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I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me.
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Diet Eman (Things We Couldn't Say)
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To read the Qur’ān is nothing less than to live the Qur’ān willingly, sincerely, devotedly, and totally. The outcome of your entire life depends on how you heed the call given by God.
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Khurram Murad (Way to the Qur'an)
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If we have forgotten our total dependency upon God, then there is nothing left for us but to try to depend upon other people’s attention to us, because without such attention we don’t even feel like human beings. Instead of paying attention to God, we become beggars for the attention of others, constantly trying to make them pity us or look up to us. But this is not true human relatedness, only mutual idolatry.
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Charles Upton
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One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give, and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God. Now, quite plainly natural gifts carry with them a similar danger. If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. “Why drag God into it?” you may ask. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex or dipsomania or nervousness or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap, and between ourselves, you agree with them. You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing, and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness. Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognize their need for Christ at all until one day, the natural goodness lets them down, and their self-satisfaction is shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who are rich in this sense to enter the kingdom.
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C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
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We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God’s feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God’s share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of ‘our own’ pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be ‘our own’. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God’s hand, as they came, as ‘accidents’. But in the second week he is beginning to ‘know the ropes’: by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and when he cannot, that he is being interfered.
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C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)
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Hatred and greed are heavy loads. Your motive, on the other hand, is love. And instead of priding yourselves on your cunning, you recognize how weak you are...so weak that you must depend totally on the Spirit of God.
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Brother Andrew (God's Smuggler)
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We are to work to improve ourselves while at the same time remaining totally dependent on God.
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T.D. Jakes (Help Me, I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up!)
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The greatest joy is joy in God. This is plain from Psalm 16:11: "You [God] will make known to me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; in Your right hand there are pleasures forever." Fullness of joy and eternal joy cannot be improved. Nothing is fuller than full, and nothing is longer than eternal. And this joy is owing to the presence of God, not the accomplishments of man. Therefore, if God wants to love us infinitely and delight us fully and eternally, he must preserve for us the one thing that will satisfy us totally and eternally; namely, the presence and worth of his own glory. He alone is the source of full and lasting pleasure. Therefore, his commitment to uphold and display his glory is not vain, but virtuous. God is the one being for whom self-exaltation is an infinitely loving act. If he revealed himself to the proud and self-sufficient and not to the humble and dependent, he would belittle the very glory whose worth is the foundation of our joy. Therefore, God's pleasure in hiding this from "the wise and intelligent" and revealing it to "infants" is the pleasure of God in both his glory and our joy.
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John Piper (The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God's Delight in Being God)
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Whatever it takes to get you to the place where God is your all in all and you live in total dependence on Him is worth the pain. Let
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Kay Arthur (When the Hurt Runs Deep: Healing and Hope for Life's Desperate Moments)
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Hence, it's obvious to see why in AA the community is so important; we are powerless over ourselves. Since we don't have immediate awareness of the Higher Power and how it works, we need to be constantly reminded of our commitment to freedom and liberation. The old patterns are so seductive that as they go off, they set off the association of ideas and the desire to give in to our addiction with an enormous force that we can't handle. The renewal of defeat often leads to despair. At the same time, it's a source of hope for those who have a spiritual view of the process. Because it reminds us that we have to renew once again our total dependence on the Higher Power. This is not just a notional acknowledgment of our need. We feel it from the very depths of our being. Something in us causes our whole being to cry out, “Help!” That's when the steps begin to work. And that, I might add, is when the spiritual journey begins to work. A lot of activities that people in that category regard as spiritual are not communicating to them experientially their profound dependence on the grace of God to go anywhere with their spiritual practices or observances. That's why religious practice can be so ineffective. The real spiritual journey depends on our acknowledging the unmanageability of our lives. The love of God or the Higher Power is what heals us. Nobody becomes a full human being without love. It brings to life people who are most damaged. The steps are really an engagement in an ever-deepening relationship with God. Divine love picks us up when we sincerely believe nobody else will. We then begin to experience freedom, peace, calm, equanimity, and liberation from cravings for what we have come to know are damaging—cravings that cannot bring happiness, but at best only momentary relief that makes the real problem worse.
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Thomas Keating (Divine Therapy and Addiction)
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Your body and my body are both totally made up of and dependent upon the elements of the earth—the water, the air, the heat, the land, the soil and the food it produces—as well as all of the elements that these elements are dependent upon—the sun, the stars, the galaxies, and a vast field of energy and space to contain them in. Nature is our extended body, and the elements outside of our skin are just as important to our health as the elements within our skin. Our bodies are connected to the universe as a whole, and consequently to each other and the many ways in which we influence our shared environment.
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Joseph P. Kauffman (The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom)
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The concept of divine revelation was central to Augustine's epistemology, or theory of knowledge.
The metaphor of light is instructive. In our present earthly state we are equipped with the faculty of sight. We have eyes, optic nerves, and so forth- all the equipment needed for sight. But a man with the keenest eyesight can see nothing if he is locked in a totally dark room. So just as an external source of light is needed for seeing, so an external revelation from God is needed for knowing.
When Augustine speaks of revelation, he is not speaking of Biblical revelation alone. He is also concerned with "general" or "natural" revelation. Not only are the truths in Scripture dependent on God's revelation, but all truth, including scientific truth, is dependent on divine revelation. This is why Augustine encouraged students to learn as much as possible about as many things as possible. For him, all truth is God's truth, and when one encounters truth, one encounters the God whose truth it is.
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R.C. Sproul (The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World)
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Friendship is the call out of isolation and selfishness in order to teach me how to love and how to serve. But without stability, friendship - real soul-searing friendship, the kind that makes us choose between domination and infatuation and possessiveness and dependence for growth and freedom and depth and responsibility and self-knowledge - is impossible.
Stability is what enables us, in other words, to live totally in God and totally for others.
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Joan D. Chittister (Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today)
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When the farmer arises in the morning unreconciled to get out of bed, he feels no anxiety that he has wasted time through his sleep; au contraire, he is confident that the seed has continued to grow during the night. So, too, the spiritual woman does not fret and flap over opportunities missed, does not hammer herself for not working hard enough, and does not have a panic attack wondering whether she has received grace in vain. She lives in quiet confidence that God is working in her by day and by night. Like the farmer, she is not totally passive or presumptuous. The woman knows that she has her full measure of work to do, but she realizes that the outcome rests with God and that the decisive factor is unearned grace. Thus, she works as if everything depends on God and prays as if everything depends on her.
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Brennan Manning (Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God)
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We must not simply desire God; we must live in total dependence.
