Not having read Malcolm Muggeridge's book Something Beautiful for God, I was ---disturbed by the following excerpt which I read. Allow me to quote/copy it as I read it.
John 5:13-15 (NLT) 13 The man didn’t know, for Jesus had disappeared into the crowd. 14 But afterward Jesus found him in the Temple and told him, “Now you are well; so stop sinning, or something even worse may happen to you.” 15 Then the man went and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had healed him. Lord give me grace, power, and effort to maintain a resilience against sin. Sin is ALWAYS a dark path. It ALWAYS pays wages. The wage of sin is death. Sin will always hurt, always destroy, always wound—you, relationships, stuff, goals, etc. It is a killer. It is a wound-er. It is a consumer of all that is healthy, strong, good, and perfect. Learn to hate sin. Learn to fear sin. Learn to run as fast as you can away from sin. Search deeply for hidden sin. Be disgusted with your sin. Repent, repent, repent daily for your sin. Be afraid of your sin. Be petrified of your sin. Be worried ab...
About a week ago I had breakfast with a dear friend of mine who is a missionary in Russia. He told me the following interesting story. His daughter was involved in street evangelism in Russia. She, along with other youth, carried clipboards and were doing surveys. One of the questions they asked was this: “Do you believe in heaven and hell, and if so, where will you spend eternity.” Ninety-five percent of the people interviewed responded along these lines: ‘Yes I believe in heaven and hell! I will spend eternity in hell because I am such an awful sinner.’ Now this same daughter moved to Canada and organized the same kind of outreach doing the same thing, asking the same question: “Do you believe in heaven and hell, and if so, where will you spend eternity.” Ninety-five percent of the people interviewed responded along these lines: ‘Yes I believe in heaven and hell! I will spend eternity in heaven because I am a go...
I recently read Rod Parsley quoting Leonard Ravenhill. Here is the quote: “The greatest miracle God could ever do is to take an unholy man out of an unholy world, make him holy, put him back in an unholy world, and keep him HOLY.” Let’s face it—holiness (what ever that means) has reached a pretty low degree on the scale of popularity. Let me give you a brief description of my journey with the ever elusive holiness. I was raised and learned my ‘Christian walk’ steeped in a culture of holiness. This holiness culture was interpreted by me in the following manner: 1. God is holy—Peter is not. 2. While the initial dose of holiness came through salvation—after the initial dose, Peter needed to majorly step up to the plate and smarten up. Basically this was interpreted like this: If it was fun—it was probably wrong. 3. Unholiness could jeopardize the initial dose of the aforementioned imputed holiness received at salvation...
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