A Thankful Heart and Tongue

"Therefore I will give thanks unto thee, O Lord, among the heathen, and I will sing praises unto thy name" (2 Samuel 22:50)

All good and beneficial things the world affords are gifts of Almighty God and come to us out of His loving kindness. Add to these all the wealth of grace which comes to us through blood atonement: revelation, redemption, mercy, the gift of eternal life and in the indwelling Spirit. For all this, for everything we are in debt to God forever. We can never repay our heavenly Father for the least of His goodness.
In view of all these things, a thankless man must be a bad man if for no other reason than that he is thankless. Ingratitude is a major sin.

The man of enlightened mind will always feel deeply humbled when he considers God's goodness and his own insignificance. He is likely to be very modest about demanding anything further; he will be to conscious that he already enjoys far more than the circumstances warrant.

There are holy tongues, yielded to the Holy Spirit and under the control of the fire of Pentecost. The good tongue is often a silent tongue. We all talk too much. Hand your tongue over to God; ask Him to take it and help you to remember it is not your own.

~A. W. Tozer~
______________________

Warm Hearts and Cool Heads

"We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens" (Hebrews 8:1)

The warmest hearts and the coolest heads anywhere at any time should always belong to the Christians. There are sound reasons for this. The Christian is seated "above." His fortunes do not depend upon earthly circumstances, but upon Christ who has conquered everything.

For the warmth of his heart the Christian has the love of God which is "shed abroad" by the Holy Spirit, while from his vantage point in the "heavenly places" he is able to look down calmly upon the excited happenings of men. In his flesh he may be a part of the human scene, but in his spirit he is far above it all and is never at any time too much moved by what he sees.

Since he is a part of God's eternal purpose, he knows he must win at last, and he can afford to be calm even when the battle seems to be temporarily going against him. The world has no such "blissful center" upon which to rest and is therefore constantly shifting about, greatly elated today, terribly cast down tomorrow and wildly excited the next day.

We know that in the natural world the mightiest forces are those we do not see. So in the spiritual world faith is the power to attach ourselves to God.

~A. W. Tozer~