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Dillon Burroughs (Hunger No More: A 1-Year Devotional Journey Through the Psalms)
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Union with God of this depth is totally unattainable by our own efforts; it is a gift that only God can give; we are totally dependent on His grace for progress in the spiritual life. Yet
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Ralph Martin (The Fulfillment of All Desire: A Guidebook to God Based on the Wisdom of the Saints)
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Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations, threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might b e in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that h as now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual co st to life.
Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.
Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. As with the earliest forms of authoritarian technics, the weight of effort, if one is to judge by national budgets, is toward absolute instruments of destruction, designed for absolutely irrational purposes whose chief by-product would be the mutilation or extermination of the human race. Even Ashurbanipal and Genghis Khan performed their gory operations under normal human limits.
The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. Like the Pharoahs of the Pyramid Age, these servants of the system identify its goods with their own kind of well-being: as with the divine king, their praise of the system is an act of self-worship; and again like the king, they are in the grip of an irrational compulsion to extend their means of control and expand the scope of their authority. In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.
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Lewis Mumford
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Uroboric, because it is dominated by the symbol of the circular snake, standing for total nondifferentiation, everything issuing from everything and again entering into everything, depending on everything, and connecting with everything; pleromatic, because the ego germ still dwells in the pleroma, in the “fullness” of the unformed God, and, as consciousness unborn, slumbers in the primordial egg, in the bliss of paradise.
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Erich Neumann (The Origins and History of Consciousness (Maresfield Library))
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To love God means that we are totally dependent upon Him for everything, like a baby with its mother. Finally, to love God means that no matter what our situation, we will declare it “home,” as God is right there with us.
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Chaim Bentorah (Hebrew Word Study: A Hebrew Teacher's Search for the Heart of God)
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If you could design a new structure for Camp Half-Blood what would it be? Annabeth: I’m glad you asked. We seriously need a temple. Here we are, children of the Greek gods, and we don’t even have a monument to our parents. I’d put it on the hill just south of Half-Blood Hill, and I’d design it so that every morning the rising sun would shine through its windows and make a different god’s emblem on the floor: like one day an eagle, the next an owl. It would have statues for all the gods, of course, and golden braziers for burnt offerings. I’d design it with perfect acoustics, like Carnegie Hall, so we could have lyre and reed pipe concerts there. I could go on and on, but you probably get the idea. Chiron says we’d have to sell four million truckloads of strawberries to pay for a project like that, but I think it would be worth it. Aside from your mom, who do you think is the wisest god or goddess on the Olympian Council? Annabeth: Wow, let me think . . . um. The thing is, the Olympians aren’t exactly known for wisdom, and I mean that with the greatest possible respect. Zeus is wise in his own way. I mean he’s kept the family together for four thousand years, and that’s not easy. Hermes is clever. He even fooled Apollo once by stealing his cattle, and Apollo is no slouch. I’ve always admired Artemis, too. She doesn’t compromise her beliefs. She just does her own thing and doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing with the other gods on the council. She spends more time in the mortal world than most gods, too, so she understands what’s going on. She doesn’t understand guys, though. I guess nobody’s perfect. Of all your Camp Half-Blood friends, who would you most like to have with you in battle? Annabeth: Oh, Percy. No contest. I mean, sure he can be annoying, but he’s dependable. He’s brave and he’s a good fighter. Normally, as long as I’m telling him what to do, he wins in a fight. You’ve been known to call Percy “Seaweed Brain” from time to time. What’s his most annoying quality? Annabeth: Well, I don’t call him that because he’s so bright, do I? I mean he’s not dumb. He’s actually pretty intelligent, but he acts so dumb sometimes. I wonder if he does it just to annoy me. The guy has a lot going for him. He’s courageous. He’s got a sense of humor. He’s good-looking, but don’t you dare tell him I said that. Where was I? Oh yeah, so he’s got a lot going for him, but he’s so . . . obtuse. That’s the word. I mean he doesn’t see really obvious stuff, like the way people feel, even when you’re giving him hints, and being totally blatant. What? No, I’m not talking about anyone or anything in particular! I’m just making a general statement. Why does everyone always think . . . agh! Forget it. Interview with GROVER UNDERWOOD, Satyr What’s your favorite song to play on the reed pipes?
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Rick Riordan (The Demigod Files (Percy Jackson and the Olympians))
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If you are striving to be perfect and pure, everything depends on getting the right idea of what absolute purity and perfection mean. We tend to get trapped in the idea of a static perfection that leads to rigid perfectionism. Abstract speculation can create an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. On the level of religious doctrine, it's a God that is totally purged of anything that we call dark. Then we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light and we can't handle the darkness within us. And because we can't handle it, we suppress it. But the more we suppress it, the more it leads its own life, because it's not integrated. Before we know it, we are in serious trouble.
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David Steindl-Rast
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We are told to be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might (Eph. 6:10). We walk and war in His strength. This requires humility and total dependence upon God. We are not confident in our own strength. We cannot allow pride to open the door for destruction.
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John Eckhardt (Prayers That Rout Demons: Prayers for Defeating Demons and Overthrowing the Powers of Darkness)
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The pastor by definition is a shepherd, the under-shepherd of the flock of God. His primary task is to feed the flock by leading them to green pastures. He also has to care for them when they are sick or hurt, and seek them when they go astray. The importance of the pastor depends on the value of the sheep. Pursue the pastoral metaphor a little further: Israel's sheep were reared, fed, tended, retrieved, healed and restored – for sacrifice on the altar of God. This end of all pastoral work must never be forgotten – that its ultimate aim is to lead God's people to offer themselves up to Him in total devotion of worship and service.
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William Still (The Work of the Pastor)
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How energy changes energy depends upon the energies that are interacting. It is all about which energies are mixing. This is the best news you could ever receive, because this is something you can control. You cannot totally control the energies outside of you, but you can totally control the energy within you—and that is where the power is.
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Neale Donald Walsch (What God Said: The 25 Core Messages of Conversations with God That Will Change Your Life and th e World)
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But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought... if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way... if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain.
Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before... Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind's possession in the moment's firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours... How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all other minds considering everything that is the case... as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision.
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E.L. Doctorow (City of God)
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Normally, as we grow older, we become progressively skilled in coping with life. In most departments, we acquire techniques on which we can fall back when interest and attention wilt. It is part of maturity that there is always some reserve we can tap. But this is not so in prayer. It is the only human activity that depends totally and solely on its intrinsic truth. We are there before God, or rather, to the degree that we are there before God, we are exposed to all that He is, and He can neither deceive nor be deceived. It is not that we want to deceive, whether God or anybody else, but with other people we cannot help our human condition of obscurity. We are not wholly there for them, nor they for us. We are simply not able to be so. Nor should we be. No human occasion calls for our total presence, even were it within our power to offer it. But prayer calls for it. Prayer is prayer if we want it to be.
