Are you free?

Posted on July 4, 2010 by Barbara Harper

I discovered the following on the back of a church bulletin in a box I was cleaning out. It was written by a former pastor of our family’s, Jesse L. Boyd, for whom our son, Jesse, was named.

Are Your Free?

One of the frequent cries of our day is, “I want to be free.” Well, what is freedom? It is not the living of life without restraints of law.

It is not licentiousness or immorality, because their slimy arms can soon wrap us up in their dark and dismal prison-house of suffering.

It is not the lack of government, but rather the privilege of having the right of freely enjoying one’s own government.

It is true Americanism: founded on the Holy Bible, bequeathed to us by our forefathers, and symbolized in Old Glory — The Star-Spangled Banner — “Oh, long may it wave o’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”

It is the privilege of spending one’s treasure, of spilling one’s blood, and of being prompted by the spirit of liberty to stand against despotism and tyranny.

It is liberty and loyalty combined.

It is the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty.

It is the title to justice.

It is living as one should; no wicked man lives as he should, therefore, he is never free.

It is having full mastery over all matter.

Freedom ends where tyranny begins.

It comes by mastering one’s self.

It comes through knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

It comes through receiving Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1, NAS). “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2). Hallelujah! What a Saviour!

Freedom is that which one receives from God in the new birth. Man cannot govern himself, because, when all restraints are taken away, then evil dethrones him. He can only find rest (soul rest; freedom) in the arms of Jesus Christ. Are you free?

Laudable Linkage and Grandma’s Birthday

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Barbara Harper

We enjoyed celebrating Grandma’s 82nd birthday last night with Pizza, cake, presents and “Team Scrabble.”

I don’t know how many people are around this holiday weekend, but here are a few things I’ve enjoyed reading the past couple of weeks.

Sometimes It’s Just Plain Hard, a very honest perspective that not everyone has beautiful, inspiring last days and death, but the hardness is all the more reminder that death is an enemy and Christ has overcome it and offers new life.

Another on the subject of death: I was brought to tears by the text of The Long Goodnight, HT to Challies. My own preferences for musical style is more conservative than the accompaniment here, but the text is from an old German hymn.

Laura introduced me to the M. O. B. Society (Mothers of Boys) with the post A Woman of God in a Household of Boys.

The High Calling of a Wife and Mother in Biblical Perspective.

“If Anyone Destroys God’s Temple…” Very convicting, not the usual take you see on this passage.

Beware the anger of man that attempts to produce the righteousness of God.

How can I make sure I am regularly shepherding everyone in the church?

In the “something to think about” department: Girlie Christianity.

Hope all my American friends have a happy Independence Day! I’ve loved this explanation of the Declaration of Independence by Red Skelton since I first heard it:

Treasures

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Barbara Harper

I don’t know what brought this to mind this morning, but I decided to share it. I have never heard this song except at the church I attended as a teen when a new family came and sang it. I am not sure who wrote it — looking it up online I saw it quoted without an author several times, attributed to Martha Snell Nicholson a couple of times and a slightly different version of it in a poem by James S. Hewett. But whoever wrote it, it contains a good thought:

Treasures

One by one He took them from me
All the things I valued most;
‘Til I was empty-handed,
Every glittering toy was lost.

And I walked earth’s highways, grieving,
In my rags and poverty.
Until I heard His voice inviting,
“Lift those empty hands to Me!”

Then I turned my hands toward heaven,
And He filled them with a store
Of His own transcendent riches,
‘Till they could contain no more.

And at last I comprehended
With my stupid mind, and dull,
That God cannot pour His riches
Into hands already full.

The Week In Words

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Barbara Harper

Welcome to The Week In Words, where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us, attributing it to its source, which can be a book, newspaper, blog, Facebook — anything that you read. More information is here.

Here are some interesting quotes I saw this week:

From ivman:

“Nobody sins because they want to be miserable. We somehow think we’re better off to sin than to obey.” – Drew Conley

That reminds me about the verse that there is pleasure in sin for a season — but just a season. The misery from it will come soonser or later, but people forget that.

This one is a quote within a quote within a quote. 🙂 Girltalk quotes C. J. Mahaney quoting John Piper about reading:

Is reading worth the time investment when so much is forgotten? John Piper says yes.

In a message long ago (July 12, 1981) he said this:

What I have learned from about twenty-years of serious reading is this: It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don’t begrudge the 99%.

Read, but not to remember everything. Read because that 1% that you remember has to potential to change your life.

That is such a comfort to me, because I have gotten so frustrated with myself because I do tend to remember just a few sentences or principles rather than feeling as if I have a grasp of the whole book.

