Overcoming temptation is a battle, and one’s attitude in the midst of battle is critical. In The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, Hannah Whitall Smith stressed the importance of cheerfulness. It’s more than a gift or a blessing. It’s a weapon.
In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer wrote that the fellowship of Christ’s suffering means communion with God even in separation from Him.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his 1937 classic, The Cost of Discipleship, as a call to return to the original vision of the Protestant Reformation. According to Bonhoeffer, “When the Reformation came, the providence of God raised Martin Luther to restore the gospel of pure, costly grace.”
When Jesus calls you to follow Him—and He never stops calling you to follow Him—He is calling you to take a step of faith. He doesn’t wait until you already believe before He calls you. He speaks to you where you are, in unbelief, just as He invited Peter to step out of the boat and walk to Him on the water.
When Jesus said, “Come,” Peter was still in the boat and still could not believe that he was looking a Jesus. The command of Jesus enabled Peter to step out of unbelief and into faith, just at it had done and would continue to do over and over again throughout his life.
This is an argument that Dietrich Bonhoeffer made in chapter two of The Cost of Discipleship. That first step of obedience is critical, he explained, and you can’t wait for faith to motivate you to take it because it itself is a step into faith.
A watered-down gospel produces watered-down Christians. When we read, in the Gospels, about Jesus calling disciples, we see that He didn’t make it easy to follow Him, but He made it worth it. We also see that there was a difference between the crowd and the disciples. Jesus didn’t call crowds, He called disciples.
In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that the grace of salvation is also the call to discipleship. “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow,” he wrote, “and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.”
In a sermon entitled “The Use of Money,” John Wesley laid down his three easy-to-remember rules that he thought should direct every Christian’s attitude toward money: gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can.
When we read about what happened to Joseph in the book of Genesis we see many ways that he was a type of Christ. While some of the prophetic parallels are obvious, some are easy to miss. Watchman Nee, in The Normal Christian Life, pointed out one that I had always overlooked.
These are all from Murray’s book, Humility.
Andrew Murray’s remarkable accomplishments make him someone worth listening to on this subject. He had an awful lot to be proud of yet seemed to know an awful lot about humility.
Define humility in 15 words or less. Murray boiled it down to this:
“Humility is nothing but the disappearance of self in the vision that God is all.”
A. W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy is a book about the attributes of God, with each chapter focused on a different attribute. Published in 1961.
This quote is the first sentence of Chapter One. What a great way to start a book.
“What comes to our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
Hannah Whitall Smith published The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life in 1875, at the height of her popularity as a speaker, along with her husband, in the Higher Life movement. It’s a good example of the preaching that was prevalent at the beginnings of the Keswick Convention in England and in the Holiness movement in America, with its emphasis on trusting God to develop and maintain personal holiness. Here are three lessons she taught about such trust.