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Wendy Beckett (Sister Wendy on Prayer)
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Andrew Murray wrote, “Christ’s life and work, His suffering and death, were founded on prayer—total dependence upon God the Father, trust in God, receiving from God, and surrendering to God. Your redemption is brought into being by prayer and intercession. The life He lived for you and the life He lives in you is a life that delights to wait on God and receive from Him. To pray in His name is to pray as He prayed. Christ is our example because He is our Head, our Savior, and our Life. In virtue of His deity and of His Spirit, He can live in us. We can pray in His name because we abide in Him and He abides in us.”1
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Stephen Kendrick (The Battle Plan for Prayer: From Basic Training to Targeted Strategies)
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When I Find It Difficult to Trust Him Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. PROVERBS 3:5 HAS YOUR HUSBAND ever done something you feel has violated your trust in him? It doesn’t have to be anything as terrible as infidelity. It could be financial irresponsibility, or some kind of lie or deception, or hurtful treatment of you, or a confidence he shared with someone else. Whatever it is, you can find yourself wary—always suspecting he may do the same thing again. Yet there must be trust in your marriage relationship or you can never move forward. Living in such a close relationship without trust is not living at all. It’s remarkably sad to not be able to trust the one we are supposed to trust the most. If this has happened to you, it must be remedied, rectified, and resolved. Only God can truly restore the kind of trust you need to have. If your husband has done something to lose your trust, pray that God will lead him to complete repentance. Pray also that your heart will be willing to forgive him. This can be especially hard if he is a repeat offender, but it is not too hard for God to work forgiveness in your heart if you are willing. Ask God to set you free of all anger, frustration, disappointment, fear, and resentment. The most important thing to do after you have prayed for your husband’s repentance and your forgiveness is to pray you will trust God to work a miracle in your husband’s heart and yours as well. You have to first decide that You will trust God with all your heart and not lean on your own understanding. Then He will enable you to trust your husband again. My Prayer to God LORD, I confess any time when I have lost faith in my husband and don’t have full trust in him. I know that is not the way You want me to live. Help us both to have faith in each other and not live in constant distrust, bracing ourselves for what violation of trust is going to happen next. Where my distrust is unfounded, I pray You would help me to see that and enable me to step out in trust of him again. Where my distrust is legitimate because he has truly violated that trust, I ask for a miracle of restoration. First of all, I pray You would lead my husband to total repentance. Bring him to his knees before You in confession so he can be restored. I pray he will be sincerely apologetic to me as well. Second, help me to forgive him so completely that I can trust him fully without reservation again. And last, but most important of all, help me to trust You with all my heart to rectify this situation. Work powerfully in my husband to make him trustworthy, and do a work in me to make me trusting. Help me to not depend on my own reasoning, but rather to depend on Your ability to transform us both. In Jesus’ name I pray.
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Stormie Omartian (The Power of a Praying Wife Devotional)
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The soul grows through: 1 Humility and self-responsibility, your desire to totally and completely feel all your emotions, and to make it no one else’s fault, neither punishing, blaming, judging or harming yourself or others. 2 Desire to receive Divine Love and Truth as the priority: human love is secondary 3 Free will choice: being educated about all the possibilities available to you 4 Being sovereign: having your own connection to God and Truth within you dependent on no one else 5 Having a heartfelt determination, commitment and discipline 6 Merging with the spirit body vehicle and caring for the physical: The Holy Trinity 7 Loving and serving others in all dimensions 8 Developing the six forms of Love 9 Living by the 64 moral codes of love: Ma’at 10 Discernment and wisdom regarding what is love and what is truth; investigating and applying this consistently with everyone in all aspects of your life without exception
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Padma Aon Prakasha (Dimensions of Love: 7 Steps to God)
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Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a 'machine' does it far too much honor. Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made possible an exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody—and ultimately even the phrase 'unsuccessful attempt' is too anthropomorphic and reproachful. But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word 'accident' has meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type. Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to 'naturalize' humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?
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Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
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St. Therese saw things in their totality. She saw the smallest detail of life as part of an infinite whole; she saw the smallest suffering in its direct relation to heaven.
What was it that enabled her to see things thus? it was her littleness, that very thing in her which we so readily misunderstand. To the really little, to the really humble, to the soul, that is to say, that is completely dependent upon God, the whole universe and every detail of human life within it is a unity. The smallest thing on earth is inseparably linked with heaven. It is the humble who see things in their totality, because for them, God is the centre of everything. Their life therefore is a harmony, and they are at peace. On the other hand, the more grown up we are, the more self reliant and independent we become, the more is this truth hidden from our eyes, precisely because, self being the centre, we see things only after a fragmentary fashion. Life is full of discord and conflict; we become anxious and rebellious and know no peace.
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Vernon Johnson (Spiritual Childhood: The Spirituality of St. Therese of Lisieux)
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You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth when you were trying to ask that girl on a date, had a brain freeze on the final exam you were totally prepared for, lipped out a three-foot putt to win the golf tournament, or been paralyzed by the feeling of “Oh my god life can’t get any better, do I really deserve this?” I have. What happens when we get that feeling? We clench up, get short of breath, self-conscious. We have an out-of-body experience where we observe ourselves in the third person, no longer present, now not doing well what we are there to do. We become voyeurs of our moment because we let it become bigger than us, and in doing so, we just became less involved in it and more impressed with it. Why does this happen? It happens because when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we then create a fictitious ceiling, a restriction, over the expectations we have of our own performance in that moment. We get tense, we focus on the outcome instead of the activity, and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result, or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and it’s not our right to believe it does or is. Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great
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Matthew McConaughey (Greenlights)
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Thousands upon thousands of millions of minute and diverse individuals had come together and the product of their mutual dependence, their mutual hostility had been a human life. Their total colony, their living hive had been a man. The hive was dead. But in the lingering warmth many of the component individuals still faintly lived; soon they also would have perished. And meanwhile, from the air, the invisible hosts of saprophytics had already begun their unresisted invasion. They would live among the dead cells, they would grow, and prodigiously multiply and in their growing and procreation all the chemical building of the body would be undone, all the intricacies and complications of its matter would be resolved, till by the time their work was finished a few pounds of carbon, a few quarts of water, some lime, a little phosphorus and sulphur, a pinch of iron and silicon, a handful of mixed salts--all scattered and recombined with the surrounding world--would be all that remained of Everard Webley's ambition to rule and his love for Elinor, of his thoughts about politics and his recollections of childhood, of his fencing and good horsemanship, of that soft strong voice and that suddenly illuminating smile, of his admiration for Mantegna, his dislike of whiskey, his deliberately terrifying rages, his habit of stroking his chin, his belief in God, his incapacity to whistle a tune correctly, his unshakeable determinations and his knowledge of Russian.