This is from p. 59 of Hoping for Something Better: Refusing to Settle for Life as Usual, a Bible study by Nancy Guthrie. It is an expansion on a similar quote from C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity about Christ being able to sympathize and help us in temptation because He faced temptation and resisted:

Jesus doesn’t roll his eyes and wonder how we could even consider taking a step in the direction we’re being tempted in. He doesn’t take lightly our struggles with sin, because he knows what it is like to be tempted. Jesus was tempted in all the ways we are — yet he never gave in to sin.

We might think that if Jesus never sinned, he really doesn’t know what temptation is like, But if you think about it, only the person who tries to resist temptation knows how strong it is. The one who gives in after a few minutes doesn’t know what it would be like after a few hours. Who has experienced greater temptation: the one who is tempted and quickly gives in to the temptation or the one who holds on and holds out and doesn’t give in? Christ, in never yielding to temptation, knows more about the strength of temptation and the suffering involved in temptation than we will ever know. He’s our advocate who understands.

If you have some family-friendly quotes you’d like to share, please leave the link to your “Week In Words” post with Mr. Linky below, and don’t forget to leave a comment telling me what you think about these quotes. And whether you have any you’d like to share, if you like reading you might find some interesting quotes at the other participants: I hope you’ll visit them as well.

Be Still My Soul

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Barbara Harper

“Be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10

Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change, He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul: thy God doth undertake
To guide the future, as He has the past.
Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake;
All now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know
His voice Who ruled them while He dwelt below.

Be still, my soul: when dearest friends depart,
And all is darkened in the vale of tears,
Then shalt thou better know His love, His heart,
Who comes to soothe thy sorrow and thy fears.
Be still, my soul: thy Jesus can repay
From His own fullness all He takes away.

Be still, my soul: the hour is hastening on
When we shall be forever with the Lord.
When disappointment, grief and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past
All safe and blessèd we shall meet at last.

Be still, my soul: begin the song of praise
On earth, believing, to Thy Lord on high;
Acknowledge Him in all thy words and ways,
So shall He view thee with a well pleased eye.
Be still, my soul: the Sun of life divine
Through passing clouds shall but more brightly shine.

~ Katharina A. von Schlegel, 1855

The Week In Words

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Barbara Harper

Here are some interesting quotes I saw this week:

From various friends’ Facebook status updates:

“Where the heart is willing, it will find a thousand ways. Where it is unwilling, it will find a thousand excuses.”~ Arlen Price

“The benefit of memorizing Scripture is so you can be thinking God’s thoughts; trading your thoughts for His; meditating on what’s important to God instead of what’s important to yourself.” ~ Nancy Leigh DeMoss.

Seen at Brenda‘s:

Right is right even if no one’s doing it.
Wrong is wrong even if everyone’s doing it.

Seen at Dawn‘s:

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. ~Mignon McLaughlin.

I’ve marked a number of quotes in Hoping for Something Better: Refusing to Settle for Life as Usual, a Bible study by Nancy Guthrie. The parts emphasized in each one are my emphasis, the parts that particularly jumped out at me.:

Christianity is corporate. There are no lone rangers in the body. We need each other. And we need to encourage each other. Maybe you are full of courage today. If so, then offer some of yours to someone else. Don’t operate in the body looking only to get your needs met. Look for needs that you can uniquely meet, and in the process you’ll find your needs uniquely met. (p. 117).

[In regard to those who say they can’t forgive themselves…] If God says we are forgiven, who are we to keep punishing ourselves? If we refuse to forgive ourselves, it is as if we are saying that we are greater than God, that our judgment is higher than His. (p. 105).

When God forgives, it doesn’t mean He looks at our sin and says, “It doesn’t matter. It is no big deal.” When He said He would forgive our wickedness, He knew what it would cost. He knew that the price for sin would be paid through the death of a perfect sacrifice — His own Son. (p. 97).

While Hebrew 4:1 has an invitation, it also has a warning. “Since the promise of entering His rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it”….In the New Living translation this verse reads, “We ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience it.” Here we learn that there is something worth being afraid of — terrified of — in this life: unbelief, not trusting God. It is a scary thing to hear and know the promises of God and to choose not to trust them — to decide we don’t really need them or want them, to walk away from them rather than enter into them. (p. 46).

Forgive me for including quite so many: I know that the more there is, the longer the post, the more people’s eyes glaze over and they tend to skim rather than read carefully. I know quotes make more impact when there are just a few succinct ones. Yet…I didn’t feel I could leave any of these out.

