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I Sing The Mighty Power Of God

I sing the mighty pow’r of God, that made the mountains rise, That spread the flowing seas abroad, and built the lofty skies. I sing the wisdom that ordained the sun to rule the day; The moon shines full at His command, and all the stars obey.

I sing the goodness of the Lord, who filled the earth with food, Who formed the creatures through the Word, and then pronounced them good. Lord, how Thy wonders are displayed, where’er I turn my eye, If I survey the ground I tread, or gaze upon the sky.

There’s not a plant or flow’r below, but makes Thy glories known, And clouds arise, and tempests blow, by order from Thy throne; While all that borrows life from Thee is ever in Thy care; And everywhere that we can be, Thou, God, art present there.

You cannot battle the affections of the flesh with the command; the command is no match for the affections of the flesh. You can only battle the affections of the flesh with the affections of the Spirit, with the affections of the gospel.

--Mark Dever

There can be no hope for me except in Your great mercy. Give me the grace to do as You command and command me to do what You will. You command me to control my bodily desires. Truly it is by continence that we are made as one and regained the unity of self which we lost by falling apart in the search for a variety of pleasures. For a man loves You so much less if besides You he also loves something else which he does not love for Your sake. O love ever burning, never quenched. Oh charity my God set me on fire with Your love. You command me to be continent, chaste. You command me to be pure. Give me the grace to do as You command and command me to do what You will.

--Augustine of Hippo

Expulsive Power - When a new love enters our hearts, it can drive out old and stagnant feelings, even attraction for things that would do us harm. One writer called this kind of love “the expulsive power of a new affection.” Imagine for a moment a young child playing with something extremely dangerous, perhaps a knife from the kitchen. One way to solve that crisis would be to approach the child and try to grab the knife. Perhaps another would be to command the child to place the knife on the table or the floor. But using the expulsive power of a new affection, one might offer the child an attractive toy, a delicious piece of candy, or a shiny coin to attract immediate attention and then exchange the coin for the knife. God’s love is like that in our hearts. We only love one another because of the way Jesus loved us (cf. Rom. 5:5+). But when we do what he commands, others will notice that we are His disciples, cleansed and changed by the expulsive power of a new affection. --Kenneth O. Gangel

Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross. All of us have inflated views of ourselves...until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross that we shrink to our true size. -John Stott

The best way to disengage an impure desire is to engage a pure one; the best way to expel the love of what is evil is to embrace the love of what is good instead. To be specific, we must replace the object of our sinful affection with an infinitely more worthy one—God himself. In this way we do not move from a full heart into a vacuum. Instead we move from a full heart to a heart bursting with fullness. And the expulsive power of our new affection weakens and even destroys the power of sin in our hearts.

--Thomas Chalmers, Sermon, The Expulsive Power of A New Affection

Indeed, as I have already said, you cannot truly deal with the negative unless you are at the same time doing the positive. The way to get rid of the defects is to cultivate the virtues. To use a well-known phrase of Thomas Chalmers, what we need is to apply the “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection”. I use a simple illustration. The way the dead leaves of winter are removed from some trees is not that people go around plucking them off; no, it is the new life, the shoot that comes and pushes off the dead in order to make room for itself. In the same way the Christian gets rid of all such things as bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and evil speaking and all malice. The new qualities develop and the others simply have no room; they are pushed out and they are pushed off.

--Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Love triumphs all afflictions. And our earthly sufferings only serve to make that which awaits us an even greater glory.

—Corrie Ten Boom

Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher's sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity.

D. A. Carson, A Call To Spiritual Reformation,121

I am wired by nature to love the same toys that the world loves. I start to fit in. I start to love what others love. I start to call earth "home." Before you know it, I am calling luxuries "needs" and using my money just the way unbelievers do. I begin to forget the war. I don't think much about people perishing. Missions and unreached people drop out of my mind. I stop dreaming about the triumphs of grace. I sink into a secular mind-set that looks first to what man can do, not what God can do. It is a terrible sickness. And I thank God for those who have forced me again and again toward a wartime mind-set.

John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

Prayer is the practice of drawing on the grace of God. Don’t say, “I will endure this until I can get away and pray.” Pray now—draw on the grace of God in your moment of need. Prayer is the most normal and useful thing; it is not simply a reflex action of your devotion to God. We are very slow to learn to draw on God’s grace through prayer.

—Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest

Ah! Sinner, remember this, there is no way on earth effectually to be rid of the guilt, filth, and power of sin, but by believing in a Savior. It is not resolving, it is not complaining, it is not mourning, but believing, that will make thee divinely victorious over that body of sin that this day is too strong for thee, and that will certainly be thy ruin, if it be not ruined by a hand of faith.

Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies Againts Satan’s Devices

To follow the call of God is therefore to live before the heart of God. It is a life coram deo and thus to shift our awareness of audiences to the point where only the last and highest—God—counts. (Os Guinness)

#coram deo #audience of one

The inner essence of worship is cherishing Christ as gain - indeed as more gain than all that life can offer - family, career, retirement, fame, food, friends. The essence of worship is experiencing Christ as gain. Or to use words that we love to use around here: it is savoring Christ, treasuring Christ, being satisfied with Christ.

John Piper, Sermon, The Inner Essence of Worship

This life is not godliness, but growth in godliness; not health, but healing; not being, but becoming; not rest, but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way; the process is not yet finished, but it has begun; this is not the goal, but it is road; at present all does not gleam and glitter, but everything is being purified.

Martin Luther, A Defense and Explanation of All Articles, AE 32:24

...God has made provision for our holiness. Through Christ He has delivered us from sin's reign so that we now can resist sin. But the responsibility for resisting is ours. God does not do that for us. To confuse the potential for resisting (which God provided) with the responsibility for resisting (which is ours) is to court disaster in our pursuit of holiness.

Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness, 57

We need to repent of the haughty way in which we sometimes stand in judgment upon Scripture and must learn to sit humbly under its judgments instead. If we come to Scripture with our minds made up, expecting to hear from it only an echo of our own thoughts and never the thunderclap of God’s, then indeed he will not speak to us and we shall only be confirmed in our own prejudices. We must allow the Word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behavior.

John Stott, Authentic Christianity

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