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Aldous Huxley (Point Counter Point)
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Man without God is nothing, God without Man is still God"
Flip it:
"God without Man is nothing, Man without God is still Man"
Then please read...
Humans had lived for so many years before they developed language and with the language conceptualized the concept of GOD.
God here is just a concept. That's why God means different things to different people.
Depending on where you are born, you will know a God and strongly believe it is the only true God.
It is just a belief, and you are human first before any beliefs.
Even though most of us have identified so much with our beliefs that we think we are the same with our beliefs. Because of this, when your beliefs are rejected or attacked you believe your person is being rejected and attacked too and you start to fight and defend.
No, you are totally different from your beliefs.
Your beliefs can change, but your humanity cannot change.
Your beliefs are like software programs, and like every software program, they need a host. They can be changed, replaced, repaired, formatted, or removed completely while the system still remains intact. No computer will change to a "Home theater" because of a software, but a computer can be made to behave like a "home theater" because of a software.
We have allowed belief systems to control us so much that we now think it is the beliefs that make us worthy. That we are nothing without those beliefs.
I am here to tell you today that it is the other way around,
THE BELIEFS ARE NOTHING WITHOUT US.
A software program is nothing without a computer system.
Just like a virus, the beliefs have taken over the whole system, if we do not format now, we might lose everything.
From now, start separating yourself from your beliefs so that a format will not destroy you, because it is coming.
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Chidi Ejeagba
“
Thorn in My Side “Cast your cares on the LORD and He will sustain you” (Psalm 55:22). I have a certain person in my life who causes me grief on a regular basis. It seems in order for his day to be complete he must have conflict. If there’s not conflict, then he creates it. And I seem to be his favourite target. I refer to this person as the “thorn in my side”. He is a constant reminder to me that fear and anxiety are real feelings. Some days, I think that my life would be absolutely stress free without him and the problems he creates. However, through studying God’s Word, I have been able to see him in a different light. Although I don’t enjoy the trials he puts me through, I’ve realized that because of these things I have come to rely more on God. I find myself leaning on God’s wisdom and knowledge to help me reply to this man. I find myself praying for the Holy Spirit to fill me with peace when I must confront him. I find myself praying to God for forgiveness – the need to be forgiven for what I think and do, and the need to forgive this man. And recently, I find myself praying for this man. Jesus commanded that we pray for our enemies: “But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). I am truly learning what this means in my life. Although this man causes me great sorrow and pain, it is through these actions that I have come closer to God. It is through his acts that I have developed a deeper relationship with my Lord. And although I don’t know that I can ever thank him for the anxiety and hurt, I am thankful that through this I have come to know Jesus closer. Paradoxically, prayer is the activity done in total solitude that reminds me that I am never alone. It is the counter to my illusion of self-sufficiency, a plea for help after much bravado and floundering. Prayer is my signed Declaration of Dependence. ~ Dr. Ramon Presson Complaining
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Kimberley Payne (Feed Your Spirit: A Collection of Devotionals on Prayer (Meeting Faith Devotional Series Book 2))
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Your God is a child, so long as you are not childlike. Is the child order, meaningi' Or disorder, capricei' Disorder and meaninglessness are the mother oforder and meaning. Order and meaning are things that have become and are no longer becoming.
You open the gates ofthe soul to let the darkffood ofchaosffow into your order and meaning. I f you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.
You are aftaid to open the doori' I too was ayaid, since we hadforgotten that God is terrible. Christ taught: God is love. 66 But you should know that love is also terrible.
I spoke to a loving soul and as I drew nearer to her, I was overcome by horror, and I heaped up a wall ofdoubt, and did not anticipate that I thus wanted to protect myselfyom myftaiful soul.
You dread the depths; it should horrify you, since the way ofwhat is to come leads through it. You must endure the temptation offtar and doubt, and at the same time acknowledge to the bone that your ftar is justified and your doubt is reasonable. How otherwise / could it be a true temptation and a true overcomingi'
Christ totally overcomes the temptation ofthe devil, but not the temptation ofGodtogoodandreason.67 Christthussuccumbstocursing.68
Youstillhavetolearnthis,tosuccumbtonotemptation,buttodo thing ofyour own will; then you will befree and beyond christianity.
I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I ftar; yes, even more, that I must even love what horrifies me. We must learn suchyom that saint who was disgusted by the plague inftctions; she drank the pus cifplague boils and became aware that it smelled like roses. The acts cifthe saint were not in vain. 69
I n everything regarding your salvation and the attainment ofmercy, you are dependent on your soul. Thus no sacrifice can be too(greatfor you. I f your virtues hinder youyom salvation, discard them, since they have become evil to you. The slave to virtuefinds the way as little as the slave to vices.70
Ifyou believe that you are the master ofyour soul, then become her vant. I f you were her servant, make yourselfher master, since she needs to be ruled. These should be yourfirst steps.
”
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C.G. Jung
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Let us beware.— Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential, universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a “machine” does it far too much honor. Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made possible an exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune2 which may never be called a melody—and ultimately even the phrase “unsuccessful attempt” is too anthropomorphic and reproachful. But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word “accident” has meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type. Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?
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Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
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Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders―and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands―parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion―shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development―the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself―is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that:―the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.
”
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders - and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands - parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion - shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development - the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself - is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that: - the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
Successful parenting is the rightful, God-ordained loss of control. The goal of parenting is to work ourselves out of a job. The goal of parenting is to raise children who were once totally dependent on us to be independent, mature people who, with reliance on God and proper connectedness to the Christian community, are able to stand on their own two feet.
”
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Paul David Tripp (Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens)
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The purpose of God with human history is nothing less than to bring out of it—small and insignificant as it seems from the biological and naturalistic point of view—an eternal community of those who were once thought to be just “ordinary human beings.”8 Because of God’s purposes for it, this community will, in its way, pervade the entire created realm and share in the government of it. God’s precreation intention to have that community as a special dwelling place or home will be realized. He will be its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. But why? What is the point of it? The purpose is to meet what can only be described as a need of God’s nature as totally competent love. It is the same purpose that manifests itself in his creation of the world. Only in the light of such a creation and such a redeemed community is it possible for God to be known in his deepest nature. They make it possible for God to be known. And love unknown is love unfulfilled. Moreover, the welfare of every conscious being in existence depends upon their possession of this knowledge of God.
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Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
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Our independence shall be our total dependence on the Divine Being, God.
