Cornelius Van Til Quotes

GOD made my life complete when I placed all the pieces before him. When I got my act together, he gave me a fresh start. Now I'm alert to GOD's ways; I don't take God for granted. Every day I review the ways he works; I try not to miss a trick. I feel put back together, and I'm watching my step. GOD rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

Often we talk about God's ability to change lives without fully understanding how to access that power.

There has already been the karmic work: that what life has transformed in me, this initiation brought on, of necessity, by trials.

He has turned my life around by 180 degrees, I still don't understand why Shiva has blessed me so much. I believe he'll bless the worst of us first because we need it the most.

Do you think that any one can move the heart but He that made it?

As it is with spiritual discoveries and affections given at first conversion, so it is in all subsequent illuminations and affections of that kind; they are all transforming. There is a like divine power and energy in them as in the first discoveries; they still reach the bottom of the heart, and affect and alter the very nature of the soul, in proportion to the degree in which they are given. And a transformation of nature is continued and carried on by them to the end of life, until it is brought to perfection in glory.

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

Repentance is something that is brought about in the human heart by the work of God the Holy Spirit.

We will suffer a sharp painful disullisionment before we fully surrender. When people really see themselves as the Lord sees them, it is not the terribly offensive sins of the fleshthat shock them, but the awful nature of the pride of their own hearts opposing Jesus Christ. When they see themselves in the light of the Lord, the shame, the horror, and desperate conviction hit home for them.

I do think that taking these sort of natural mind-opening and altering drugs does have an effect. Doors and windows that you didn't even know were in the house are open and you're seeing views you've never noticed before. Even though, when you come down, the world sort of goes back to the way it was, an inkling of that transformed vision and experience of the world remains. I think it's a little bit medicinal, and over time it sort of builds up a new experience of the world. That's when I think smoking pot and doing drugs is really good for you, spiritually speaking.

Lord, reform Thy world, beginning with me.

I want to tell you about the God that actually showed up and healed my heart. Not the God I grew up, because the God I grew up was fundamentally, and I use the word advisedly, fundamentally untrustworthy -- schizophrenic, narcissistic, unreachable, unknowable, and my concept within which I grew up was that Jesus -- He likes me -- but He came to save me from God the Father -- who was the one who was angry and distant, and unreachable, unknowable. All of that had to come crashing down.

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching.

Do not despair, thinking that you cannot change yourself after so many years. Simply enter into the presence of Jesus as you are and ask him to give you a fearless heart where he can be with you. You cannot make yourself different. Jesus came to give you a new heart, a new spirit, a new mind, and a new body. Let him transform you by his love and so enable you to receive his affection in your whole being.

Get up; repent. Come to God. Get the pattern of your life from Him, and then go about your work and be yourself.

The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.

Jesus is knocking at your door. Take hold of the better life by letting him into your life. Make him the boss of your life. It'll change everything.

Conversion is not only changing the faith. Conversion is changing the heart and working over there is the grace of God. Then only comes the question of change of faith. Nobody can force you, not even the holy prophets.

I used to think I could shape the circumstances around me, but now I know Jesus uses circumstances to shape me.

When I look back on my life-and an extraordinary transformation is happening again to me right now - I describe it as my “point of observation” is moving. It is moving because my range of frequencies I am accessing is becoming greater. It’s not because I’m something special because anyone can do it.

My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am.

If we get away from the lazy and fuzzy thinking that is like a poison in our society - if we get away from all the bad television that we tend to watch - and begin to take up serious meditation and other sacred exercises, we will have a real revolution of consciousness. If that happens, the world will change by itself.

One simple change - seeking and finding peace within - could, if it were undertaken by everyone, end all wars, eliminate conflict and prevent injustice. World peace is a personal thing. What is needed is not a change of circumstance, but a change of consciousness.

The heart of the issue is an issue of the heart. And that's why I'm a pastor, not a politician. Because I think only - only God can change hearts. And only God can take the evil out. I don't think you can legislate the evil out of people.

Once you realize that the way you exist right now is not enough, that there is something more, your spiritual process has already begun.