Phoebe Palmer in The Promise of the Father wrote of receiving an impression to speak a word for the Lord. She hesitated and decided to pray about it first.

Holiness is the only attribute of God that is described with the word “beauty.” I thought of this beauty when my friend Judy shared her response to a troubling situation.

Phillip Henry had a great idea for daily meditation. Two hundred years ago, he advised his children to take a verse of Psalm 119 every morning to meditate on, and so go over the Psalm twice in the year. “That will bring you to be in love with all the rest of the Scriptures,” Mr. Henry promised.

Nancy and her husband took their son to be admitted as a freshman in a Bible college. She said, “As soon as I stepped on to the campus, the voice of God said that this is a land He wants me to saturate with prayer. The next day, He made it clear to her that He wanted her to spend a day every week on campus to pray for the faculty, staff, and students. She did not know anyone beside her son in the school.

I was probably in grade school, but I still remember my mother getting up during a testimony time in our small church and quoting with deep feeling - even tears - Paul’s doxology in the last verses of Romans 11:

We have been created for His pleasure (Revelation 4:11), but we easily lose the wonderful enjoyment of thinking upon our God as a happy God—a God who is delighting in us and rejoicing over us with singing (Zephaniah 3:17).

We might tend to think of our praises to God as insignificant, not worth much—until we consider what God did to gain them. God paid a high price for our praises. He freely gave the precious blood of His own Son for our praises. “In him we were also chosen...in order that we...might be for the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:11-12).

I heard Dr. Dennis Kinlaw speak on levels of intimacy with God. He described the most intimate level as that of identification. What does it mean to identify with God? Paul explained it when he said, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).