If you have some family-friendly quotes you’d like to share, please leave the link to your “Week In Words” post with Mr. Linky below, and don’t forget to leave a comment telling me what you think about these quotes. 🙂 And whether you have any you’d like to share, if you like reading you might find some interesting quotes at the other participants: I hope you’ll visit them as well.

Book Review: Hope and Help For Your Nerves

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Barbara Harper

It’s not unusual to have some physical symptom of stress, nervousness or anxiety. Even world class athletes have reported throwing up before a big match, and many seasoned performers and public speakers battle “stage fright” with sweaty, shaky hands. Nausea, vomiting, headaches, multiple trips to the bathroom are just a few physical manifestations.

In some people, though, those reactions appear in excess, or at the slightest trigger. Sometimes this overreaction or over-sensitization to stimuli occurs after a prolonged problem or illness when the sufferer is depleted or exhausted. Sometimes it occurs as what Dr. Claire Weekes in her book Hope and Help For Your Nerves calls “second fear” — fear of the symptoms themselves, fear that they might crop up at just the wrong moment (which they then do), anxiety that they crop up with so little provocation.

The first instinct or first advice, if you talk to someone else about it, is to fight against it. But fighting releases adrenalin, which heightens all those symptoms. And you can’t reason it away as an irrational fear of something that will likely not happen, because it has happened before, and at the worst times. As this over-sensitization continues, it sometimes grows and produces other problems.

A summary of Dr. Weekes advice would be to face and accept the fears, anxieties, and their physical symptoms rather than run from them, “float” past them rather than fight them, and be patient, letting enough time pass to change the conditioned responses of your mind and body to new ones. She explains all of these to greater degrees in her book and applies them to various scenarios.

If you’re prone to feel symptoms that you read about, you may want to skip parts of the book that deal with the escalation of symptoms and problems that a person experiences when these reactions go unchecked, lest you add fears of that happening to your other fears.

Though the book is not written from a Christian vantage point, it is not anti-Christian: Dr. Weekes acknowledges that “religion is a good friend” to those trying to recover from nervous illness. She doesn’t say this, but in my opinion Christians have an additional layer to deal with because they feel guilty: we think Christians shouldn’t have panic attacks, anxiety, or fear. In fact, I wrestled for a time with guilt over any kind of physical response to nervousness or fear, thinking I wasn’t exercising faith, until my pastor said something in a message to the effect that, if you are taking a walk and a dog starts chasing you, as you run to find a tree to climb with an angry dog nipping at your heels, you may fully trust that the Lord is with you and will help you deal with whatever happens, but your heart will still be racing. An over-reaction to the normal fears of life is a product of faulty thinking, and Christians are as prone to that as anyone else and in need to changing their thinking to right patterns. And sometimes the practical considerations need to be dealt with alongside or even before dealing with the spiritual issues. When Elijah fled, fearful and discouraged, from Jezebel in I Kings 19, the first thing the Lord did was to let him sleep, then send an angel to give him food and drink before dealing with the issue at hand. In Dr. Jim Berg’s Quieting a Noisy Soul series, he has a quick start section for those dealing with debilitating symptoms and who need immediate help. Of course, he deals with all of the things that disquiet the soul from a Biblical stance and in much more depth, and I hope that some day he will subdivide the series so that people can purchase the book, DVDs, etc. individually and more affordably rather than having to buy the whole kit when there will be parts of it they don’t use. But in the meantime he has a lot of excellent resources and helps on his site. I found Dr. Weekes’ book a helpful companion to Dr. Berg’s series. She does not advocate the Eastern religious types of meditation or other practices that would be cause for concern for the Christian.

I would not agree with every single point. For example, she advises that someone suffering extremely from these responses have companionship and not be left alone. But I have found that sometimes having to keep up with conversations and even someone else’s presence adds to the over-sensitization, and I can relax more fully when alone. I think one’s personality determines whether or not solitude is helpful or harmful. Overall, though, I found the book very helpful and practical.

(This review will be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books).

The Week In Words

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Barbara Harper

I am sorry to be so late with this today. Getting back from a trip with its associated laundry and grocery runs, company, and then having the kids over til pretty late last night prevented me from pre-preparing a this post, then I slept in a little to recover from all of that. 🙂

I saw this first quote at Carrie’s in her review of the book Purity: A Godly Woman’s Adornment by Lydia Brownback. This is her succinct definition of purity:

“It is to have a single goal, a single focus, and a single purpose for ourselves and for our lives. . . . At its core, purity is having a heart for the Lord that isn’t watered down or polluted by lesser things.”

I don’t have that book, but I do have the one on Trust in the series waiting for me.

