With Christ in the school of prayer, by Andrew Murray, 45

This post continues a series of excerpts from With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. I thank the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for making this public domain work available. To see their post of the book, go here. The previous post is here. As usual in this blog, long quotations are in this color.

Let us now believe this. As we pray to be filled with the Spirit, let us not seek for the answer in our feelings.  All spiritual blessings must be received, that is, accepted or taken in faith. Let me believe, the Father gives the Holy Spirit to His praying child. Even now, while I pray, I must say in faith:  I have what I ask, the fulness of the Spirit is mine.  Let us continue stedfast in this faith.  On the strength of God’s Word we know that we have what we ask.  Let us, with thanksgiving that we have been heard, with thanksgiving for what we have received and taken and now hold as ours, continue stedfast in believing prayer that the blessing, which has already been given us, and which we hold in faith, may break through and fill our whole being.  It is in such believing thanksgiving and prayer, that our soul opens up for the Spirit to take entire and undisturbed possession.  It is such prayer that not only asks and hopes, but takes and holds, that inherits the full blessing. In all our prayer let us remember the lesson the Saviour would teach us this day, that, if there is one thing on earth we can be sure of, it is this, that the Father desires to have us filled with His Spirit, that He delights to give us His Spirit.

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With Christ in the School of prayer, 40

This post continues a series of excerpts from With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. I thank the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for making this public domain work available. To see their post of the book, go here. The previous post is here. As usual in this blog, long quotations are in this color.

We need to get in at the tenderness and helpfulness which lie in these words, and to rest upon it—your Father.  Speak them over to yourself until something of the wonderful truth is felt by us.  It means that I am bound to God by the closest and tenderest relationship; that I have a right to His love and His power and His blessing, such as nothing else could give me.  O the boldness with which we can draw near!  O the great things we have a right to ask for!  Your Father.  It means that all His infinite love and patience and wisdom bend over me to help me. In this relationship lies not only the possibility of holiness; there is infinitely more than that. 

Here we are to begin, in the patient love of our Father.  Think how He knows us apart and by ourselves, in all our peculiarities, and in all our weaknesses and difficulties.  The master judges by the result, but our Father judges by the effort.  Failure does not always mean fault.  He knows how much things cost, and weighs them where others only measure. 

YOUR FATHER.  Think how great store His love sets by the poor beginnings of the little ones, clumsy and unmeaning as they may be to others.  All this lies in this blessed relationship and infinitely more.  Do not fear to take it all as your own.

With Christ in the School of Prayer, 39, by Andrew Murray

This post continues a series of excerpts from With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. I thank the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for making this public domain work available. To see their post of the book, go here. The previous post is here. As usual in this blog, long quotations are in this color.

‘Your Father which is in heaven.’  Alas!  we speak of it only as the utterance of a reverential homage.  We think of it as a figure borrowed from an earthly life, and only in some faint and shallow meaning to be used of God.  We are afraid to take God as our own tender and pitiful father.  He is a schoolmaster, or almost farther off than that, and knowing less about us—an inspector, who knows nothing of us except through our lessons.  His eyes are not on the scholar, but on the book, and all alike must come up to the standard. 

Now open the ears of the heart, timid child of God; let it go sinking right down into the inner most depths of the soul.  Here is the starting-point of holiness, in the love and patience and pity of our heavenly Father.  We have not to learn to be holy as a hard lesson at school, that we may make God think well of us; we are to learn it at home with the Father to help us.  God loves you not because you are clever not because you are good, but because He is your Father.  The Cross of Christ does not make God love us; it is the outcome and measure of His love to us.  He loves all His children, the clumsiest, the dullest, the worst of His children.  His love lies at the back of everything, and we must get upon that as the solid foundation of our religious life, not growing up into that, but growing up out of it.  We must begin there or our beginning will come to nothing.  Do take hold of this mightily.  We must go out of ourselves for any hope, or any strength, or any confidence.  And what hope, what strength, what confidence may be ours now that we begin here, your Father which is in heaven!

With Christ in the School of Prayer, 37, by Andrew Murray

This post continues a series of excerpts from With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. I thank the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for making this public domain work available. To see their post of the book, go here. The previous post is here. As usual in this blog, long quotations are in this color.

Beloved fellow-disciple!  we begin to see what the reason is that we know so little of daily answers to prayer, and what the chief lesson is which the Lord has for us in His school. It is all in the name of Father.  We thought of new and deeper insight into some of the mysteries of the prayer-world as what we should get in Christ’s school;  He tells us the first is the highest lesson; we must learn to say well, ‘Abba, Father!’  ‘Our Father which art in heaven.’  He that can say this, has the key to all prayer.  In all the compassion with which a father listens to his weak or sickly child, in all the joy with which he hears his stammering child, in all the gentle patience with which he bears with a thoughtless child, we must, as in so many mirrors, study the heart of our Father, until every prayer be borne upward on the faith of this Divine word: ‘How much more shall your heavenly Father give good gifts to them that ask Him.’

‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

With Christ in the school of prayer, by Andrew Murray, 34

This post continues a series of excerpts from With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. I thank the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for making this public domain work available. To see their post of the book, go here. The previous post is here. As usual in this blog, long quotations are in this color.

And what is the true child-life?  The answer can be found in any home.  The child that by preference forsakes the father’s house, that finds no pleasure in the presence and love and obedience of the father, and still thinks to ask and obtain what he will, will surely be disappointed.  On the contrary, he to whom the intercourse and will and honour and love of the father are the joy of his life, will find that it is the father’s joy to grant his requests. 

Scripture says, ‘As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the children of God:’ the childlike privilege of asking all is inseparable from the childlike life under the leading of the Spirit.  He that gives himself to be led by the Spirit in his life, will be led by Him in his prayers too.  And he will find that Fatherlike giving is the Divine response to childlike living. 

God's goodness

God is good.

God’s original creation was good.

We can overcome evil with good.

There is good news!

There are over 600 occurrences of “good,” or variations on it, in scripture. Below is a sample. Many of these are much like other occurrences not listed. Warning: all of them are out of context! Quotes are from the public domain World English Bible.

Genesis 1:31a God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. (In this chapter, there are six previous references to a good creation.)

Psalm 31:19a Oh how great is your goodness, which you have laid up for those who fear you,

Psalm 34:8 Oh taste and see that Yahweh is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

Psalm 16:2 My soul, you have said to Yahweh, “You are my Lord. Apart from you I have no good thing.”

Psalm 84:11 For Yahweh God is a sun and a shield. Yahweh will give grace and glory. He withholds no good thing from those who walk blamelessly.

Psalm 106:1 Praise Yahweh! Give thanks to Yahweh, for he is good, for his loving kindness endures forever. (A similar phrase occurs in several Psalms.)

Amos 5:15a Hate evil, love good, and establish justice in the courts.

Nahum 1:15a Behold, on the mountains the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace!

Matthew 12:35 The good man out of his good treasure brings out good things, and the evil man out of his evil treasure brings out evil things. (Luke 6:43 For there is no good tree that produces rotten fruit; nor again a rotten tree that produces good fruit.)

Matthew 19:17 He said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but one, that is, God.

Luke 4:18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to deliver those who are crushed, 19 and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” (Quoting Isaiah 62:1-2)

John 10:11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

Acts 13:32 We bring you good news of the promise made to the fathers …

Romans 8:28 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.

Romans 12:21 Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Galatians 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith,

Philippians 1:6 being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.

1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good.

James 1:17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, nor turning shadow. 18 Of his own will he gave birth to us by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.

Thanks for reading!