Quotes about sovereignty-of-god

Guidance, like all God's acts of blessing under the covenant of grace, is a sovereign act. Not merely does God will to guide us in the sense of showing us his way, that we may tread it; he wills also to guide us in the more fundamental sense of ensuring that, whatever happens, whatever mistakes we may make, we shall come safely home. Slippings and strayings there will be, no doubt, but the everlasting arms are beneath us; we shall be caught, rescued, restored. This is God's promise; this is how

Our duty is found in the revealed will of God in the Scriptures. Our trust must be in the sovereign will of God as He works in the ordinary circumstances of our daily lives for our good and His glory.

That eye which sees anything good in the creature is a blind eye; that eye which fancies it can discern anything in man, or anything in anything he can do to win the Divine favor, is as yet stone blind to the Truth of God, and needs to be lanced and cut, and the cataract of pride removed from it!

As God can protect his people under the greatest despotism, so the utmost civil liberty is no safety to them without the immediate protection of his Almighty arm. I fear that Christians in this country have too great a confidence in political institutions . . . [rather] than of the government of God.

You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.

Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.

Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary.

If it pleases Him to bid our patience exercise itself, shall He not do as He wills with His own!

I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole.

We are not trying to manipulate God and tell Him what to do. Rather, we are asking Him to tell us what to do.

We do not pray to inform God of our needs, because He knows what we need before we ask.What is prayer like for you?Is it a religious ritual that you perform out of habit?Is it a spiritual discipline that you practice because you want to be the best Christian you possibly can be?Is it a mechanism by which you can bring your “shopping list” to God in order to have your needs met?Or are you running to meet your Lover, to commune with Him, hungering to find your joy in Him, and to be fulfilled in Hi

What we do every time we pray is to confess our impotence and God's sovereignty.

Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, 'Prayer happened, and I was there" more than "I prayed today". All you know is that you are being led, being guided, being loved, being used, being prayed through -- and you are no longer in the drivers seat.

(God's) nature, identity, and overarching purposes are no doubt unchanging. But his intentions with regard to many particular matters that concern individual human beings are not. This does not diminish him. Far from it. He would be a lesser God if he could not change his intentions when he thinks it is appropriate.

When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God’s throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people.

Man in his usual perversity turns the footstool into a throne from whence he would feign direct the Almighty as to what He ought to do, giving the onlooker the impression that if God had half the compassion that those who pray (?) have, all would quickly be right

If my words don't flow out of a heart that rests in God's control, sovereignty, then they come out of the heart that seeks control so I can get what I want.

Winter in the soul is by no means a comfortable season: but there is this comfort, namely, that the Lord makes it.

One of the great wonders of Christianity is that you were born into your times, to set your times aright.

She did not find these riches (of fulfillment). They were a gift from God.

What is most decisive is God's Joy Project is not that we fully grasp it, but that our sovereign God fully grasps us.

Those who understand God's sovereignty have joy even in the midst of suffering, a joy reflected on their very faces, for they see that their suffering is not without purpose.

God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.

In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.

God chose to introduce Himself to us in the first verse of Genesis as a Creator. And yet so few Christians really understand the power of creativity to influence the culture.

The greatness of the man's power is the measure of his surrender.

God is not some lesser employee, as many try to make Him out to be: rather He is the ultimate Treasure. He works in a man; He works on a man; He works through a man; He works around a man. Know that He does far more than simply work for a man. And yet, even as He Himself needs no one else, everyone else is ever in need of Him.

Man is most free when he is most guided.

You can't bluff an old theologian. Linus

Greater is Your care for me than all the care I am able to take from myself.

God often grants in a moment what He has long denied.

The Holy Ghost is no temporary gift, He abides with the saints. We have but to seek Him aright, and He will be found of us. He is jealous, but He is pitiful; if He leaves in anger, He returns in mercy. Condescending and tender, He does not weary of us, but awaits to be gracious still.

We must remember that all stations are as much about life as they are obviously about death. All is redeemed. All is grist for transformation and glory.

No man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and wither he is going. – Napoleon

Worship is the launching pad for life.

