E. Stanley Jones
E. Stanley Jones
Eli Stanley Joneswas a 20th-century Methodist Christian missionary and theologian. He is remembered chiefly for his interreligious lectures to the educated classes in India, thousands of which were held across the Indian subcontinent during the first decades of the 20th century. According to his and other contemporary reports, his friendship for the cause of Indian self-determination allowed him to become a friend of leaders of the up-and-coming Indian National Congress party. He spent much time with Mohandas K. Gandhi, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTheologian
CountryUnited States of America
In the prayer time, the battle of the spiritual life is lost or won.
The opponent strikes you on your cheek, and you strike him on the heart by your amazing spiritual audacity in turning the other cheek. You wrest the offensive from him by refusing to take his weapons, by keeping your own, and by striking him in his conscience from a higher level. He hits you physically, and you hit him spiritually.
Spiritual power comes out of inward fellowship with God and abandonment to his purposes.
Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you.
In our Ashrams of East and West, places of spiritual retreat, we begin with what we call "The Morning of the Open Heart," in which we tell our needs. . . . We give four or five hours to this catharsis. The reaction of one member, who listened to it for the first time, was: "Good gracious, have we all the disrupted people in the country here?" My reply was: "No, you have a cross section of the church life honestly revealed." In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to a appear better than we really are.
When prayer fades out, power fades out. We are as spiritual as we are prayerful; no more, no less.
Here he tells us that the new birth is first of all 'not of blood'. You don't get it through the blood stream, through heredity. Your parents can give you much, but they cannot give you this.
When we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code, but a character.
To implant fear in the minds of children is a crime. If parents try to rule the child by fear, then fear rules the child.
If you don't surrender to God, don't think you don't surrender. Everybody surrenders -- to something.
Surrender the thing you fear into the hands of God. Turn it right over to God and ask Him to solve it with you. Fear is keeping things in your own hands; faith is turning them over into the hands of God.
Everybody who belongs to Christ belongs to everybody who belongs to Christ
Very often when I haven't faith in my faith, I have to have faith in His faith. He makes me believe in myself and my possibilities, when I simply can't. I have to rise to His faith in me.
When Satan attacks you, command him in the Name of Jesus to bend his neck. On the back of it you'll find there's a nail scarred foot print!