"Do you want a house for your soul? Do you ask, ‘what is the purchase?’ It is something less than proud human nature will like to give. It is without money and without price. Ah! You would like to pay a respectable rent! You would love to do something to win Christ? Then you cannot have the house, for it is ‘without price.’ Will you take my Master’s house on a lease for all eternity, with nothing to pay for it, nothing but the ground-rent of loving and serving Him forever? Will you take Jesus and ‘dwell in Him?’ See, this house is furnished with all you want; it is filled with riches more than you will spend as long as you live. Here you can have intimate communion with Christ and feast on His love; here are table well-stored with food for you to live on forever; in it, when weary, you can find rest with Jesus; and from it you can look out and see heaven itself. Will you have the house? Ah! if you are houseless, you will say, ‘I should like to have the house; but may I have it?’ Yes; there is the key - the key is, ‘Come to Jesus.’ ‘But,’ you say„ ‘I am too shabby for such a house.’ Never mind; there are garments inside. If you feel guilty and condemned, come; and thought the house is too good for you, Christ will make you good enough for the house by-and-by. He will wash you and cleanse you, and you will yet be able to sing, ‘We dwell in Him.’"

Spurgeon, on 1 John 4:13 ‘We live in Him’

"She thought Him one who kept so good a table that all she needed would only be a crumb in comparison; yet remember, what she wanted was to have the devil cast out of her daughter. It was a very great thing to her, but she had such a high esteem of Christ, that she said, “It is nothing to Him, it is but a crumb for Christ to give.”
This is the royal road to comfort. Great thoughts of your sin alone will drive you to despair; but great thoughts of Christ will pilot you into the haven of peace."

C. H. Spurgeon, on Matthew 15:27

"What might not the best of us do if it were not for the checks which the Lord sets upon us both in providence and in grace! … There is enough tinder in the heart of the best of men to light a fire that shall burn to the lowest hell, unless God shall quench the sparks as they fall."

Spurgeon on Psalm 19:13 - “keep your servant back from willful sins.”

Spurgeon cut to the heart the evening I read this. How often do I accept with my heart and mind that without Christ I am in dire straits because my sin of rebellion against God runs so, so deep. Yet at the same time, do I not refuse to accept that I could commit the worst of sins? I try to proclaim my goodness even as I acknowledge the depth of my depravity. What hypocrisy and what pride - the very root of all sin! May I ever thank the Lord for his floods of grace that wash away all guilt.

"Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings .. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could."

C. S. Lewis in ‘Letters to Children’, describing the writing of his Narnia novels.
 

"I can always have you with me in my mind—why should we not have our Lord always before us in our minds, for we have His life and character and mind far more clearly described than we can know any on here? If we had seen Him in the flesh we should not have known Him any better, perhaps not so well. Pray to Him for constant sight of Him, for He is man that we may be able to look to Him, and God, so that He can create us anew in His own image."

James Clerk Maxwell to his wife, 28th June, 1864.
My favourite thing about reading the biography of this man was the small glimpses of his insights into God, the Word, the world and the nature of the Christian life.

"In our daily experience, we have all sorts of spiritual ups and downs - sin, failure, discouragement - all of which tend to make us question God’s love. That is because we keep thinking that God’s love is somehow conditional. We are afraid to believe His love is based entirely upon the finished work of Christ for us. Deep down in our souls we must get hold of the wonderful truth that our spiritual failures do not affect God’s love for us one iota - that His love for us does not fluctuate according to our experience."

Jerry Bridges, The Practice of Godliness.

"It is not the future anticipation of which the writer [of Hebrews] is speaking but present reality… We are already citizens of the heavenly family. We are already in Christ; already in heaven, though still on earth waiting for the redemption of our bodies. In part, we have died and our life is hid with Christ in God; in part, we still belong on earth and need to put to death our earthly members. Through Christ we have come into the Father’s presence and are members of his household. We are already in heaven, this is our present situation not merely a future hope. We are already at present citizens of a heavenly city (Phil 3:20), a heavenly household (Eph 2:19), a heavenly church (Heb 12:23)."

Broughton Knox on the Church

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Crown Him - Taken from the last verse of ‘Crown Him With Many Crowns’ - Words by Matthew Bridges, 1800-1894, and Godfrey Thring, 1823-1903.

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Heart of my own heart, whatever befall, still be my vision, oh ruler of all. Words from the hymn ‘Be Thou My Vision’. Designed by Tucker Francis (@tuckerfrancis).

(via hymnlyrics)

The King of Christmas

Let the candy cane remind you of God’s amazing grace
Red the blood of Jesus as he suffered in our place 
White the full forgiveness, won as Jesus rose again
You can tell you friends the gospel with a candy cane. 

Let your love show, ho, ho!
Let your faith grow, ho, ho! 
That everyone will know:
Christ the King of Christmas. 

Well, let all the gifts at Christmas time fill your heart with praise
To God for all His goodness shown in O so many ways
That everyday in everyway we’d be completely his
Give your life to Jesus as a christmas gift

"Faith looks back to the man who lived and died for us, and sees glory in his shame, honor in his disgraces, riches in his poverty, might in his weakness, triumph in his conflict, and immortality in his death."

Charles Spurgeon, The Glory of Christ, Beheld (via mattjhuber)

(via unconfusing)

"That is how we are to think of ourselves. We are Christ’s captives, captured from the race of rebellious image-bearers and now poured out as God’s “gifts to men.” That invests all our service with unimaginable dignity."

Don Carson, reflecting on Numbers 8:19, Psalm 68:18 and Ephesians 4:7-8