In a sermon entitled “God’s Providence,” C. H. Spurgeon said, “Napoleon once heard it said, that man proposes and God disposes. ‘Ah,’ said Napoleon, ‘but I propose and dispose too.’ How do you think he proposed and disposed? He proposed to go and take Russia; he proposed to make all Europe his. He proposed to destroy that power, and how did he come back again? How had he disposed it? He came back solitary and alone, his mighty army perished and wasted, having well-nigh eaten and devoured one ano

Sin is cosmic treason. Sin is treason against a perfectly pure Sovereign. It is an act of supreme ingratitude toward the One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself. Have you ever considered the deeper implications of the slightest sin, of the most minute peccadillo? What are we saying to our Creator when we disobey Him at the slightest point? We are saying no to the righteousness of God. We are saying, “God, Your law is not good. My judgement is better than Yours. You

On what grounds would God be told that He can bring death to millions of people at the end of a normal life span, but that He may not do it in any other way?

There is no such thing as a great man of God, only weak, pitiful, faithless men of a great and merciful God.

If there is one single reason why good people turn evil, it is because they fail to recognize God’s ownership over their kingdom, their vocation, their resources, their abilities, and above all their lives.

It is well for us when prayers about our sorrows are linked with pleas concerning our sins—when, being under God's hand, we are not wholly taken up with our pain, but remember our offences against God.

CS Lewis may make difficult questions accessible. I don't think he makes answers 'easy. – Debra Winger

The more unworthy you feel yourself to be, the more evidence have you that nothing but unspeakable love could have led the Lord Jesus to save such a soul as yours. The more demerit you feel, the clearer is the display of the abounding love of God in having chosen you, and called you, and made you an heir of bliss.

In brokenness comes beauty, divine fragility.

Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ and author of the Four Spiritual Laws chose three words for his tombstone: "slave for Jesus".

The author points out strikingly different reactions to calamity. While many passengers of a devastating shipwreck were thankful to be alive, future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau saw his being spared as proof of his exceptionalism rather than of the grace from which he benefited.

You can't believe what a lovely planet we have until you see her from outside.

The triune God exercises total government over all things, and He requires us as His image-bearers to exercise government in Christ in our own spheres in terms of His law.

Often the question of, "Who am I?" should be answered with, "Whose am I?

Author says writing about Jesus is difficult because it is like writing about a friend "who is still liable to surprise us.

Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue, Christian style.

The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.

I am pleased God made my skin black. I only wish He had to made it thicker.

Trying to figure out God is like trying to catch a fish in the Pacific Ocean with an inch of dental floss.

The clearest sensation that a human being has when he experiences the holy is an overpowering and overwhelming sense of creatureliness. That is, when we are in the presence of God, we are humbled and become most aware of ourselves as creatures. This is the opposite of Satan's original temptation, "You shall be as gods.

The sun was shining, but Christ had hidden Himself, and all the world was black to you; or it was night, and since the bright and morning star was gone, no other star could yield you so much as a ray of light. What a howling wilderness is this world without our Lord! If once He hideth Himself from us, withered are the flowers of our garden; our pleasant fruits decay; the birds suspend their songs, and a tempest overturns our hopes.

There is a certain mysticism in the Christian's affirmation of the physical universe. There is a confidence that whatever is discovered conforms with Jesus Christ and is a manifestation of His will.

If we need the protection of men, let us first ask it from God. If we prevail with Him, the power of the most mighty and of the most wicked must minister to our relief.

On observing 1963 America for the first time, the author says that organization and standardization to a certain degree compete with divine providence.

Justice is useful when money is useless.

Why should not He had made all things, still having something immediately to do with the things that He has made? Where lies the great difficulty, if we own the being of a God, that He created all things out of nothing, I'll be allowing something immediate influence of God on creation still?

Every time a believer mounts from this earth to paradise, it is an answer to Christ's prayer. A good old divine remarks, "Many times Jesus and His people pull against one another in prayer. You bend your knee in prayer and say 'Father, I will that Thy saints be with me where I am'; Christ says, 'Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am.

Not even generals can stop the rain.

You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

When we understand the character of God, when we grasp something of His holiness, then we begin to understand the radical character of our sin and hopelessness. Helpless sinners can survive only by grace. Our strength is futile in itself; we are spiritually impotent without the assistance of a merciful God. We may dislike giving our attention to God's wrath and justice, but until we incline ourselves to these aspects of God's nature, we will never appreciate what has been wrought for us by grace

No art like the art displayed in our salvation, no cunning workmanship like that beheld in the righteousness of the saints. Justification has engrossed learned pens in all ages of the church, and will be the theme of admiration in eternity.

That vague and wandering opinion of Deity is declared by an apostle to be ignorance of God:

A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.

Always, in Lincoln's mature theology, there is paradox. There is starting this, yet there is also tenderness; there is melancholy, yet there is also humor: there is moral law, yet there is also compassion. History is the scene of the working out God's justice, which we can never escape, but it is also the scene of the revelation of the everlasting mercy.

