Give yourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word. If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry, as He did me, to teach you to pray.
Robert Murray M'CheyneRead
I ought to spend the best hours of the day in communion with God. It is my noblest and most fruitful employment, and is not to be thrust into any corner.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes prioritizing time spent in spiritual reflection and communion with God as a vital and noble pursuit.
Robert Murray M'Cheyne highlights the importance of dedicating one's best time to connect with God, viewing this spiritual communion as not only the highest calling but also the most productive use of one's hours. He suggests that such spiritual engagements should not be relegated to the peripheries of our lives but should be central to our daily existence, reflecting their significance in personal fulfillment and moral development.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the importance of prayer and meditation.
Give yourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word. If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry, as He did me, to teach you to pray.
I ought to pray before seeing any one. Often when I sleep long, or meet with others early, it is eleven or twelve o'clock before I begin secret prayer. I feel it is far better to begin with God-to see His face first, to get my soul near Him before it is near another.
Rose early to seek God and found Him whom my soul loveth. Who would not rise early to meet such company?
Live near to God, and so all things will appear to you little In comparison to eternal realities.
If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies.
The greatest need of my people is my own holiness.
Let's stop 'tolerating' or 'accepting' difference, as if we're so much better for not being different in the first place. Instead, let's celebrate difference, because in this world it takes a lot of guts to be different.
But we are not interested in death at all: rather, we escape the facts, we are continuously escaping the facts. Death is there, and every moment we are dying. Death is not something far away, it is here and now: we are dying. But while we are dying we go on being concerned about life. This concern with life, this over concern with life, is just an escape, just a fear. Death is there, deep inside - growing.
I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
In 1986, Pakistan got the blasphemy law. So, while we had just two cases of blasphemy before that year, now we have thousands. It shows that one should be careful while bringing religion into legislation, because the law itself can become an instrument of persecution.
I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.
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