Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.
Martin LutherRead
Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things that we do not see.
Interpretation
Faith involves trusting in what is not visible or tangible.
This quote by Martin Luther emphasizes the essence of faith as a belief in unseen truths and realities. It suggests that true faith goes beyond empirical evidence, allowing individuals to embrace what they cannot perceive directly, ultimately guiding their actions and beliefs in life.
In practice
Encouraging a friend who is struggling with doubt.
Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.
Now if I believe in God's Son and remember that He became man, all creatures will appear a hundred times more beautiful to me than before. Then I will properly appreciate the sun, the moon, the stars, trees, apples, as I reflect that he is Lord over all things. ...God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.
It is the part of a Christian to take care of his own body for the very purpose that, by its soundness and wellbeing, he may be enabled to labour, and to acquire and preserve property, for the aid of those who are in want, that thus the stronger member may serve the weaker member, and we may be children of God, and busy for one another, bearing one another's burdens, and so fulfiling the law of Christ.
Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.
We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.
In a mouse we admire God's creation and craft work. The same may be said about flies.
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.
There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.
But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world, and that God will preserve it always.
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