Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord.
J. I. PackerRead
To know that nothing happens in God's world apart from God's will may frighten the godless, but it stabilizes the saints.
Interpretation
Understanding divine will can bring comfort to believers while unsettling non-believers.
This quote reflects the idea that the belief in God's sovereignty offers stability and assurance to those who have faith, while it may provoke fear and anxiety in those who do not share that belief. The contrast between the 'godless' and the 'saints' highlights how different worldviews interpret the same reality in fundamentally different ways.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the nature of divine control, this quote can emphasize faith in challenging times.
Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord.
He that has learned to feel his sins, and to trust Christ as a Saviour, has learned the two hardest and greatest lessons in Christianity.
We need to discover all over again that worship is natural to the Christian, as it was to the godly Israelites who wrote the psalms, and that the habit of celebrating the greatness and graciousness of God yields an endless flow of thankfulness, joy, and zeal.
The fruit of wisdom is Christlikeness, peace, humility and love. And, the root of it is faith in Christ as the manifested wisdom of God
Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be ADOPTION THROUGH PROPITIATION, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.
Only when it is seen that what decides each individual's destiny is whether or not God decides to save him from his sins, and that this is a decision that God need not make in any individual case, can one begin to grasp the biblical view of grace.
I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.
An answer is always a form of death.
The acceptance of all that God has given us and the willingness to let it go - to give it back to him at a moment's notice - that's true human freedom.
God always forgives, always. But he asks that I forgive. If I don't forgive, in a certain sense I am closing the door to God's forgiveness.
Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.