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Lailah Gifty Akita
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October 26 He went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone. (Matthew 14:23) Christ Jesus, in His humanity, felt the need of complete solitude—to be entirely by Himself, alone with Himself. Each of us knows how draining constant interchange with others can be and how it exhausts our energy. As part of humankind, Jesus knew this and felt the need to be by Himself in order to regain His strength. Solitude was also important to Him in order to fully realize His high calling, His human weakness, and His total dependence on His Father. As a child of God, how much more do we need times of complete solitude—times to deal with the spiritual realities of life and to be alone with God the Father. If there was ever anyone who could dispense with special times of solitude and fellowship, it was our Lord. Yet even He could not maintain His full strength and power for His work and His fellowship with the Father without His quiet time. God desires that every servant of His would understand and perform this blessed practice, that His church would know how to train its children to recognize this high and holy privilege, and that every believer would realize the importance of making time for God alone. Oh, the thought of having God all alone to myself and knowing that God has me all alone to Himself! Andrew Murray Lamartine, the first of the French Romantic poets and a writer of the nineteenth century, in one of his books wrote of how his mother had a secluded spot in the garden where she spent the same hour of each day. He related that nobody ever dreamed of intruding upon her for even a moment of that hour. It was the holy garden of the Lord to her. Pity those people who have no such Beulah land! (See Isa. 62:4.) Jesus said, “Go into your room, close the door and pray” (Matt. 6:6), for it is in quiet solitude that we catch the deep and mysterious truths that flow from the soul of the things God allows to enter our lives.
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Mrs. Charles E. Cowman (Streams in the Desert: 366 Daily Devotional Readings)
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God’s glory is not dependent on the manifestation of any one attribute, but on the manifestation of each in its proper time and place, and in full harmony with the others.
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Arthur W. Pink (The Total Depravity of Man (The Pink Collection Book 55))
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when we say the Apostles’ Creed we are reminded that life itself is founded on trust. Christians in the ancient church went naked to the waters of baptism. The second birth is like the first. We are totally dependent. We bring nothing with us except life. The birth cry of baptism is the threefold “I believe” of the creed, a cry of total trust in the Triune God.
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Ben Myers (The Apostles' Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism (Christian Essentials))
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Total dependence upon God through Faith gives you the confidence to trust Him for your miracle.
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Gift Gugu Mona (The Essence of Faith: Daily Inspirational Quotes)
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Covenant Theology insists that the covenant at Sinai was a gracious covenant made with a “redeemed” by which they mean “justified” people. It totally ignores the big “if” and the “then” in verse 5.30 They fail to see the covenant at Sinai was a conditional covenant. Israel was indeed a people redeemed by blood, but it was not spiritual redemption by Christ’s blood. It was a physical redemption from Egypt by animal blood. Israel becoming a “kingdom of priests” and a “holy nation” was totally dependent upon their keeping the covenant terms of Exodus 20, which they never did. The covenant at Sinai was without question a legal covenant of works conditioned on Israel’s obedience to the covenant terms. The words “if you will obey” and “then I will” cannot be made to mean “I will whether you do or not.” The covenant at Sinai was without question a conditional covenant. Language cannot be more explicit. God said, “If you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then [and only then] … you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” They did become a “holy”31 (meaning separate) physical nation, but they did not become a “holy,” (meaning spiritual) nation where all of the members in the nation were regenerate saints.
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John G. Reisinger (Christ, Our New Covenant Prophet, Priest and King)
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Most of us live only within the level of consciousness—consciously serving and consciously devoted to God. This shows immaturity and the fact that we’re not yet living the real Christian life. Maturity is produced in the life of a child of God on the unconscious level, until we become so totally surrendered to God that we are not even aware of being used by Him. When we are consciously aware of being used as broken bread and poured-out wine, we have yet another level to reach—a level where all awareness of ourselves and of what God is doing through us is completely eliminated. A saint is never consciously a saint—a saint is consciously dependent on God.
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Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest)
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According to the usual representation of this theory man is on probation right along. He failed in the first test and thus missed the reward of eternal life, but God was compassionate and in mercy gave him a new trial. Repeated failures led to repeated manifestations of the mercy of God in the introduction of new trials, which, however, kept man on probation all the time. This is not equivalent to saying that God in justice holds the natural man to the condition of the covenant of works—which is perfectly true—but that God in mercy and compassion—and therefore seemingly to save—gives man one chance after another to meet the ever varying conditions, and thus to obtain eternal life by rendering obedience to God. This representation is contrary to Scripture, which does not represent fallen man as still on probation, but as an utter failure, totally unable to render obedience to God, and absolutely dependent on the grace of God for salvation.
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Louis Berkhof (Systematic Theology)
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Mary, I depend on you totally as a child on its mother, that in return you may possess me, protect me, and transform me into Jesus. May the light of your faith dispel the darkness of my mind; may your profound humility take the place of my pride; may your contemplation replace the distractions of my wandering imagination; and may your virtues take the place of my sins. Lead me deeper into the mystery of the cross that you may share your experience of Jesus’s thirst with me. O most pure heart of Mary, allow me to enter your heart, to share your interior life. You see and know my needs, help me to do “whatever Jesus tells me” … that my human needs may be changed into thirst for God alone. I desire to discover, satiate, and proclaim Jesus’s thirst, but I know all too well my weakness, nothingness, and sin. Mother, may this covenant of consecration with you be the hidden strength in my life that you may use me to satiate your Son to the full. Let this be my only joy…and you will be the cause of that joy.” – St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa. Angelo D. Scolozzi, editor. Thirsting
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Kaylene M Brown (Magnify: pursuing virtue as a feminine genius)
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But in the Kaliyuga, man, being totally dependent on food for life, cannot altogether shake off the idea that he is the body. In this state of mind it is not proper for him to say, ‘I am He.’ When a man does all sorts of worldly things, he should not say, ‘I am Brahman.’ Those who cannot give up attachment to worldly things, and who find no means to shake off the feeling of ‘I’, should rather cherish the idea, ‘I am God’s servant; I am His devotee.’ One can also realize God by following the path of devotion.
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Ramakrishna (Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna)
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True salvation is free of works and totally dependent upon God’s grace.
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Warren W. Wiersbe (Be Free (Galatians): Exchange Legalism for True Spirituality (The BE Series Commentary))
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Let us pray: Father God, we understand the power of a church that prays. We humbly ask for the gates of our spiritual ears to be opened so that we may hear the knock at the door and openly receive the answers to our prayers. We know that regardless of what it looks like, blessing angels have been released from heaven and are in route to our doorsteps. We know that a miracle is taking place and soon our water will turn to wine. Allow us to trust and depend totally on You. If we’ve been doing things in our own strength, forgive us. In Jesus’ name we have prayed. Amen.
