Revitalize Your Church

Here we stand at the threshold of the New Year. 2018 will soon be passed and packed away, living only in the attic of memories.   Looking ahead to 2019, I can guarantee one thing: a lot of living will go into it. How will it turn out? Only God knows. This chapter may be drama. Perhaps it will be romance. Action adventure. Comedy. Tragedy. Mystery. Next December, upon reflection, you will be able to describe the events of 2019 – but not now. The best you can do is throw your shoulders back, trust God, and march right in. You see, although you don’t know anything about the upcoming months, God does – and He will be with you as you travel from mountain top to valley.   Nobody knows what tomorrow holds, but we do know WHO holds tomorrow.  Despite our moments of anxiety, discouragement, lonliness, or sorrow,  God has promised never to leave us or forsake us. An anonymous writer captured this idea with these inspiring words: I said to the man who stood at t...

When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and the princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flocks, The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among people, To make music in the heart. -- James Thurman

I have a need of such clearance as the Savior effected in the temple of Jerusalem a riddance of clutter of what is secondary that blocks the way to the all important central emptiness which is filled with the presence of God alone -- Jean Danielou

In her devotional,  Edges of His Ways (1932) ,  the great missionary, Amy Carmichael (1932).wrote the following based on: Psalm 68:13: Though ye have lien among the pots. . . . I think we sometimes feel as though we had. Perhaps we have been especially eager to press through and up into the clear air, and meet our Lord in the radiant, intimate way granted to others, and we do not seem to have been able to do so. The more we looked towards Him Whom our soul loveth, the more we saw His dazzling purity, the more we felt “among the pots”, sooty; like him who “would not lift up so much as his eyes unto Heaven”; like him who said, “Woe is Me! For I am undone . . . for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.” “Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold.” It is the sun striking down upon the bird that gives that look of silver and gold. I have never seen it, on our doves and paddy-birds ...