Are you a person God can use?

Horatius Bonar, writing the preface to John Gillies’ Accounts of Revival regarding the leaders of the Great Awakening, proposed that men useful to the Holy Spirit for revival are marked in these nine ways:

1.  They are in earnest: “They lived and labored and preached like men on whose lips the immortality of thousands hung.”

2.  They are bent on success: “As warriors, they set their hearts on victory and fought with the believing anticipation of triumph, under the guidance of such a Captain as their head.”

3.  They are men of faith: “They knew that in due season they should reap, if they fainted not.”

4.  They are men of labor: “Their lives are the annals of incessant, unwearied toil of body and soul; time, strength, substance, health, all they were and possessed they freely offered to the Lord, keeping back nothing, grudging nothing.”

5.  They are men of patience: “Day after day they pursued what, to the eye of the world, appeared a thankless and fruitless round of toil.”

6.  They are men of boldness: “Timidity shuts many a door of usefulness and loses many a precious opportunity; it wins no friends, while it strengthens every enemy.  Nothing is lost by boldness, nor gained by fear.”

7.  They are men of prayer: “They were much alone with God, replenishing their own souls out of the living fountain, that out of them might flow to their people rivers of living water.”

8.  They are men of strong doctrine: “Their preaching seems to have been of the most masculine and fearless kind, falling on the audience with tremendous power.  It was not vehement, it was not fierce, it was not noisy; it was far too solemn to be such; it was massive, weighty, cutting, piercing, sharper than a two-edged sword.”

9.  They are men of deep spirituality: “No frivolity, no flippancy . . . . The world could not point to them as being but slightly dissimilar from itself.”

–Ray Ortlund

 

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100 resources/a dime a piece

Monergism Books has just released 109 sermons and booklets by J.C. Ryle electronically, via eBook format, for a mindboggling $9.95.

Erik in his review of this product said

I visited with the owner of Monergism Books, John Hendryx, this morning [11/19] here in Portland, Oregon and witnessed first hand the superb quality and readability of these writings. This eBook comes complete with a linked Table of Contents, making navigation simple and very user friendly.

If you own an iPad, Kindle (remember Kindle for PC or Mac is a free program), Nook, Sony eReader, or other hand-held device, you can download it now for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

 

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Question on worldliness

“When does our behavior go from being IN the world to being OF the world?”

Responses?

(via Truth Matters)

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