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Kellie Lane (When God Is Silent)
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Those who restrict themselves to mere words limit their gift, and may unintentionally lead believers to pride by increasing knowledge without an increased awareness of God’s presence and power. It’s in the trenches of Christlike ministry that we learn to become totally dependent upon God. Moving in the impossible through relying on God short-circuits the development of pride.
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Bill Johnson (When Heaven Invades Earth: A Practical Guide to a Life of Miracles)
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My father was a corresponding figure representing the LORD, who is the ultimate man in the black cape. As we walk through the Christian life we need to seek refuge under God’s protective and loving shelter. His comforting hand is extended to us and we need to hold it tightly, relying on Him with total dependence to guide each step.
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Marc Eckel (The Man in the Black Cape)
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1. Declaration of Intent: Hand lifting to the sky The first step is the collective declaration of intent to reestablish Kintuadi between Creator, Catalyst and Creation. That collective intent was implemented and manifested by the physical act of hand lifting to the sky. Objective: To first acknowledge that we are lost due to a false start and to seek the alignment and the Kintuadi of 3 Components; Creator, Catalyst and Creation (CCC). 2. Commitment and Decision: Cross Jumping The second step is the collective commitment and decision to abandon sinful, flesh and material driven life, and jump to the side of the creator and Christ. That collective commitment and decision was implemented and manifested by the physical act of cross jumping. Objective: To stop and commit to a change of direction. 3. Fasting and Meditation: Spiritual Retreat The third step is the collective fasting and meditation to gradually reduce total dependency on flesh and material driven life. This is the step of seeking spiritual enlightment, guidance and purpose for life. It is achieved by a temporary but frequent isolation and spiritual retreats. During this step, the body and soul are cleansed and fed with spiritual food. Objective: To stop dependency on human guidance but seeks spiritual guidance and direction. 4. Devotion and Service to God: Temple Construction (1987) The fourth step is the collective devotion and service to God. Now that body and soul are cleansed and fed spiritually, man devotion and service to god is manifested by the construction of the temple as an offering to God. The real temple is the body of Christ, the supreme sacrifice. Objective: To regain God’s trust by gradually training the flesh and material wealth to serve God. 5. Prayers and Faith Consolidation: Spiritual Soiree (1990s) Now that body and soul have constructed the sanctuary, the place of reunion and spiritual communion with God. This fifth step is the step of collective prayers and faith consolidation at the sanctuary, the place of invocation and the real body of Christ, our Catalyst. Objective: To repair and reestablish communication between Creator, Catalyst and Creation. 6. Redemption: The Begging for forgiveness; December 24, 1992 In the name of all humanity, on December 24, 1992 followers of Simon Kimbangu lead by Papa Dialungana Kiangani (Kimbangu son) gathered inside the temple in Nkamba, all wearing sac clothes and begged for the forgiveness of Adamus and eve original sin. After asking for forgiveness that Adamus himself did not have the courage to ask, the Kimbanguists burned all sac clothes. In 1994, Adeneho Nana Oduro Numapau II, President of the Ghana National House of Chiefs, initiated ceremonies in Africa and the Americas to beg forgiveness of African Americans for his ancestors ‘involvement in the slave trade. Objective: To reestablish and maintain interconnectivity between Creator, Catalyst and Creation. 7. Return to Eden, the Realm of Kintuadi (Oneness) December 24th, 1992 marked the beginning of a new spiritual era for mankind in general but for Africans in particular. The chains of physical and spiritual slavery were broken on that date. The spiritual exodus from Egypt, the land of Slavery to Eden, the Promised Land also started that date. On May 10, 1994 Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first black President of South Africa, Africa most powerful country. On January 20, 2009, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated as the first African American president of the United States, the most powerful country on earth. Objective: To enjoy the Oneness between Creator, Catalyst and Creation. Chapter 27 Kimbangu’s Wife, 3 sons and 30 Grand Children As stated in chapter 11, few months after Kimbangu’s birth, his mother Luezi died, so Kimbangu did not know his biological mother and was raised by Kinzembo, his maternal aunt.
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Dom Pedro V (The Quantum Vision of Simon Kimbangu: Kintuadi in 3D)
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Love honors the truth of the soul in you and others, the soul created by God. • Love chooses and is totally willing and desiring to feel any and all emotions. • Love speaks truth always, to everyone. • Love moves forward to grow more. • Love welcomes its Law of Attraction and seeks its causal emotions. • Love seeks out where it is absent. • Love gives with truth, and gives freely in this. • Loving yourself means you know yourself, wounds and strengths. • Love follows Truth, no matter what Truth looks like. • Love’s behavior is not dependent on what anyone else says, thinks, does or reacts to. • Love stands by Itself and only needs Itself to be Itself. • Love freely chooses and desires love for its own sake. • Love accepts and appreciates. • Love allows everyone to choose what they wish to choose, desire what they wish to desire, and create what they wish to create. • Love is humble. • Love is the only protection.
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Padma Aon Prakasha (Dimensions of Love: 7 Steps to God)
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Each Death marks your increasing dependence on Divine Love and Truth, on God, as the very lifeblood of your existence and purpose for being alive. The Five Deaths become Five Steps to Eternal and Divine Life, the ever increasing life of the expanding soul, the openings into the Reality of Divine Love through the permanent establishing of deep humility as your foundation, burning desire as your guiding, living light, holy choice as perpetual harmony, and your total willingness to obey the laws of love at all times in all parts of your life simply because it is true and what you desire most of all.
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Padma Aon Prakasha (Dimensions of Love: 7 Steps to God)
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Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust. . . . All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness. (Isa. 40:15, 17) It is true that we have been made his children, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:17). But we will never treasure that truth the way we should until we tremble at this one. Oh, that every person in this postmodern, self-exalting world would come to feel and say, "I am totally dependent on God, and immeasurably less valuable than he. And this is the beginning of my joy.
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John Piper (The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World)
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It is easy to love God when you do not even have a cent in your pocket and you are totally dependent on Him
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Sunday Adelaja
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Jesus Christ goes Adam’s route, but in reverse. In contrast to Adam he is really “like God.” But this being like God, this similarity to God, is being a Son, and hence it is totally relational. “I do nothing on my own authority” (John 8:28). Therefore the One who is truly like God does not hold graspingly to his autonomy, to the limitlessness of his ability and his willing. He does the contrary: he becomes completely dependent, he becomes a slave. Because he does not go the route of power but that of love, he can descend into the depths of Adam’s lie, into the depths of death, and there raise up truth and life.
