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.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
I'm in a period of growth and expansion. I'm taking long, hard looks at the world and what's happening in it, analyzing and thinking. I'm trying to become acquainted with the universe - with the part of it I occupy - and trying to settle, for myself, what my relationship with it is.
A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.
Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.
Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
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