Guidance & Wisdom
For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what will a man give in exchange for his life?
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
It is not what we feel, but what we are that settles the question.
The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it.
It is the man’s own symbol, his soul’s picture, in a word, the sign which belongs to him and to no one else.
Judge yourself at what Christ is rather than at what you are.
The Self is God’s making—only it must be the ‘slave of Christ,’ that the Son may make it also the free son of the same Father; it must receive all from him—not as from nowhere; as well as the deeper soul, it must follow him, not its own desires.
“Listen to me, you who follow after righteousness, you who seek Yahweh. Look to the rock you were cut from, and to the quarry you were dug from.”
Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the LORD: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.
Though we are engaged in it, and are obliged to work for our children; though we are obliged to follow trades and merchandise, and to be serviceable to the commonwealth, yet if we are real Christians, we shall be loose to the world.
Each of us is a distinct flower or tree in the spiritual garden of God,—precious, each for his own sake, in the eyes of him who is even now making us,—each of us watered and shone upon and filled with life, for the sake of his flower, his completed being, which will blossom out of him at last to the glory and pleasure of the great gardener.
The stages by which this transcendent standpoint is to be reached are now plainly before us. They are, the discovery of self and the discovery of Christ.
God, like the true mother, will have all or none.
The voice of one who calls out, “Prepare the way of Yahweh in the wilderness! Make a level highway in the desert for our God.”
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
All true service begins in personal contact with Jesus.
There is no middle way in religion—self or Christ. The quality of the selfishness—intellectual, literary, artistic—the fact that our self’s centre may be of a superior order of self, does nothing to destroy this grave distinction.
If the world has nothing to say against you, Jesus Christ will have nothing to say for you.
God, whose pleasure brought Man into being, stands away As it were, an handbreath off, to give Room for the newly-made to live. He has made us, but we have to be.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
What a man loves, that that man is. What a man chooses out of a hundred offers, you are sure by that who and what that man is.
A man’s character does not have its seat or source in his body; character is not a physical thing.
A Christian must be different from other people. Time has not changed the essential difference between the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christ.
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