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Pope Benedict XVI (In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought (RRRCT)))
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You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth when you were trying to ask that girl on a date, had a brain freeze on the final exam you were totally prepared for, lipped out a three-foot putt to win the golf tournament, or been paralyzed by the feeling of “Oh my god life can’t get any better, do I really deserve this?” I have. What happens when we get that feeling? We clench up, get short of breath, self-conscious. We have an out-of-body experience where we observe ourselves in the third person, no longer present, now not doing well what we are there to do. We become voyeurs of our moment because we let it become bigger than us, and in doing so, we just became less involved in it and more impressed with it. Why does this happen? It happens because when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we then create a fictitious ceiling, a restriction, over the expectations we have of our own performance in that moment. We get tense, we focus on the outcome instead of the activity, and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result, or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and it’s not our right to believe it does or is. Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great idea, the love of our life, euphoric bliss, who are we to think we don’t deserve these fortunes when they are in our grasp? Who are we to think we haven’t earned them? If we stay in process, within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we aren’t thinking of the finish line, we’re not looking at the clock, we’re not watching ourselves on the Jumbotron performing. We are performing in real time, where the approach is the destination, and there is no goal line because we are never finished. When Bo Jackson scored, he ran over the goal line, through the end zone, and up the tunnel . The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it. When we truly latch on to the fact that we are going to die at some point in time, we have more presence in this one. Reach beyond your grasp, have immortal finish lines, and turn your red light green, because a roof is a man-made thing.
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Matthew McConaughey (Greenlights)
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In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which is almost completely devoted to both a psychic and social study of communication, Shakespeare states his awareness that true social and political navigation depend upon anticipating the consequences of innovation: The providence that’s in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Plutus’ gold,
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps,
Keeps place with thought, and almost like the gods
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles. The increasing awareness of the action of media, quite independently of their “content” or programming, was indicated in the annoyed and anonymous stanza: In modern thought, (if not in fact)
Nothing is that doesn’t act,
So that is reckoned wisdom which
Describes the scratch but not the itch. The same kind of total, configurational awareness that reveals why the medium is socially the message has occurred in the most recent and radical medical theories.
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Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man)
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Semantics are important here. As Cardano put it, the probability of an outcome is the ratio of favorable outcomes to the total opportunity set. The odds on an outcome are the ratio of favorable outcomes to unfavorable outcomes. The odds obviously depend on the probability, but the odds are what matter when you are placing a bet.
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Peter L. Bernstein (Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk)
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Our independence lies on total dependent on Almighty God.
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Lailah Gifty Akita
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Worry is the only CURRENCY that steals your total dependence on God, it is the transaction that leaves you in the debt called DEFEAT; it is the broken wall that keeps you defenseless against your enemies
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Dr Ikoghene S. Aashikpelokhai
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Yes, as we have already said, Christianity was on the one hand the end of all natural joy. It revealed its impossibility, its futility, its sadness—because by revealing the perfect man it revealed the abyss of man’s alienation from God and the inexhaustible sadness of this alienation. The cross of Christ signified an end of all “natural” rejoicing; it made it, indeed, impossible. From this point of view the sad “seriousness” of modern man is certainly of Christian origin, even if this has been forgotten by that man himself. Since the Gospel was preached in this world, all attempts to go back to a pure “pagan joy,” all “renaissances,” all “healthy optimisms” were bound to fail. “There is but one sadness,” said Leon Bloy, “that of not being a saint.” And it is this sadness that permeates mysteriously the whole life of the world, its frantic and pathetic hunger and thirst for perfection, which kills all joy. Christianity made it impossible simply to rejoice in the natural cycles—in harvests and new moons. Because it relegated the perfection of joy to the inaccessible future—as the goal and end of all work—it made all human life an “effort,” a “work.” Yet, on the other hand Christianity was the revelation and the gift of joy, and thus, the gift of genuine feast. Every Saturday night at the resurrection vigil we sing, “for, through the Cross, joy came into the whole world.” This joy is pure joy because it does not depend on anything in this world, and is not the reward of anything in us. It is totally and absolutely a gift, the “charis,” the grace. And being pure gift, this joy has a transforming power, the only really transforming power in this world. It is the “seal” of the Holy Spirit on the life of the Church—on its faith, hope and love.
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Alexander Schmemann (For the Life of the World)
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it is in the sacred meal that man sees the sacredness of life, his own life, and as a result apprehends himself as being dependent upon one who is Almighty and all good, or, to express it more accurately, upon the singular and super abundant fruitfulness of the divinity. To recognize the sacredness of a meal as being the highest form of human activity is to recognize means total dependence, both for his creation and continued existence, upon a God who is at the same time apprehended as the one who possesses the fullness of life.
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J.D. Crichton
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What is of import here is not just Tertullian’s dependence on an earlier exegetical tradition, but the person-centered reading strategy that he and his predecessors undertook—assigning dramatic speakers or addressees that are unmarked, and indeed in some cases, seemingly totally foreign to the Old Testament text.
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Matthew W. Bates (The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament)
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No one ever addressed God in prayer thus: '0 God, thou knowest that I am the architect of my own fortunes and the determiner of my own destiny. Thou mayest indeed do something to help me in the securing of my purposes after I have determined upon them. But my heart is my own, and thou canst not intrude into it; my will is my own, and thou canst not bend it. When I wish thy aid, I will call on thee for it. Meanwhile, thou must await my pleasure.' Men may reason somewhat like this; but that is not the way they pray. All men assume the religious attitude, then, when they pray. But many men box up, as it were, this attitude in their prayer, and shutting it off from their lives with the Amen, rise from their knees to assume a totally different attitude, if not of heart, then at least of mind. They pray as if they were dependent on God's mercy alone; they reason -- perhaps they even live -- as if God, in some of his activities at least, were dependent on them. The Calvinist is the man who is determined to preserve the attitude he takes in prayer in all his thinking, in all his feeling, in all his doing. That is to say, he is the man who is determined that religion in its purity shall come to its full rights in his thinking, and feeling, and living. This is the ground of his special mode of thought, by reason of which he is called a Calvinist; and as well of his special mode of acting in the world, by reason of which he has become the greatest regenerating force in the world. Other men are Calvinists on their knees; the Calvinist is the man who is determined that his intellect, and heart, and will shall remain on their knees continually, and only from this attitude think, and feel, and act. Calvinism is, therefore, that type of thought in which there comes to its rights the truly religious attitude of utter dependence on God and humble trust in his mercy alone for salvation.
