Certainty is the mark of the commonsense life-gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life.
Oswald ChambersRead
It is perilously easy to have amazing sympathy with God's truth and remain in sin.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the ease of acknowledging truth while still engaging in wrongful behavior.
Oswald Chambers points out that one can intellectually or emotionally understand and resonate with the truth that comes from God, yet still choose to live in sin. This suggests a disconnect between belief and action, emphasizing the importance of aligning one's life with the truths they acknowledge rather than merely sympathizing with them.
In practice
In a sermon about the importance of genuine faith, one might use this quote to illustrate the need for true repentance.
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.
Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
One of the things that I have admired about India is the spiritualism of the people.
What is more insane than to be partakers of the Sacraments of the Lord and not partakers of the words of the Lord? These men truly have to say: "In Thy Name we have eaten and drunk," and they will have to hear: "I do not know you!" (Luke 13:26-27). They eat and drink His Body and Blood in the Sacrament and do not recognize in the Gospel His members spread over the whole world, and for this reason they are not numbered among them at the Judgment.
There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig - an animal easily as intelligent as a dog - that becomes the Christmas ham.
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him.
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