Meditations

Corrie ten Boom

I do not believe immediately in telling new Christians what they should and should not do: such things can be left safely to the Holy Spirit. For, after all, we do not bring people to a faith, a religion, or a doctrine, but to a person, Jesus Christ.

If you will work for God, form a committee. If you will work with God, form a prayer group.

If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. But, if you look at Christ, You’ll be at rest.

Billy Graham

Perhaps you say, “But I don’t know what to say when I pray,” God does not mind your stumbling and halting phrases. He is not interested in your grammer. He is interested in your heart. I have a little boy only two years old. He stumbles and falters trying to express himself to me; but I think I love his little words that I can not understand even more than I will appreciate his correct grammatical sentences when he grows older.

One thing the Bible does not teach is that sex in itself is sin. Far from being prudish, the Bible celebrates sex and its proper use, presenting it as God-created, God-ordained, God-blessed. It makes plain that God himself implanted the physical magnetism between the sexes for two reasons: for the propagation of the human race, and for the expression of that kind of love between man and wife that makes for true oneness. His command to the first man and woman to be “one flesh” was as important as His command to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Courage and cowardice are antithetical. Courage is an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations; cowardice is a submissive surrender to circumstance. Courage breeds creative self-affirmation; cowardice produces a destructive self-abnegation. Courage faces fear and thereby masters it; cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it. Courageous men never lose the zest for living even though their life situation is zestless; cowardly men, overwhelmed by the uncertainties of life, lose the will to live. We must constantly build dykes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.
Fear is mastered through love. the New Testament affirms, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.” The kind of love that led Christ to a cross and kept Paul unembittered amid the angry torrents of persecution is not soft, anaemic, and sentimental. Such love confronts evil without flinching and shows in our popular parlance an infinite capacity “to take it.” Such love overcomes the world even from a rough-hewn cross against the sky-line.

Thomas Jefferson

At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous.

Ronald Reagan

The fact is, we’ll never build a lasting economic recovery by going deeper into debt at a faster rate than we ever have before. … Inflation is the cause of recession and unemployment. And we’re not going to have real prosperity or recovery until we stop fighting the symptoms and start fighting the disease. There’s only one cause for inflation — government spending more than government takes in. The cure is a balanced budget. Ah, but they tell us, 80 percent of the budget is uncontrollable. It’s fixed by laws passed by Congress. Well, laws passed by Congress can be repealed by Congress. And, if Congress is unwilling to do this, then isn’t it time we elect a Congress that will?