E. Stanley Jones

We are personalities in the making, limited, and grappling with things too high for us. Obviously we, at very best, will make many mistakes, but these mistakes need not be sins.

To pass from estrangement from God to be a son of God is the basic fact of conversion. That altered relationship with God gives you an altered relationship with yourself, with your brother man, with nature, with the universe.

Some have said that the power of a Redeemer would depend upon two things: first, upon the richness of the self that was given; and second, upon the depths of the giving. Friend and foe alike are agreed on the question of the character of Jesus Christ.

Our intentions may be very good, but, because the intelligence is limited, the action may turn out to be a mistake - a mistake, but not necessarily a sin, for sin comes out of a wrong intention.

Life is supplied with a basic adequacy.

Being born in a Christian home does not make you a Christian.

The conscious mind determines the actions, the unconscious mind determines the reactions; and the reactions are just as important as the actions.

In conversion you are not attached primarily to an order, nor to an institution, nor a movement, nor a set of beliefs, nor a code of action - you are attached primarily to a Person, and secondarily to these other things.

Character is supreme in life, hence Jesus stood supreme in the supreme thing - so supreme that, when we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code but a character.

Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Prayer is co-operation with God. It is the purest exercise of the faculties God has given us - an exercise that links these faculties with the Maker to work out the intentions He had in mind in their creation.

God, to redeem us at the deepest portion of our nature - the urge to love and be loved - must reveal His nature in an incredible and impossible way. He must reveal it at a cross.

Here he tells us that the new birth is first of all 'not of blood'. You don't get it through the blood stream, through heredity. Your parents can give you much, but they cannot give you this.

Prayer means that the total you is praying. Your whole being reaches out to God, and God reaches down to you.

You cease to move into yourself, away from others. You give up your antagonism. You begin to move toward others in love. God moved toward you in gracious, outgoing love, and you move toward others in that same outgoing love.

When the depths are upheld by the Holy Spirit, then the reaction is Christian.

In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to appear better than we really are.

The action carries a sense of incompleteness and frustration, but not of guilt. Victorious living does not mean perfect living in the sense of living without flaw, but it does mean adequate living, and that can be consistent with many mistakes.

Whatever our creed, we stand with admiration before the sublime character of Jesus.

Prayer is commitment. We don't merely co-operate with God with certain things held back within. We, the total person, co-operate. This means that co-operation equals committment.

When we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code, but a character.