Lizzy Tonkin > Recent Status Updates

“We know the Holy Spirit first by the testimony of Jesus, and then by the conscious enjoyment of His presence.”

“Our Lord in His teaching always considered prayer work, not preparation for work.”

“Beware of making God fit the mold of His own precedent. Just because He did a certain thing once, does not mean He is sure to do it again…We have taken ourselves so seriously we cannot even see God; we are dictating to God.”

“We think of prayer as preparation for work, or claim after having done work, whereas prayer is the essential work.”

“The great difficulty in intercession is myself, nothing less or more…I must learn not to take myself too seriously.”

“A man has the Spirit of Jesus given to him, but he has not His mind until he forms it. How are we to form the mind of Christ? By letting His Spirit imbue our spirit, our thinking, and our reasoning faculties.”

“The characteristic of the Holy Spirit in a man is a strong family likeness to Jesus and freedom from everything unlike Jesus.”

“So many of us limit our praying because we are not reckless in our confidence in God.”

“We have to pray relying upon what has been revealed by the sent-down Holy Spirit, and the first revelation is that we do not know how to pray.”

“Jesus prayed that you might be one with the age that as He is; are you helping His answer His prayer, or have you another end for your life?”

“He did not choose the solitary places; he was driven by the Spirit of God into the wilderness. It is not good to be alone; evil will make a person want to be alone. Jesus Christ does not make religious hermits; he makes men and women fit for the world as it is.”

“It will be a wonderful moment when we stand before Gos and find that the prayers we clamored for in early days and imagined were never answered, have been answered in the most amazing way, and that God’s silence has been the sign of the answer. If we always want to be able to point to something and say, ‘This is the way God answered by prayer,’ God cannot trust us yet with his silence.”

“God’s silences are his answers. If we only take as an answer those that are visible to our senses, we are in a very elementary condition of grace.”

“It is not prayer that is strenuous, but the overcoming of our own laziness. If we make the basis of prayer our effort and agony, we mistake the basis of prayer. The basis of prayer is not what it cost us, but what it cost God to enable us to pray.”

“Do not go too long in the light of undisciplined vision. Thank God for the triumphant minute, but we have to walk on earth according to what we saw in vision . . . Thank God for seeing Jesus transfigured, and for the almightiness of the visions He does give, but remember that the vision is to be made real in actual circumstances; the glory is to be manifested in earthen vessels.”

“The difficulty is that when we do what God wants us to do, our friends say, ‘It is all very well, but suppose we all did that?’ Our Lord did not tell all the disciples to sit there while He prayed; He told only three of them. The point is that we must take as from God the haphazard arrangements of our lives.”

“It is not so true that ‘Prayer changes things’ as that prayer changes us, and then we change things. Consequently we must not ask God to do what He has created us to do. For instance, Jesus Christ is not a social reformer; He came to alter us first, and if there is any social reform to be done on earth, we must do it.”

“Some say that a man will suffer in his life if he does not pray. I question it. Prayer is an interruption of personal ambition, and no person who is busy has time to pray.”

“Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life to confirm, prompts the betting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.”

“what is beautiful is in league with what is true because truth abides in the immortal sphere.”

Essay 26: What Christmas Means to Me

“If it were my business to have a ‘view’ on this, I should say that I much approve of merrymaking. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business.”

Essay 25: The Sermon and the Lunch

“The family, like the nation, can be offered to God, can be converted and redeemed, and will then become the channel of particular blessings and graves. But, like everything else that is human, it needs redemption. Unredeemed, it will produce only particular temptations, corruptions, and miseries. Charity begins at home: so does uncharity.”

Essay 24: Cross-examination

Essay 23: God in the Dock

Essay 22: Modern Translations of the Bible

Essay 21: Vivisection

Essay 20: The Decline of Religion

“The fog of “religion” has lifted; the positions and numbers of both armies can be observed; and real shooting is now possible.”

Essay 19: Scraps

Essay 18: On the Reading of Old Books

“It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring then secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

Essay 17: Two Ways With the Self

“The wrong asceticism torments the self: the right kind kills selfless. We must die daily: but it is better to love the self than to love nothing, and pity the self than to pity no one.”