Certainty is the mark of the commonsense life-gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life.
Oswald ChambersRead
The only way we can be of use to God is to let Him take us through the crooks and crannies of our own characters.
Interpretation
Embracing our flaws and complexities allows us to serve a greater purpose.
This quote by Oswald Chambers emphasizes the importance of self-examination and personal growth as a pathway to fulfilling a higher purpose. It suggests that by confronting and understanding the intricacies of our own character, including our weaknesses and imperfections, we can truly be of use to a divine force or contribute positively to the world around us.
In practice
In a spiritual retreat, this quote can inspire participants to reflect on their personal journeys.
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.
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
Hinduism threw away Buddhism after taking its sap. The attempt of all the Southern Acharyas was to effect a reconciliation between the two. Shankaracharya's teaching shows the influence of Buddhism. His disciples perverted his teaching and carried it to such an extreme point that some of the later reformers were right in calling the Acharya's followers "crypto-buddhists".
One evening at Chequers the film was Oliver Twist. Rufus, as usual, had the best seat in the house, on his master's lap. At the point when Bill Sikes was about to drown his dog to put the police off his track, Churchill covered Rufus's eyes with his hand. He said, "Don't look now, dear. I'll tell you about it afterwards."
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.
Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.
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