Against the persecution of a tyrant the godly have no remedy but prayer.
John CalvinRead
However many blessings we expect from God, His infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts.
Interpretation
God's generosity surpasses our expectations and desires.
This quote from John Calvin emphasizes the idea that no matter how many blessings we anticipate receiving from God, His generosity is far greater than we can even imagine. It invites us to reflect on the abundance of divine grace and encourages an attitude of gratitude, recognizing that our desires may be limited compared to what God is willing to provide.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a sermon to illustrate God's generosity to the congregation.
Against the persecution of a tyrant the godly have no remedy but prayer.
The pastor ought to have two voices: one, for gathering the sheep; and another, for warding off and driving away wolves and thieves. The Scripture supplies him with the means of doing both.
Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.
Whomever the Lord has adopted and deemed worthy of His fellowship ought to prepare themselves for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with very many and various kinds of evil.
For as the aged, or those whose sight is defective, when any book, however fair, is set before them, though they perceive that there is something written, are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly.
When God wants to judge a nation, He gives them wicked rulers.
He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness.
Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.
I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created.
I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.
It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.
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