The time of testing that marks and mightily enriches a soul’s spiritual career is no ordinary one,
but a period when all hell seems to let loose, a period when we realize our souls are brought into a net,
when we know that God is permitting us to be in the devil’s hand. Alpha White
From Streams in the Desert Volume 1 by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman
…an impersonal beginning explains neither the form of the universe nor the personality of man…But the Judeo-Christian tradition begins with the opposite answer. And it is upon this that our whole Western culture has been built.
The universe had a personal beginning – a personal beginning on the high order of the Trinity. That is, before ” in the beginning ” the personal was already there. Love and thought and communication existed prior to the creation of the heavens and the earth.
Modern man is deeply plagued by the question “Where do love and communication come from?” Many artists who pour themselves out in their paintings, who paint bleak messages on canvas, many singers, many poets and dramatists are expressing the blackness of the fact that while everything hangs upon love and communication, they don’t know where these come from and they don’t know what they mean.
The biblical answer is quite otherwise: Something was there before creation. God was there; love and communication were there; and therefore, prior even to Genesis 1:1, love and communication are intrinsic to what always has been.
Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984)
Stones are not broken except by an earnest
use of the hammer, and the stone-breaker usually
goes down on his knees…
…You can force your way through anything
with the leverage of prayer. Thoughts and
reasoning may be like the steel wedges that
may open a way into truth, but prayer is the
lever, the crowbar that forces open the iron
chest of sacred mysteries so that we may get
the treasures hidden in it for those who can
force their way to reach it. “Until now the
kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the
violent take it by force. ” (Matt 11:12).
Take care that you work with the mighty
implement of prayer, and nothing can stand
against you.
Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)
