George C. Lorimer (1838 – 1904)
Noted reverend, and was pastor of several churches around the United States, most notably the Tremont Temple in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Not a sorrow, not a burden, not a temptation, not a bereavement, not a disappointment, not a care, not a groan or tear, but has its antidote in God's rich and inexhaustible resources.
And yet the doing is ours, not His. He inspired it, we wrought it out. He quickened, but we brought forth. His the heart-beat, but ours the hand-stroke; His the influence, ours the effluence.
We are to do what Paul meant, when he said that he had committed to Christ what He was able to keep. You have treasures that you dare not leave in your own house, and so you lock them up in some safety-deposit vault. When they are thus secured, you feel little anxiety regarding them.
Christ's divinity accounts for His exaltation to the right hand of God, justifies the worship of angels and the confidence of mankind. It makes clear His right to the throne of the universe, and enables the mind to understand why He is exalted in providence, in grace, and in judgment. It is the unifying truth that harmonizes all other teachings of Christianity, and renders the entire system symmetrical and complete.
To deny one's self, to take up the cross, denotes something immeasurably grander than self-imposed penance or rigid conformity to a Divine statute. It is the surrender of self to an ennobling work, an absolute subordination of personal advantages and of personal pleasures for the sake of truth and the welfare of others, and a willing acceptance of every disability which their interests may entail.
Though you are weak and frail, though you are poor and helpless, God does not despise you; but would glorify your being with His own, and raise you to fellowship with Himself.
There is nothing more pitiable than a soulless, sapless, shriveled church, seeking to thrive in a worldly atmosphere, rooted in barren professions, bearing no fruit, and maintaining only the semblance of existence; such a church cannot long survive.
The human mind may know God, and learn of God, though it has no terms by which to explain Him; it may think of Him as Absolute, as Infinite, as Personal, while it may never in this life be able to fathom the full meaning of these sublime ideas.
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