Certainty is the mark of the commonsense life-gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life.
Oswald ChambersRead
If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in his presence.
Interpretation
The quote encourages us to approach God with reverence and remove our casual attitudes toward spirituality.
Oswald Chambers emphasizes the importance of recognizing the sacredness of our relationship with God. By suggesting that we must metaphorically take off our 'religious shoes,' he implies that familiarity can breed complacency in our spiritual lives. It challenges us to reflect on whether we have genuinely engaged with the divine or merely gone through the motions of religious practice without true reverence.
In practice
In a sermon about the importance of reverence in worship.
Certainty is the mark of the commonsense life-gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life.
Never make the blunder of trying to forecast the way God is going to answer your prayer.
Service is the overflow which pours from a life filled with love and devotion. But strictly speaking, there is no call to that. Service is what I bring to the relationship and is the reflection of my identification with the nature of God.
When we preach the love of God there is a danger of forgetting that the Bible reveals not first the love of God but the intense, blazing holiness of God, with His love at the center of that holiness.
It is much easier to do something than to trust in God; we mistake panic for inspiration.
Service is the overflow which pours from a life filled with love and devotion.
The history of Rome presents various men of greater genius than Scipio Aemilianus, but none equalling him in moral purity, in the utter absence of political selfishness, in generous love of his country, and none, perhaps, to whom destiny has assigned a more tragic part.
Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.
When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.
This is a world where everybody’s gotta do something. Ya know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody’s gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that . . . Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don’t wanna do. All the things that I don’t wanna be. Places I don’t wanna go, like India, like getting my teeth cleaned. Save the whale, all that, I don’t understand that . . .
I mean that you always know what results will come from one or another of your actions; but in a strange way you want to do one thing and get the result that could only come from another
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