affection.
2.13 - THE MASTER AT THE HOUSES OF BALARM AND GIRISH, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
BHAVANTH: "M. says: 'As long as I have not seen the elephant, how can I know whether it can pass through the eye of a needle? I do not, know God; how can I understand through reason whether or not He can incarnate Himself as man?"
MASTER: "Everything is possible for God. It is He who casts the spell. The magician swallows the knife and takes it out again; he swallows stones and bricks."
--
GIRISH: "Yes, I saw something like that in their paper, the Sulabha Samachar. But a man cannot even finish all the works that are necessary for him in order to know God, and still he speaks of worldly duties."
Sri Ramakrishna smiled a little, looked at M., and made a sign with his eye, as if to say, "What he says is right."
--
MASTER (in the ecstatic mood): "There is no one else here; so I am telling you this. He who from the depth of his soul seeks to know God will certainly realize Him. He must. He alone who is restless for God and seeks nothing but Him will certainly realize Him.
"Those who belong to this place have already come. Those who will come from now on are outsiders. Such people will come now and then. The Divine Mother will tell them: 'Do this. Call on God in this way.'
2.14 - AT RAMS HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
One should use the thorn of knowledge to pull out the thorn of ignorance. Then one throws away both the thorns, knowledge and ignorance, and attains vijnna. What is vijnna? It is to know God distinctly by realizing His existence through an intuitive experience and to speak to Him intimately. That is why Sri Krishna said to Arjuna, 'Go beyond the three Guns.'
"In order to attain vijnna one has to accept the help of Vidy My. Vidy My
2.18 - SRI RAMAKRISHNA AT SYAMPUKUR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "A man may not know the right path, but if he has bhakti and the desire to know God, then he attains Him through the force of sheer bhakti. Once a sincere devotee set out on a pilgrimage to the temple of Jagannath in Puri. He did not know the way; he went west instead of south. He no doubt strayed from the right path, but he always eagerly asked people the way, and they gave him the right directions, saying, 'This is not the path; follow that one.' At last the devotee was able to get to Puri and worship the Deity. So you see, even if you are ignorant, someone will tell you the way if you are earnest."
DOCTOR: "But the devotee in his ignorance did lose his way."
2.19 - THE MASTER AND DR. SARKAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "But you must remember one thing. When his soul feels restless for God, a man forgets the difference between good water and ditch-water. In order to know God, he sometimes goes to good men, sometimes to imperfect men. Dirty water cannot injure an aspirant if God's grace descends on him. When God grants him Knowledge, He reveals to the aspirant what is good and what is bad.
"There may be hollows on the top of a hill, but they cannot exist on the hill of the 'wicked ego'. Only if it is an 'ego of Knowledge' or an 'ego of bhakti', does the pure water from the sky collect there.
2.21 - IN THE COMPANY OF DEVOTEES AT SYAMPUKUR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER (smiling): "It is vijnna, special Knowledge of God. To know many things is ignorance. To know that God dwells in all beings is knowledge. And what is vijnna? It is to know God in a special manner, to converse with Him and feel Him to be one's own relative.
"To know that there is fire in wood is knowledge. But to make a fire with that wood, cook food with that fire, and become healthy and strong from that food is vijnna."
2.22 - The Supreme Secret, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
HE ESSENCE of the teaching and the Yoga has thus been given to the disciple on the field of his work and battle and the divine Teacher now proceeds to apply it to his action, but in a way that makes it applicable to all action. Attached to a crucial example, spoken to the protagonist of Kurukshetra, the words bear a much wider significance and are a universal rule for all who are ready to ascend above the ordinary mentality and to live and act in the highest spiritual consciousness. To break out of ego and personal mind and see everything in the wideness of the self and spirit, to know God and adore him in his integral truth and in all his aspects, to surrender all oneself to the transcendent Soul of nature and existence, to possess and be possessed by the divine consciousness, to be one with the One in universality of love and delight and will and knowledge, one in him with all beings, to do works as an adoration and a sacrifice on the divine foundation of a world in which all is God and in the divine status of a liberated spirit, is the sense of the Gita's
Yoga. It is a transition from the apparent to the supreme spiritual and real truth of our being, and one enters into it by putting off the many limitations of the separative consciousness and the mind's attachment to the passion and unrest and ignorance, the lesser light and knowledge, the sin and virtue, the dual law and standard of the lower nature. Therefore, says the Teacher,
2.23 - THE MASTER AND BUDDHA, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"You think only of the suffering in the world — why do you forget that God has also given you so much happiness? How kind He is to us! He has granted us three very great things: human birth, the yearning to know God, and the companionship of a great soul."
