Rest and Reflect

You can never be absolutely sure you are right. And just because you are right does not mean the others are wrong. Be humble and gracious and admit that.

Never lose sight of the destination. Never lose your first love.

is developing healthy taste buds.

Ellen G White reflecting on her memories of the events surrounding 1844:

1844… This was the happiest year of my life. My heart was full of glad expectation; but I felt great pity and anxiety for those who were in discouragement and had no hope in Jesus. We united, as a people, in earnest prayer for a true experience and the unmistakable evidence of our acceptance with God. {CET 51-2}

In 1844, when anything came to our attention that we did not understand, we kneeled down and asked God to help us take the right position; and then we were able to come to a right understanding and see eye to eye. There was no dissension, no enmity, no evil-surmising, no misjudging of our brethren. If we but knew the evil of the spirit of intolerance, how carefully would we shun it! {GW 302}

There was a spirit of consecration then that there is not now. What has come over the professed peculiar people of God? I saw the conformity to the world, the unwillingness to suffer for the truth’s sake. I saw a great lack of submission to the will of God. I was pointed back to the children of Israel after they left Egypt… Their language was, “Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt.” They lusted for the leeks and onions there. {CET 158}

Nothing, therefore, can be more derogatory to the Bible than the assertion that its doctrines are contrary to reason. The assumption that reason and faith are incompatible; that we must become irrational in order to become believers is, however it may be intended, the language of infidelity; for faith in the irrational is of necessity itself irrational….We can believe only what we know, i.e., what we intelligently apprehend.
– Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols., reprint (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 1:83-84.

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.
– Mohandas Gandhi

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When we used to be captive to a sinful nature, our sinful passions (inflamed by the law that forbids them) enslaved our bodies for their gratification/indulgence — producing actions for which the consequences were fatal. But now (because of the gospel), we are already dead (because Christ died for us) to that captivity (to sin), released from the (condemning) power of the law – so that we may now be slaves to a new (free) life (ruled by God’s Spirit), not the old indenture/bond/contract.