Success is Costly[1]

Success in any field is costly, but the man who will pay the price can have it.

The concert pianist must become a slave to hi instrument: four hours, five hours each day he must sit at the keyboard. The scientist must live for his work. The philosopher must devote himself to thought, the scholar to his books. The price may seem excessively heavy, but there are some who consider the reward worthwhile.

The laws of success operate also in the higher field of the soul--spiritual greatness has its price. Eminence in the things of the Spirit demands a devotion to these things more complete than most of us are willing to give. But the law cannot be escaped. If we would be holy we know the way; the law of holy living is before us. The prophets of the Old Testament, the apostles of the New and more than all the sublime teachings of Christ are there to tell us how to succeed.

If we would progress spiritually we must separate ourselves into the things of God and concentrate to the exclusion of a thousand of things the worldly man considers important. We must cultivate God in the solitude and silence; we must make the Kingdom of God the sphere of our activity and labour in it like a farmer in his field, like a miner in the earth.

[1]A.W. Tozer. We Travel an Appointed Way.

True Worship

True Worship

He who prays must speak to God as though he were in God's very presence, for the Lord is everywhere, in every place, in every person, and especially in the soul of the righteous. Therefore let us not seek God on earth, nor in heaven, nor anywhere else, let us seek Him in our own hearts, as the prophet says, “I will pay attention to what the Lord shall say to me” (Psalm 85:8). In prayer, a person may pay attention to his own words, which I merely outward thing; or he may pay attention to the meaning of his words, which is study rather than prayer, or he may fix his thoughts on God, and this alone is true prayer. We must not consider the words or the sentences, but lift our souls above self and almost lose self in the thought of God. When the believer has attained this state, he forgets the world and worldly desires, and has a kind of foretaste of heaven's joy. The uneducated as well as the learned can just as easily rise up to this height. Indeed, it often happens that someone who recites the Psalms without particularly understanding what they mean, prays more acceptably than a scholar who can interpret them. Words are not essential to prayer. On the contrary, when a person is really caught up in a spirit of devotion, speech becomes a hindrance, and silent mental prayer should take its place. This shows the great error of those who tell us to work our way through a set number of spoken prayers. The Lord takes no joy in a multitude of words, but in a fervent spirit.

No doubt those whose only concern is to defend the Church's ceremonies and outward rituals will attack me for saying this. My answer is the words of the Saviour to the woman of Samaria: “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth” (John 4:21,23). This means that the Lord desires inward worship, without so many outward worship-practices. This was the custom in the early Church, when people could raise their thoughts to God without any need of being stirred up by organ music or singing. But when fervor grew cold, rituals came in like medicine to sick souls. However, in our day, Christians have become like a man who is so sick tat all his natural strength has vanished, and no medicines can help him. All fervor and inward worship are dead, and outward worship-practices become ever more numerous, although they have no sanctifying power. Therefore we proclaim to the world that outward worship must give way to inward, and that rituals are nothing unless they enable the human spirit to worship truly.

From Girolamo Savonarola, Concerning Mental Prayer.[1]



Girolamo Savonarola was regarded by Luther and others a a forerunner of the Reformation for two reasons. First, Savonarola was a strong Augustinian in his understanding of God's sovereign grace in salvation. Second, he defied the papacy, and paid for his defiance with his life.











[1] N.R. Needham. 2004. 2000 Years of Christ's Power, Part Three: Renaissance and Reformation. London, England: Grace Publications Trust.

Renaissance and Reformation

I will start a new thread of blog but this time I'll be writing on the very interesting topic of Church History with emphasis on the Renaissance and Reformation.

"The Renaissance (from French Renaissance, meaning "rebirth"; Italian: Rinascimento, from re- "again" and nascere "be born")[1] was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historic era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform, this is a very general use of the term."--Wikipedia

Whenever I hear the word "Renaissance", the first thought that comes to my mind is art, and of course the famous artists who flourished at that time. We have Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian. Although, one cannot deny the fact that there was an artistic revolution during the Renaissance. But the true nature of the subject of Renaissance is still an on-going debate today. On the perspective of the Church history, only few can doubt the role of Renaissance as the fore-runner of the great Reformation. Renaissance is the same name given by the historians to a cluster of important developments within Western culture at the close of the Middle Ages.

My main reference material in this thread (I must confess) is the book by N.R. Needham: 2000 Years of Christ's Power. Part Three: Renaissance and Reformation. Actually, I will be lifting most of my topics and discussions from this very valuable book. This was given to me by a highly-esteemed preacher-teacher reformer, Noel A. Espinosa.



Nick Needham is a Londoner by birth and upbringing. He studied theology at New College, Edinburgh University, where he specialized in Church History. He also taught a course at New College on the life and works of the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli, at the same time completing his Ph.D. thesis on the nineteenth-century Scottish theologian Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. He then taught Systematic Theology at the Scottish Baptist College in Glasgow for several years before spending a semester at the Samuel Bill Theological College, where he taught Church History. After a period as assistant pastor in a church in north London, he moved to the Highland Theological College, Dingwall, where he teaches Church History. He recently accepted a call to a pastorate in Inverness. --from the back cover of the 2000 Years of Christ's Power.