RNDL

One of God's little ones living in Brazil since 1984. Main blog is a must-visit.

Two significant results

Now may the God of peace—who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep, and ratified an eternal covenant with his blood—may he equip you with all you need for doing his will. May he produce in you, through the power of Jesus Christ, every good thing that is pleasing to him. All glory to him forever and ever! Amen. Heb 13.20-21 NLT

This verse includes two significant results of Christ’s death and resurrection. God works in us to make us the kind of people that would please him, and he equips us to do the kind of work that would please him. (BibleHub)

A man is three things

A man is three things. … He is a body to act, a mind to think, a spirit to feel. —André Norton, Witch World

Is the spirit for feeling? Is it not rather for relating to God? Or perhaps for spirit we should read heart (or as the ancients considered it, the entrails or the kidneys), and consider a fourth: the soul to love God.

Live to win souls

Not a big Spurgeon fan, but this is good. I have slightly updated the language.

“I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” 1 Corinthians 9:22.

Paul’s great objective was not merely to instruct and to improve, but to save. Anything short of this would have disappointed him; he would have people renewed in heart, forgiven, sanctified, in fact, saved. Have our Christian labors been aimed at anything below this great point? Then let us amend our ways, for of what avail will it be at the last great day to have taught and moralized men if they appear before God unsaved?

Blood-red will our skirts be if through life we have sought inferior objects, and forgotten that men needed to be saved. Paul knew the ruin of man’s natural state, and did not try to educate him, but to save him; he saw men sinking to hell, and did not talk of refining them, but of saving from the wrath to come.

To compass their salvation, he gave himself up with untiring zeal to telling abroad the gospel, to warning and beseeching people to be reconciled to God. His prayers were importunate and his labors incessant. To save souls was his consuming passion, his ambition, his calling. He became a servant to all people, toiling for his race, feeling a woe within him if he preached not the gospel. He laid aside his preferences to prevent prejudice; he submitted his will in things indifferent, and if people would but receive the gospel, he raised no questions about forms or ceremonies: the gospel was the one all-important business with him. If he might save some he would be content. This was the crown for which he strove, the sole and sufficient reward of all his labors and self-denials.

Dear reader, have you and I lived to win souls at this noble rate? Are we possessed with the same all-absorbing desire? If not, why not? Jesus died for sinners, cannot we live for them? Where is our tenderness? Where is our love to Christ, if we seek not his honor in the salvation of others? O that the Lord would saturate us through and through with an undying zeal for the souls of men!