Spiritual Gems From Spiritual Giants
There are occasions when someone sends a bunch of quotations, and encourages me to pass them on. The following gems are worth reading and studying. As they richly blessed me, may they richly bless you. Take time as you meditate upon them.
The prayers and supplications that Christ offered up were, joined with strong cries and tears, herein setting us example not only to pray, but to be fervent and importunate in prayer. How many dry prayers, how few wet ones, do we offer up to God!
At God's counter there are no Sale Days, for the price of revival is ever the same - travail.
The depth of a revival will be determined exactly by the depth of the spirit of repentance.
'Where there is no vision, the people perish' (Prov 29:18). Where there is no vision of eternity, there is no prayer for the perishing.
Workers that are strangers to knee work may work up a temporary excitement, but never will be able to secure the copious outpourings of genuine revival power.
When God is about to give His people the expected good, He pours out a Spirit of prayer, and it is a good sign that He is coming towards them in mercy. Then when you see the expected end approaching, then you shall call upon Me. Note, promises are given not to supersede, but to quicken and encourage prayer, and when deliverance is coming we must by prayer go forth to meet it. When Daniel understood the 70 years were near expiring, then he set his face with more fervency than ever to seek God.
Don't come to me with that rubbish that there is no emotion in religion. You cannot have real religion without emotion. In Scotland they are crying for a revival, but they want a revival without emotion, and they will never get it. There never has been a revival without emotion and there never will be."
Whenever you touch reality in the spiritual realm, you touch things that are so vital that any normal, healthy person cannot fail to be moved. If we have today such ministry in our churches that men and women cannot be moved, there is something wrong with our preaching.
It seems to me that there are but few who really live with a passion for God - especially a passion just to be with Him. Today there is such a noise coming up before the throne of the Most High - the clamor of so-called praise, singing, and joyful shouting. But I wonder if the same people who love to sing and shout, loudly exclaiming the the praises of God, really have such an intense glory in their secret life with the Lord. When the meeting is over and there's no one there to listen except the only One who matters, do you still have that same passionate joy in your spirit, just to be alone with the Living God?"
It is in the field of prayer that life's critical battles are lost or won. We must conquer all our circumstances there. We must first of all bring them there. We must survey them there. We must master them there. In prayer we bring our spiritual enemies into the Presence of God and we fight them there. Have you tried that? Or have you been satisfied to meet and fight your foes in the open spaces of the world?
He that leaves off prayer leaves off the fear of God. A man that leaves off prayer is capable of any wickedness. When Saul had given up inquiring of God he went to the witch of Endor.
A great many people do not pray because they do not feel any sense of need. The sign that the Holy Spirit is in us is that we realize that we are empty, not that we are full. We have a sense of absolute need. We come across people who try us, circumstances that are difficult, conditions that are perplexing, and all these things awaken a dumb sense of need, which is a sign that the Holy Spirit is there. If we are ever free from the sense of need, it is not because the Holy Spirit has satisfied us, but because we have been satisfied with as much as we have. A man's reach should exceed his grasp. A sense of need is one of the greatest benedictions because it keeps our life rightly related to Jesus Christ.
I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem; they shall never hold their peace day or night. You who make mention of the LORD, do not keep silent, and give Him no rest until He establishes and makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.
The angel fetched Peter out of prison, but it was prayer that fetched the angel.
God never denied that soul anything that went as far as heaven to ask for it.
All God's giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they believed that God would be with them.
Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer.
We know the utility of prayer from the efforts of the wicked spirits to distract us, and we experience the fruit of prayer in the defeat of our enemies.
No one is a firmer believer in the power of prayer than the devil; not that he practices it, but he suffers from it.
Sandy Shaw
Sandy Shaw is Pastor of Nairn Christian Fellowship, Chaplain at Inverness Prison, and Nairn Academy, and serves on The Children's Panel in Scotland, and has travelled extensively over these past years teaching, speaking, in America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, making 12 visits to Israel conducting Tours and Pilgrimages53B, and most recently in Uganda and Kenya, ministering at Pastors and Leaders Seminars, in the poor areas surrounding Kampala, Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu.
He broadcasts regularly on WSHO radio out of New Orleans, and writes a weekly commentary at http://www.studylight.org entitled "Word from Scotland" on various biblical themes, as well as a weekly newspaper column.
His M.A. and B.D. degrees are from The University of Edinburgh, and he continues to run and exercise regularly to maintain a level of physical fitness.
Sandy Shaw
sandyshaw63@yahoo.com