All were silent.
2.24 - THE MASTERS LOVE FOR HIS DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M: "Whatever a person experiences in a particular state is real for him in that state. Suppose you are dreaming that you have gone to a garden. As long as the dream lasts, the garden is real for you. But you think of it as unreal when your mind undergoes a change, as, for instance, when you awake. When your mind attains the state in which one sees God, you will know God to be real."
NARENDRA: "I want truth. The other day I had a great argument with Sri Ramakrishna himself."
2.25 - AFTER THE PASSING AWAY, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
NARENDRA: "Did you notice what Krishna said? 'Mounted on a machine.' The Lord, by His maya, causes all beings to revolve as if mounted on a machine. To seek to know God? You are but a worm among worms — and you to know God? Just reflect a moment: what is a man? It is said that each one of the myriads of stars that shine overhead represents a solar system. This earth of ours is a part of only one solar system, and even that is too big for us. Like an insect man walks about on this earth, which, compared to the sun, is only a tiny ball."
Narendra sang:
2.3.1 - Svetasvatara Upanishad, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yoga bring us. If thou know God thou shalt break free from
every sort of bondage.
3.09 - The Return of the Soul, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
you will know God, for the Godhead is concealed and wrapped in the pure
nature like a kernel in the nutshell.... The true philosophy will teach you
4.2 - Karma, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
349. How shall I know God's will with me? I have to put egoism out of me, hunting it from every lair & burrow, and ba the my purified and naked soul in His infinite workings; then He himself will reveal it to me.
350. Only the soul that is naked and unashamed, can be pure and innocent, even as Adam was in the primal garden of humanity.
5.08 - ADAM AS TOTALITY, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
For they say of this Geryon [continues Hippolytus] that one part is spiritual, one psychic, and one earthly; and they hold that the knowledge of him is the beginning of the capacity to know God, for they say: The beginning of wholeness is the knowledge of man, but the knowledge of God is perfect wholeness. All this, they say, the spiritual, the psychic, and the earthly, set itself in motion and came down together into one man, Jesus who was born of Mary; and there spoke through it [the spiritual, the psychic, and the earthly] these three men [i.e., the triple-bodied Geryon], each from his own substance to his own. For of all things there are three kinds, the angelic, the psychic, and the earthly; and three Churches, angelic, psychic, and earthly; and their names are the Chosen, the Called, and the Captive.358
[653] This conception bears a striking resemblance to the Sefiroth system.359 In particular, Geryon corresponds to the cosmogonic Adam Kadmon. He is the masculo-feminine Man in all things, [whom] the Greeks call the heavenly horn of the moon.360 For they say all things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made.361 That which was made in him is Life. This, they say, is Life the unutterable generation [
BOOK XI. - Augustine passes to the second part of the work, in which the origin, progress, and destinies of the earthly and heavenly cities are discussed.Speculations regarding the creation of the world, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
29. Of the knowledge by which the holy angels know God in His essence, and by which they see the causes of His works in the art of the worker, before they see them in the works of the artist.
