Scripture: Joshua 21:43-45; 23:14
“By April 1970 I had grown sick to death of the church viewed as “religious cushion” and me as chief cushioner. I had been a pastor for more than a decade and instructor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia for four years. I had given it all my best shot. But as a change agent I had bombed out. I was awash with cynicism about the prospects of the Christian church and went around with continual sorrow in my heart over the state of the churches around me. In a mood of dark despair I resigned both from the seminary faculty and from my pastorate . . . I began an intensive study of the promises of God in Scripture. I spent long hours tracing out great themes of grace predicted in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Joel, Habakkuk, and Zechariah. Sometimes, like a man dying of thirst, I drank in the Gospel of John and the enormous promises presented in it . . . As the weeks passed, my mind also began to be captured by the vastness of God’s promises. I was awed by what the risen Lord had promised to me in my weakness, utterly silenced in my soul like an astronomer unexpectedly seeing a whole new galaxy when he was only searching for a single planet! . . . The promises are the handles we grab in our weakness in order to secure His Presence.”
Jack Miller, Outgrowing the Ingrown Church
“There is more in God’s promises to comfort than in this world to perplex.”
Thomas Watson
“These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.”
Hebrews 11:13-16
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