Against the persecution of a tyrant the godly have no remedy but prayer.
John CalvinRead
However many blessings we expect from God, His infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts.
Interpretation
God's generosity surpasses our expectations and desires.
This quote from John Calvin emphasizes the idea that no matter how many blessings we anticipate receiving from God, His generosity is far greater than we can even imagine. It invites us to reflect on the abundance of divine grace and encourages an attitude of gratitude, recognizing that our desires may be limited compared to what God is willing to provide.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a sermon to illustrate God's generosity to the congregation.
Against the persecution of a tyrant the godly have no remedy but prayer.
The pastor ought to have two voices: one, for gathering the sheep; and another, for warding off and driving away wolves and thieves. The Scripture supplies him with the means of doing both.
Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.
Whomever the Lord has adopted and deemed worthy of His fellowship ought to prepare themselves for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with very many and various kinds of evil.
For as the aged, or those whose sight is defective, when any book, however fair, is set before them, though they perceive that there is something written, are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly.
When God wants to judge a nation, He gives them wicked rulers.
War never takes a wicked man by chance, the good man always.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.
He, then, that would really, thoroughly, and acceptably mortify any disquieting lust, let him take care to be equally diligent in all parts of obedience, and know that every lust, every omission of duty, is burdensome to God, though but one is so to him.
Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.
We must understand the connection between inner solitude and inner silence; they are inseparable. All the masters of the interior life speak of the two in the same breath.
She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.