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B.B. Warfield
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Not even technical terms totally escape this vagueness. For example, theologians and philosophers have debated for centuries over how to define the term 'miracle,' Is a miracle a violation of natural law, an immediate act of God, a surprising and unexpected event, or something else? When a word itself is subject to such widespread understanding, it is hard to imagine it ever functioning in an analytic judgement. The term 'free will' faces similar difficulties. Is freedom ethical (the ability to do good or evil), or is it metaphysical (the absence of deterministic forces on one's will)? Whether the statement 'Man has free will' is analytic or synthetic will depend for many people on the way this free will is defined, and yet there is no universally accepted definition. It should be obvious that definitions are not natural. When disputes arise over definitions, the analytical quality of statements involving the debated terms rapidly dissolves.
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Rich Lusk
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The Fathers speak of prayer as consisting of a single thought (monologistos euche). Strictly speaking it is not even a thought, but rather an awareness of being totally absorbed in the reality of God. One can, nevertheless, call this conscious experience ‘thought’, because it is not simply a state of confused feeling or the sensation of being lost in the ocean of inarticulate reality, but it is awareness of encounter with the personal infinity of God who loves us. It is the mind’s confirmation of the reality. I do not lose myself in this infinity, because it is the infinity of a personal God and of his love to which I respond with my love. For the heart is truly the place where one experiences the love of the other, and where one responds to the other. I do not lose myself, because it is the infinity of a personal God whose love is my delight; I depend on his love as I depend on his mercy, for face to face with him I still feel infinitely small, and a sinner.
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Dumitru Stăniloae (Prayer and Holiness: The Icon of Man Renewed in God (Fairacres Publication))
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Worry is the only CURRENCY that steals your total dependence on God, it is the transaction that leaves you in a debt called DEFEAT; it is the broken wall that keeps you defenseless against your enemies.
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Dr Ikoghene S Aashikpelokhai
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Our independence depends on total dependence on righteous God.
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Lailah Gifty Akita
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He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. In one sense he is “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of discrete, finite things. In another sense he is “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things. Infinite being, infinite consciousness, infinite bliss, from whom we are, by whom we know and are known, and in whom we find our only true consummation.
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David Bentley Hart (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss)
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Those who lose themselves in others may be saved from their solitude, but they always turn out to be crippled versions of the person they could have become. In order for us to actualize our potential we need to fulfill what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called our “metaneeds” or “highest needs”, which include the drive for truth, beauty, and goodness. These needs, as Ernest Becker noted in his book the Denial of Death, cannot be completely fulfilled by other people: “It is impossible to get blood from a stone, to get spirituality from a physical being.”(Ernest Becker, Denial of Death) Any attempt to fulfill the totality of our metaneeds through an intimate relationship will result in a god-like idealization of the partner, and a resultant slavish dependence on them for our self-worth and identity.
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Academy of Ideas
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The perfection of the soul is God's grace, it's totally depends on your humbleness, kindness and the main holiness.
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Santosh Kumar
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No matter how badly the humble man fails, he will reckon his accounts with God and start over again, for his humility tells him of his total dependence on God.
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Walter J. Ciszek (He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith)
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One, we’re commanded to pray without ceasing. Since all things come from God, we must go directly to the Source. Two, relationships require two-way communication. Now that we’re in proper relationship with our Maker, we have the distinct privilege of talking to Him whenever we want, without setting appointments. Three, prayer isn’t meant to change God. God is completely unchangeable. Prayer’s meant to change us! Four, prayer reverberates throughout the spirit world constantly reminding Satan to Whom we belong. And five, prayer ultimately is a declaration of our total dependence on God.
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Patrick Higgins (The Unveiling (Chaos in the Blink of an Eye, #3))
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Jesus’ love and adoration for the Father, and concomitantly, his contemplation of the Father. Our participation in these states comes by way of imitation: we love, adore, and contemplate the Son, as he did (does) the Father. Our gaze toward [Christ] should be a gaze of the greatest honor, the most powerful love and total and absolute dependence. We should wish that. . . we could be completely occupied and given over to this spiritual and divine contemplation of the new source and principle of our being.14
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Carl E. Olson (Called to Be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification)
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Your independence is your total dependence on the Divine Being.
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Lailah Gifty Akita
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Those people knew a degree, a good job, a savings account, and comprehensive medical insurance were the safety net that wise people put in place before obeying God. Trusting God wasn’t anything so foolish as total dependency on him.
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Alia Joy (Glorious Weakness: Discovering God in All We Lack)
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Faith is a state of total dependence on God, no matter what is going on.
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Gift Gugu Mona (The Essence of Faith: Daily Inspirational Quotes)
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Our independence lies in total dependence on God.
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Lailah Gifty Akita
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amount of our hearts that we do not give to Him. We may desire to give Him our whole hearts, but the amount of our hearts that we give Him depends upon the amount of trust we have in Him. If we have total and complete trust in His faithfulness, we can give Him our hearts totally and completely. This may be why Jeremiah said: “Great is thy faithfulness”. He knew God’s faithfulness was great and thus he was able to give God his whole heart. The word faithfulness is from Hebrew root word amen. This word in its primitive meaning has the idea of a mother nursing a child. The total devotion of the mother giving herself to that child and the child’s total dependence upon the mother is the picture being drawn for the word faithfulness. I was reading in Jewish literature how the Bible does not speak of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but speaks of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Each had to find their own place in God. They could not take the place of their fathers. They had to find
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Chaim Bentorah (Hebrew Word Study: A Hebrew Teacher Finds Rest in the Heart of God)
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God's goal for you is total dependence on Him.
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Marnie Swedberg (Flow Through Vessel: How to Master the Habit of Letting God Flow Through You)
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Faith puts man right where God wants him—in the place of total dependence.
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Ronald Dunn (Faith Crisis: What Faith Isn't and Why It Doesn't Always Do What You Want)
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I commit myself to delight in the WORD of God and fellowship. I shall henceforth depend on God’s WORD day and night, and its power shall work in me always to bear the right fruits.
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Daniel C. Okpara (Prayer Wave: A 21 Days Total Deliverance & Breakthrough Devotional: 500 Powerful Prayers & Declarations to Arrest Stubborn Demonic Problems, Dislodge Spiritual ... Your Blessings (Spiritual Warfare Book 3))
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Nor is a total lack of doubt pertinent. When a doubter has become convinced that salvation depends upon the ability to truly trust, anxiety builds. The purportedly good news that the only needful thing is really to trust becomes a devastating word of condemnation. The faulty God-only-accepts-my-genuine-trust gospel puts doubters in a tailspin, but the true gospel of Jesus’s kingship gives a clear answer regarding salvation’s boundary: if a doubter continues to give allegiance to Jesus—the King revealed in the gospel—then that person is saved despite whatever doubts they harbor. Even on his or her most doubt-filled days, the doubter can still choose to give loyalty to King Jesus and his ways.
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Matthew W. Bates (Why the Gospel?: Living the Good News of King Jesus with Purpose)