Category: Odds & Ends

“Obedience to God’s will is the secret of spiritual knowledge and insight. It is not willingness to know, but willingness to do God’s will that brings certainty.” — Eric Liddell

“Prayer is reaching out after the unseen; fasting is letting go of all that is seen and temporal. Fasting helps express, deepen, confirm the resolution that we are ready to sacrifice anything, even ourselves to attain what we seek for the kingdom of God.” – Andrew Murray

“If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.” — John Piper, A Hunger For God

“You cannot make men good by law; and without good men you cannot have a good society.” — C. S. Lewis

Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky died on this day, October 15th, in 1906 at the age of seventy-five. Born in Lithuania in 1831, he went to Germany to study for the rabbinate, where he became a Christian. He emigrated to America, trained for the priesthood, and was sent by the Episcopal Church to China. There, he translated the Bible into Mandarin, was elected bishop of Shanghai, founded St. John’s University, and began translating the Bible into Wenli, another Chinese dialect.

However, he developed Parkinson’s disease and became largely paralyzed. Resigning his bishopric, he spent the rest of his life completing his Wenli Bible, typing the last two thousand pages with the one finger that he could still move.

Four years before his death, he said:

“I have sat in this chair for over twenty years. It seemed very hard at first. But God knew best. He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted.” – Dr. Jim Denison

“Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.” — Oswald Chambers

“Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace, and your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.” — Jerry Bridges

“It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.” — A. A. Hodge

Merriam-Webster – Synonyms for INTREPID: courageous, brave, fearless, valiant, heroic, gallant, heroical, adventurous;

“No one can sum up all God is able to accomplish through one solitary life, wholly yielded, adjusted, and obedient to him.” — Dwight L. Moody

“A life isn’t significant except for its impact on other lives.” — Jackie Robinson

October 6, 2025

By: Dr. Jim Denison

“The disposition of sin is not immorality and wrongdoing, but the disposition of self-realization—I am my own god.” – Oswald Chambers

The good news, as he added is this: “The moral miracle of redemption is that God can put into me a new disposition whereby I can live a totally new life.” This happens when we yield to God’s Spirit, allowing him to recreate “the disposition that was in Jesus Christ.”

Here we discover one way God redeems the moral failures that dominate each day’s news: as Chambers notes, God cannot work this miracle of transformation in my life “until I am conscious I need it.” Our Father cannot change our hearts without our hearts’ consent.

This is why the first beatitude is foundational to the Sermon that follows: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). When we honestly recognize our abject spiritual poverty, we abdicate the throne of our hearts and enthrone God as our king.

As a result, we experience the “kingdom of heaven,” that realm where God’s will is done “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

Imagine such a life-transforming, grace-infused, love-centered world. Now decide if you will pay the price to experience it personally.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously observed,

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

“A day must come in our lives, as definite as the day of our conversion, when we give up all right to ourselves and submit to the absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ.” —Watchman Nee