Oswald Chambers (1874-1917) My Utmost For His Highest (January 1st)

“My eager desire and hope being that I may never feel ashamed” [Philippians 1:20]. We shall all feel very much ashamed if we do not yield to Jesus on the point He has asked us to yield to Him.  Paul says – “My determination is to be my utmost for His Highest.” To get there is a question of will, not of debate nor of reasoning, but a surrender of will, an absolute and irrevocable surrender on that point.  An overweening consideration for ourselves is the thing that keeps us from that decision, though we put it that we are considering others.  When we consider what it will cost others if we obey the call of Jesus, we tell God He does not know what our obedience will mean.  Keep to the point; He does know.  Shut out every other consideration and keep yourself before God for this one thing only — My Utmost for His Highest.  I am determined to be absolutely and entirely for Him and for Him alone.

Did God create the heavens and the earth? Or is the universe nothing more than an accident that “just happened”? In The Question of God, Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi sets up a debate over this question between two deeply influential men, a famous psychiatrist and a famous professor of medieval literature. Their positions were unequivocal—and mutually exclusive. Today, Dr. Nicholi writes, we need to ask ourselves how much of what they believed was based on evidence and how much on emotion that caused them to distort reality?

“Observe what Andrew says to his brother, ‘We have found the Messiah, which is, being interpreted, the Christ.’ You see how, in a short time, he demonstrates not only the persuasiveness of the wise teacher but also his own longing that he had from the beginning. For this word, ‘we have found,’ is the expression of a soul that longs for his presence, looking for his coming from above, and is so ecstatic when what he is looking for happens that he hurries to tell others the good news. This is what brother affection, natural friendship, is all about when someone is eager to extend a hand to another when it comes to spiritual matters.” (John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John)

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:  “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.”  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God:  or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.

From J.S. Bach’s Cantata ‘Awake, A Voice is Calling’

Duet Between Jesus and the Soul
The Soul: When are you coming, my Savior?
Jesus: I am coming, your portion.
The Soul: I am waiting with burning oil. Open the hall for the heavenly banquet.
Jesus: I am opening the hall for the heavenly banquet.
The Soul: Come, Jesus!
Jesus: I am coming; come, sweet soul!

[Then, a little later in the work, Jesus and the soul are united and celebrate with an even more intimate exchange]

William Wilberforce (1759-1833), A Practical View of Christianity
“Servile, and base, and mercenary, is the notion of Christian practice among the bulk of nominal Christians. They give no more than they dare not withhold; they abstain from nothing but what they must not practice [and] ... they know Christianity only as a system of restraints. She is despoiled of every liberal and generous principle: she is rendered almost unfit for the social intercourses of life, and is only suited to the gloomy walls of that cloister, in which they would confine her. But true Christians consider themselves not as satisfying some rigorous creditor, but as discharging a debt of gratitude. Theirs is accordingly not the stinted return of a constrained obedience, but the large and liberal measure of a voluntary service.”