We are all theologians, either good ones or bad ones. I'd rather be a good one. Wouldn't you?

God, Lincoln believed, is seen more clearly events that in nature, though He maybe seen there also. It is a majestic thing, thought Lincoln, for a person to be RESPONSIBLE.

(Bonhoeffer's) change was not an ungainly, embarrassing leap from which he would have to retreat slightly when he gained more maturity and perspective. It was by all accounts a deepening consistent with what had gone before.

It is by suffering that Christ brings it in to the kingdoms of this world

I didn't know how faith felt when it grew incrementally.

God is the I AM that I AM not the I AM that we wish.

Struggle is a prerequisite to surrender.

Almightiness and wisdom combined will make no failures.

C.S. Lewis had come to demand of his nightly prayers a "realization," "a certain vividness of the imagination and the affectations" – a sure recipe for sleeplessness and misery.

I had rather mistrust my own capacity than God's justice.

As you call people to submit to the Person of Christ, you can trust the Spirit of Christ to lead them to salvation.

We cannot infer from prosperity that God is pleased with us, nor can we infer from adversity that he is displeased with us.

When God does not answer His children according to the letter, He does so according to the spirit. If thou askest for coarse meal, wilt thou be angered because He gives thee the finest flour? If thou seekest bodily health, shouldst thou complain if instead thereof He makes thy sickness turn to the healing of spiritual maladies?

Tomorrow's freedom is today's surrender.

The seed of acceptable devotion must come from heaven's storehouse. Only the prayer which comes from God can go to God.

Why do we calculate our forces, and consult with flesh and blood to our grievous wounding? Jehovah has power enough without borrowing from our puny arm.

The more God-centered our worship practices, the more mercy-centered our life.

If we know our original blessing, we can easily handle our original sin. If we rest in a previous dignity, we can bear insults effortlessly. If you really know your name is on some eternal list, you can let go of the irritations on the small lists of time. Ultimate security allows you to suffer small insecurity without tremendous effort. If you are tethered at some center point, it is amazing how far out you can fly and not get lost.

His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does.

We think in terms of apostolic journeys. God dares to put His greatest ambassadors in chains.

The call of God is a call according to the nature of God; where we go in obedience to that call depends entirely on the providential circumstances which God engineers, and is not of any moment. The danger is to fit the call of God into the idea of our own discernment and say, “God called me there.” If we say so and stick to it, then it is good-bye to the development of the life of God in us.

We are not bringing Christ to poor communities. He has been active in these communities since the creation of the world, sustaining them, Hebrews 1:3 says, by His powerful Word. Hence, a significant part of working in poor communities involves discovering and appreciating what God has been doing there for a LONG time.

He (Lincoln) differed from fanatical moralists primarily in that he was always perplexed. No sooner did he believe he was doing God's will that he began to admit that God's purposes might be different from his own. In short, he never forgot the men's contrast between the absolute goodness of God and the faltering goodness of all who are in the finite predicament.

The Bible attitude is not that God sends sickness or that sickness is of the devil, but that sickness is a fact usable by both God and the devil.

If we further consider this divine panoramic view within which all evil is supposedly a "secret good" is held by a God who, according to Scripture, has a passionate hatred toward all evil, the "solution" becomes more problematic still. For it is certainly not clear how God could hate what he himself wills and sees as a contributing ingredient in the good of the whole. If all things play themselves out according to a divine plan, how can God genuinely hate anything?

The smaller you get—the smaller life makes you—the easier it is to see the grandeur of grace. While I am far more incapable than I may have initially thought, God is infinitely more capable than I ever hoped.

Nothing in all the vast universe can come to pass otherwise than God has eternally purposed. Here is a foundation of faith. Here is a resting place for the intellect. Here is an anchor for the soul, both sure and steadfast. It is not blind fate, unbridled evil, man or Devil, but the Lord Almighty who is ruling the world, ruling it according to His own good pleasure and for His own eternal glory.

Supporting God's Scriptural ability to give or restrain man's desires, Jerry Bridges points to an amazing verse tucked away in Exodus 34:24. As Israel's people abandon their defense entirely to have a feast before Him three times per year, God says the surrounding peoples will be entirely devoid of even the logical desire to possess their land.

Paul looked down at the hand that had known pain, and then up to the Reverend Mother. The sound of her voice contained a difference than from any other voicing his experience. The words were outlined in brilliance. There was an edge to them.

Pain is holy ground in a person's life.