Those holy angels come to the knowledge of God not by audible words, but by the presence to their souls of immutable truth, i.e., of the only-begotten Word of God; and they know this Word Himself, and the Father, and their Holy Spirit, and that this Trinity is indivisible, and that the three persons of it are one substance, and that there are not three Gods but one God; and this they so know, that it is better understood by them than we are by ourselves. Thus, too, they know the creature also, not in itself, but by this better way, in the wisdom of God, as if in the art by which it was created; and, consequently, they know themselves better in God than in themselves, though they have also this latter knowledge. For they were created, and are different from their Creator. In Him, therefore, they have, as it were, a noonday knowledge; in themselves, a twilight knowledge, according to our former explanations.[495] For there is a great difference between knowing a thing in the design in conformity to which it was made, and knowing it in itself,e.g., the straightness of lines and correctness of figures is known in one way when mentally conceived, in another when described on paper; and justice is known in one way in the unchangeable truth, in another in the spirit of a just man. So is it with all other things,as, the firmament between the water above and below, which was called the heaven; the gathering of the waters beneath, and the laying bare of the dry land, and the production of plants and trees; the creation of sun, moon, and stars; and of the animals out of the waters, fowls, and fish, and monsters of the deep; and of everything that walks or creeps on the earth, and of man himself, who[Pg 474] excels all that is on the earth,all these things are known in one way by the angels in the Word of God, in which they see the eternally abiding causes and reasons according to which they were made, and in another way in themselves: in the former, with a clearer knowledge; in the latter, with a knowledge dimmer, and rather of the bare works than of the design. Yet, when these works are referred to the praise and adoration of the Creator Himself, it is as if morning dawned in the minds of those who contemplate them.
BOOK XIX. - A review of the philosophical opinions regarding the Supreme Good, and a comparison of these opinions with the Christian belief regarding happiness, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
This philosopher, however, has also some good to say of Christ, oblivious, as it were, of that contumely of his of which we have just been speaking; or as if his gods spoke evil of Christ only while asleep, and recognised Him to be good, and gave Him His deserved praise, when they awoke. For, as if he were about to proclaim some marvellous thing passing belief, he says, "What we are going to say will certainly take some by surprise. For the gods have declared that Christ was very pious, and has become immortal, and that they cherish his memory: that the Christians, however, are polluted, contaminated, and involved in error. And many other such things," he says, "do the gods say against the Christians." Then he gives specimens of the accusations made, as he says, by the gods against them, and then goes on: "But to some who asked Hecate whether Christ were a God, she replied, You know the condition of the disembodied immortal soul, and that if it has been severed from wisdom it always errs. The soul you refer to is that of a man foremost in piety: they worship it because they mistake the truth." To this so-called oracular response he adds the following words of his own: "Of this very pious man, then, Hecate said that the soul, like the souls of other good men, was after death dowered with immortality, and that the Christians through ignorance worship it. And to those who ask why he was condemned to die, the oracle of the goddess replied, The body, indeed, is always exposed to torments, but the souls of the pious abide in heaven. And the soul you inquire about has been the fatal cause of error to other souls which were not fated to receive the gifts[Pg 336] of the gods, and to have the knowledge of immortal Jove. Such souls are therefore hated by the gods; for they who were fated not to receive the gifts of the gods, and not to know God, were fated to be involved in error by means of him you speak of. He himself, however, was good, and heaven has been opened to him as to other good men. You are not, then, to speak evil of him, but to pity the folly of men: and through him men's danger is imminent."
Who is so foolish as not to see that these oracles were either composed by a clever man with a strong animus against the Christians, or were uttered as responses by impure demons with a similar design,that is to say, in order that their praise of Christ may win credence for their vituperation of Christians; and that thus they may, if possible, close the way of eternal salvation, which is identical with Christianity? For they believe that they are by no means counterworking their own hurtful craft by promoting belief in Christ, so long as their calumniation of Christians is also accepted; for they thus secure that even the man who thinks well of Christ declines to become a Christian, and is therefore not delivered from their own rule by the Christ he praises. Besides, their praise of Christ is so contrived that whosoever believes in Him as thus represented will not be a true Christian but a Photinian heretic, recognising only the humanity, and not also the divinity of Christ, and will thus be precluded from salvation and from deliverance out of the meshes of these devilish lies. For our part, we are no better pleased with Hecate's praises of Christ than with Apollo's calumniation of Him. Apollo says that Christ was put to death by right-minded judges, implying that He was unrighteous. Hecate says that He was a most pious man, but no more. The intention of both is the same, to prevent men from becoming Christians, because if this be secured, men shall never be rescued from their power. But it is incumbent on our philosopher, or rather on those who believe in these pretended oracles against the Christians, first of all, if they can, to bring Apollo and Hecate to the same mind regarding Christ, so that either both may condemn or both praise Him. And even if they succeeded in this, we for our part would notwithstanding repudiate[Pg 337] the testimony of demons, whether favourable or adverse to Christ. But when our adversaries find a god and goddess of their own at variance about Christ, the one praising, the other vituperating Him, they can certainly give no credence, if they have any judgment, to mere men who blaspheme the Christians.