This quote is longer than I would usually share here, but I felt it was all needed. This is from the June 14 reading of Our Daily Walk by F. B. Meyer. You can read the whole excerpt here by scrolling down to June 14. In discussing the man with the one talent from the parable of the talents, Meyer says the person with one talent may feel discouraged by his limitations. Then he goes on to say:

But the world will never be saved and helped unless the one-talented people, who are the great majority, can be aroused to a sense of their responsibility. Five men can put the whole energy of their manhood behind their single talents, whilst the one man with five talents has only the driving power of one. It is probably a greater thing in God’s sight to use one talent faithfully than many. No one notices the man with his humble one talent. There is no outburst of praise or cheering. It is a greater test of the quality of the soul to go on doing one small thing well, than to be able to turn with brilliant versatility from one talent to another. …

But the one thing that our Lord demands of each of us is to be faithful–faithful in a very little. He is watching each of us with great eagerness as we live our daily life, because He knows, as we cannot realise, how much our position in the other world depends on our fidelity in this. It is for our sake that He is so anxious that we should make good use of our one talent.

Have you only one talent? Are you doing anything with it? Remember it is the ounce-weight that may turn the scales where hundred-weights are balanced; it is the tiny tug that can move the great liner. Be thou faithful in thy very little, and thou shalt receive the “Well done” of thy Lord.

If you’re joining us for The Week In Words with your own post, please leave a link to your family-friendly quotes for today below so other participants can read them. And please feel free to read and comment whether you have a link to share or not!

The Week In Words

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Barbara Harper

This first quote is from Hope and Help For Your Nerves by Dr. Claire Weekes, p.118:

You are never defeated while you are ready to go on. The road to recovery is beset with many temporary failures. It is like traveling across the foothills toward the mountains. You travel downhill so often that it is difficult to realize that, in spite of this, you are still climbing.

There are so many applications of this beyond just the scope of this book. Any recovery from anything, any improvement, any change of bad habits for a good one, etc., all have that up and down aspect, but that word picture of going through the foothills is such a great one: we’re still climbing even though we’re on and up-and-down path, and we’re never defeated unless we give up.

I haven’t been using Joy and Strength as a devotional book this year, but I used it for a number of years and marked some of my favorite quotations from it. The June 6 reading is:

I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou shalt enlarge my heart.
PSALMS 119:32

My hands also will I lift up unto Thy commandments, which I have loved.
PSALMS 119:48

LOVE is higher than duty. But the reason is that love in reality contains duty in itself. Love without a sense of duty is a mere delusion, from which we cannot too soon set ourselves free. Love is duty and something more.
FREDERICK TEMPLE

THINK not anything little, wherein we may fulfil His commandments. It is in the midst of common and ordinary duties that our life is placed; common occupations make up our lives. By faith and love we obey; but by obedience are the faith and love, which God gives us, strengthened. Then shall we indeed love our Lord, when we seek to please Him in all things, speak or are silent, sleep or wake, labor or rest, do or suffer, with a single eye to His service. God give us grace so to love Him, that we may in all things see Him; in all, obey; and, obeying, see Him more clearly and love Him less unworthily; and so, in that blissful harmony of obedience and of love, be prepared to see Him “face to face.”
EDWARD B. PUSEY

I like the thoughts about how love and duty are intertwined. We tend to shrink away from words like “duty” and “obedience,” yet they show what and how we love.

And going along with the above quotes is this from page 46 of Jane Austen’s Little Instruction Book, a “mini-book” compilation of quotes from her books.

There is one thing…which a man can always do, if he chooses, and that is, his duty; not by maneuvering and finessing, but by vigour and resolution. Mr. Knightly, Emma.

I would add that without Him we can do nothing (John 15:5), but we “can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth” us (Philippians 4:13).

If you’re joining us for The Week In Words with your own post, please leave a link to your family-friendly quotes for today below so other participants can read them.

Simply Trusting

Posted on June 6, 2010 by Barbara Harper

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Hebrews 11:6

Simply trusting every day,
Trusting through a stormy way;
Even when my faith is small,
Trusting Jesus, that is all.

Refrain

Trusting as the moments fly,
Trusting as the days go by;
Trusting Him whate’er befall,
Trusting Jesus, that is all.

Brightly does His Spirit shine
Into this poor heart of mine;
While He leads I cannot fall;
Trusting Jesus, that is all.

Refrain

Singing if my way is clear,
Praying if the path be drear;
If in danger for Him call;
Trusting Jesus, that is all.

Refrain

Trusting Him while life shall last,
Trusting Him till earth be past;
Till within the jasper wall,
Trusting Jesus, that is all.

Refrain

~ Edgar P. Stites