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.
The Lord takes a great deal of delight to train and bring up his child to be more in love with him. God will so train and bring him up, that if he throw him into the worst condition that can be for body or soul, and shall say, 'What thinkest thou of me now? Hast thou any hard thoughts of me?' saith God. 'No,' saith the soul, 'all is love.' Walter Cradoock 1606-1659
I need not tell you that those always are the best sermons which bring one's heart nearer to God, which render Christ dearer to us, by representing our need of him, our misery without him, and our privileges by him, and which convince us of the necessity of holiness, and of the Spirit's influence to that end, exciting and assisting us to mortify the dearest sin, and to vanquish the strongest temptation, and weaning us from earthly enticements, teaching us to live in communion with God, and to bear up comfortably under all the disquietudes of this life, and fitting us for a comfortable passage through the pangs of death. Griffith Jones, Llanddowror 1684-1761
Beware of hypocrisy and formality of profession. There is much of a Pharisaical spirit abroad, typically among such as have never known, or if they have known, have forgotten, the workings of grace, and the constraining power of love. These place all their religion in an outward conformity to certain cornposed gestures and affected garbs of their leaders; thereby showing a voluntary humility, which things indeed have a show (and nothing but a show) of wisdom in will worship and humility, and neglecting of the body; though even then (as the apostle saith of the like people) they are vainly puffed up with a fleshly mind, Col. 2:18, 23. John Miles 1621-1683
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