Guru Granth Sahib first part, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
This world is engrossed in corruption and cynicism. Only those who know God are saved.
Only those who are awakened by the Lord to drink in this Sublime Essence, come to know the Unspoken Speech of the Lord. ||2||
Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
do not know God? Can you reason about the operations of the unknown?
Can you understand the mysteries of charity? I must always be absurd
r1914 04 13, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The doubt not being satisfied, a more pointed & clear reply was promised in the third sortilege. It explains the origin of the difficulty. It is impossible for the Asamhita Ashanta-mnusha (which R is) to know God by mere intellectuality or intellectual intuition. Only the pure vijnnamaya can do it; he does not insist on the God of pity & sorrow or the necessity of continual rebirth.
4)
r1914 07 30, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Trikaldrishti must know Gods event & its time, place & process. Tapas will fulfil what trikaldrishti has seen. All, however, will not be foreseen, though all will be known.
The difficult[y] is now the organisation of the Vijnana,for all the faculties do not act together. Telepathy, trikaldrishti, jnana, power, Samadhi must cooperate & not give place to each other or conflict with each other.
Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
160. Para-vidya, i.e., higher knowledge, is that by which we know God. All else, scriptures, philosophy,
logic, grammar etc. only burden and puzzle the mind. The Granthas (books) are sometimes Granthis
--
A. It is unreal so long as you do not know God. For you do not see Him in everything, and so fasten
yourself to the world with the tie of 'I and mine.' Being thus deluded by ignorance, you become attached
--
renunciation, you come to know God who is the cause of the universe. One who gains the realisation of
God in this wayif he is not all-knowing, what else is he?
--
716. Who can know God fully? It is not given to us, nor is it required of us to know Him fully. It is enough
if we can see Him-feel that He is the only reality. Suppose a person comes to the holy river Ganges and
--
1049. Unless the spirit in man gets awakened, he cannot know God.
1050. Take refuge in God and forsake shame and fear.
Tablets of Baha u llah text, #Tablets of Baha u llah, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
The supreme cause for creating the world and all that is therein is for man to know God. In this Day whosoever is guided by the fragrance of the raiment of His mercy to gain admittance into the pristine Abode, which is the station of recognizing the Source of divine commandments and the Dayspring of His Revelation, hath everlastingly attained unto all good. Having reached this lofty station a twofold obligation resteth upon every soul. One is to be steadfast in the Cause with such steadfastness that were all the peoples of the world to attempt to prevent him from turning to the Source of Revelation, they would be powerless to do so. The other is observance of the divine ordinances which have streamed forth from the wellspring of His heavenly propelled Pen. For man's knowledge of God cannot develop fully and adequately save by observing whatsoever hath been ordained by Him and is set forth in His heavenly Book.
268
Talks 176-200, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: Isvaro gururatmeti ... (God is the same as Guru and Self ...). A person begins with dissatisfaction. Not content with the world he seeks satisfaction of desires by prayers to God; his mind is purified; he longs to know God more than to satisfy his carnal desires. Then
Gods Grace begins to manifest. God takes the form of a Guru and appears to the devotee; teaches him the Truth; purifies the mind by his teachings and contact; the mind gains strength, is able to turn inward; with meditation it is purified yet further, and eventually remains still without the least ripple. That stillness is the Self. The Guru is both exterior and interior. From the exterior he gives a push to the mind to turn inward; from the interior he pulls the mind towards the Self and helps the mind to achieve quietness. That is Grace.
The Book of Certitude - P2, #The Book of Certitude, #Baha u llah, #Baha i
Heed not the idle contention of those who maintain that the Book and verses thereof can never be a testimony unto the common people, inasmuch as they neither grasp their meaning nor appreciate their value. And yet, the unfailing testimony of God to both the East and the West is none other than the Qur'án. Were it beyond the comprehension of men, how could it have been declared as a universal testimony unto all people? If their contention be true, none would therefore be required, nor would it be necessary for them to know God, inasmuch as the knowledge of the divine Being transcendeth the knowledge of His Book, and the common people would not possess the capacity to comprehend it.
