This was like watching murder. Defilement. And it was something worse than either of those things. Even among his family, black trade as they were, books were holy things.
I do not know you, my friends, not individually, most of you, but this is the wonderful thing about the work of a preacher, he does not need to know his congregation. Do you know why? Because I know the most important thing about every single one of you, and that is that each of you is a vile sinner. I do not care who you are, because all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. I do not care what particular form your sin takes. There is a great deal of attention paid to that today. The preacher is not interested in that. I do not want a catalogue of your sins. I do not care what your sins are. They can be very respectable or they can be heinous, vile, foul, filthy. It does not matter, thank God. But what I have authority to tell you is this. Though you may be the vilest man or woman ever known, and though you may until this moment have lived your life in the gutters and the brothels of sin in every shape and form, I say this to you: be it known unto you that through this man, this Lord Jesus Christ, is preached unto you the forgiveness of sin. And by him all who believe, you included, are at this very moment justified entirely and completely from everything you have ever done_ if you believe that this is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and that he died there on the cross, for your sins and to bear your punishment. If you believe that, and thank him for it, and rely utterly only upon him and what he has done, I tell you, in the name of God, all your sins are blotted out completely, as if you had never sinned in your life, and his righteousness is put on you and God sees you perfect in his Son. That is the message of the cross, that is Christian preaching, that it is our Lord who saves us, by dying on the cross, and that nothing else can save us, but that that can save whosoever believeth in him.
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I do not know you, my friends, not individually, most of you, but this is the wonderful thing about the work of a preacher, he does not need to know his congregation. Do you know why? Because I know the most important thing about every single one of you, and that is that each of you is a vile sinner. I do not care who you are, because all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. I do not care what particular form your sin takes. There is a great deal of attention paid to that today. The preacher is not interested in that. I do not want a catalogue of your sins. I do not care what your sins are. They can be very respectable or they can be heinous, vile, foul, filthy. It does not matter, thank God. But what I have authority to tell you is this. Though you may be the vilest man or woman ever known, and though you may until this moment have lived your life in the gutters and the brothels of sin in every shape and form, I say this to you: be it known unto you that through this man, this Lord Jesus Christ, is preached unto you the forgiveness of sin. And by him all who believe, you included, are at this very moment justified entirely and completely from everything you have ever done_ if you believe that this is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and that he died there on the cross, for your sins and to bear your punishment. If you believe that, and thank him for it, and rely utterly only upon him and what he has done, I tell you, in the name of God, all your sins are blotted out completely, as if you had never sinned in your life, and his righteousness is put on you and God sees you perfect in his Son. That is the message of the cross, that is Christian preaching, that it is our Lord who saves us, by dying on the cross, and that nothing else can save us, but that that can save whosoever believeth in him.
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So you're lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God, But He can't hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody'll ever hear you.
I saw the massive stone altar first begin to glow like a ruby; then it was a heart of liquid gold like a solid single-crystal chrysoprase: the gold intensified into ice-cold emerald and passed into the dark sapphire of an arctic sky; this again withdrew into a violet so deep that the visual purple of the eye itself seemed absorbed in that depth, that abyss of color in which sight was being drowned. And as this intensification of vibrancy seemed to sweep across the visible spectrum up to those ranges where energy absorbs all mass and that which can pierce the most solid is itself fine beyond all substance, so it seemed with hearing. That abyss of sound which I had been thinking of as only depth, it, too, seemed to rise or, rather, I suppose I was carried up on some rising wave which explored the deep of the height.As the light drew toward the invisible, I experienced a sound so acute that I can only remember feeling to myself that this was the note emitted when the visible universe returns to the unmanifest__his was the consummatum est of creation. I knew that an aperture was opening in the solid manifold. The things of sense were passing with the music of their own transmutation, out of sight. Veil after veil was evaporating under the blaze of the final Radiance. Suddenly I knew terror as never before. The only words which will go near to recreating in me some hint of that actual mode are those which feebly point toward the periphery of panic by saying that all things men dread are made actually friendly by this ultimate awfulness. Every human horror, every evil that the physical body may suffer, seemed, beside this that loomed before me, friendly, homely, safe. The rage of a leaping tiger would have been a warm embrace. The hell of a forest wrapped in a hurricane of fire, the subzero desolation of the antarctic blizzard, would have been only the familiar motions of a simple well-known world. Yes, even the worst, most cunning and cruel evil would only be the normal reassuring behavior of a well-understood, much-sympathized-with child. Against This, the ultimate Absolute, how friendly became anything less, anything relative.
Similitude of the heart is like that of a telephone operator between man and God.
When someone studies well, has a successful career, or deals with difficulties well, people think he is a wise man. However, such successes do not mean that one is wise. True wisdom is to know with the consciousness of God.
It is not solely or chiefly in virtue of the divine image that man effectively resembles God, but in virtue of his consciousness of being an image and the movement whereby the soul, passing in a way through itself, avails itself of the factual resemblance in order to attain to God.