Such contention is utterly fallacious and inadmissible. It is actuated solely by arrogance and pride. Its motive is to lead the people astray from the Ridván of divine good-pleasure and to tighten the reins of their authority over the people. And yet, in the sight of God, these common people are infinitely superior and exalted above their religious leaders who have turned away from the one true God. The understanding of His words and the comprehension of the utterances of the Birds of Heaven are in no wise dependent upon human learning. They depend solely upon purity of heart, chastity of soul, and freedom of spirit. This is evidenced by those who, today, though without a single letter of the accepted standards of learning, are occupying the loftiest seats of knowledge; and the garden of their hearts is adorned, through the showers of divine grace, with the roses of wisdom and the tulips of understanding. Well is it with the sincere in heart for their share of the light of a mighty Day! [Ridván] The Kitáb-i-Aqdas; Prayers and Meditations, p. 6; Gleanings From The Writings Of Bahá'u'lláh, p. 31; The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, vol. 1, 2, 3, 4
The Divine Names Text (Dionysis), #The Divine Names, #unset, #Zen
In addition to these things, we must examine how we know God, Who is neither an object of intellectual nor of sensible perception, nor is absolutely anything of things existing. Never, then, is it true to say, that we know God; not from His own nature (for that is unknown, and surpasses all reason and mind), but, from the ordering of all existing things, as projected from Himself, and containing a sort of images and similitudes of His Divine exemplars, we ascend, as far as we have power, to that which is beyond all, by method and order in the abstraction and pre-eminence of all, and in the Cause of all. Wherefore, Almighty God is known even in all, and apart from all. And through knowledge, Almighty God is known, and through agnosia. And there is, of Him, both conception, and expression, and science, and contact, and sensible perception, and opinion, and imagination, and name, and all the rest. And He is neither conceived, nor expressed, nor named. And He is not any of existing things, nor is He known in any one of existing things. And He is all in all, and nothing in none. And He is known to all, from all, and to none from none. For, we both say these things correctly concerning God, and He is celebrated from all existing things, according to the analogy of all things, of which He is Cause. And there is, further, the most Divine Knowledge of Almighty God, which is known, through not knowing (agnosia) during the union above mind; when the mind, having stood apart from all existing |92 things, then having dismissed also itself, has been made one with the super-luminous rays, thence and there being illuminated by the unsearchable depth of wisdom. Yet, even from all things, as I said, we may know It, for It is, according to the sacred text, the Cause formative of all, and ever harmonizing all, and (Cause) of the indissoluble adaptation and order of all, and ever uniting 38 the ends of the former to the beginnings of those that follow, and beautifying the one symphony and harmony of the whole.
SECTION IV.
the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
18) Man, wouldst thou be a sage, wouldst thou know thyself and know God? First thou shouldst extinguish in thyself the desire of the world. ~ Angelus Silesius
19) Desire nothing. Rage not against the unalterable laws of Nature. Struggle only against the personal, the transient, the ephemeral, the perishable. ~ Book of Golden Precepts
The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, #The Bible, #Anonymous, #Various
19 "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside." 20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. 22 For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
26 For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; 27 but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, 28 and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, 29 so that no man may boast before God.
The First Letter of John, #The Bible, #Anonymous, #Various
8 Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
9 In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.
Verses of Vemana, #is Book, #unset, #Zen
What wisdom can he have who knoweth not knowledge? The fool never shall know God. What is the chief God (tatwa) to know the wisdom that is within wisdom?
663
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What wisdom can he have who knoweth not knowledge? The fool never shall know God. What is the chief God (tatwa) to know the wisdom that is within wisdom?
663
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The swan knows water from milk, but how should the peacock know it. Then can a brute beast know God?
709
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104915.How_To_Know_God
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1668116.How_to_Know_God_s_Will_in_Your_Life
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19305077-to-know-god
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20698260-if-i-can-cook-you-know-god-can
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/207342.How_to_Know_God
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25486819-how-to-know-god
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