Calvary Chapel Riverside

06/18/2021

We at Calvary Chapel Riverside have discontinued posting to this page. We will be leaving the page up so you can access all posts made as a resource. If you would like to further contact us, keep updated with the church, hear recent teachings, or watch live webcasts, please refer to our website CCRiverside.org or VersesForLife.org
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Verses For Life is the media ministry of Calvary Chapel Riverside located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Thank you for downloading or streaming media available through this site. We would like to hear how the verse-by-verse teaching of God’s word has impacted your life, or been a useful tool for you t...

01/18/2021

I ask, what is our real beauty as we are called out one by one to take our places by faith in the body of Christ to await his coming? God has not left this to chance. He gives us one by one the beauties, the gifts, the graces of the Holy Spirit, typified only imperfectly by those jewels and gems that the servant bestowed on behalf of Isaac. Thus we are being prepared, and when we meet Jesus Christ as our coming Lord and King, our adornment will be our God given graces and gifts. By that means it will be possible for us to stand with the one who is the Lord of all Beauty!

If you do not know Him and worship Him, if you do not long to reside where He is, if you have never known wonder and ecstasy in your soul because of His crucifixion and resurrection, your claim of Christianity is unfounded. It cannot be related to the true Christian life and experience at all.

Meanwhile, I believe that we as Christians must become willing to allow every other ugly thing in our lives to be crucified. We must indeed worship the Lord of all beauty in spirit and in truth. This is not a popular thing, for so many Christians insist that they must be entertained while they are being edified.
..[as AB Simpson said] “Jesus Christ is your sanctifier, your sanctification, your all and in all. God wants you to get your eyes away from the gifts, the formulas, the techniques. He wants your gaze to be on the giver, Christ himself. He is your Lord; worship Him"

AW Tozer

01/10/2021

My Christian brother or sister, thank God always for the blessed gifts of sensitivity and conscience and human choice He has given you. Are you being faithful as a Christian believer where He has placed you?

If God has called you out of darkness into His light, you should be worshiping Him. If He has shown you that you are to show forth the excellencies, the virtues, the beauties of the Lord who has called you, then you should be humbly and gladly worshipping Him with the radiance and the blessing of the Holy Spirit in your life.

It is sad that we humans do not always function joyfully for God in the place He has marked out for us. We may even allow trifling things and minor incidents to disturb our fellowship with God and our spiritual witness for Him who is our Savior.
... There is no limit to what God can do through us if we are His yielded and purified people, worshiping and showing forth His glory and His faithfulness.

AW Tozer

12/20/2020

We go to God as we send a boy to the grocery store with a long written list. “God, give me this, give me this, and give me this," and our gracious God often does give us what we want. But I think God is disappointed because we make Him to be no more than a source of what we want. Even our Lord Jesus is presented too often much as “Someone who will meet your need.” That's the throbbing heart of modern evangelism. You're in need and Jesus will meet your need. He's the need meter. Well, He is that indeed; but, ah, He's infinitely more than that.


AW Tozer

12/13/2020

...Man is better qualified to appreciate God than any other creature because he was made in His image and is the only creature who was. This admiration for God grows and grows until it fills the heart with wonder and delight. “In are astonished reverence we confess Thine uncreated loveliness," said the hymn writer. “In are astonished reverence." The God of the modern evangelical rarely astonishes anybody. He manages to stay pretty much within the constitution. Never breaks over our bylaws. He's a very well-behaved God and very denominational and very much one of us, and we ask Him to help us when we're in trouble and look to Him to watch over us when we're asleep. The God of the modern evangelical isn't a God I could have much respect for. But when the Holy Ghost shows us God as He is, we admire Him to the point of wonder and delight.


AW Tozer

12/07/2020

...I believe in the Deeper Life. I believe that the farther on with God we go, the farther up into Christ's heart we move, the more like Christ we’ll become; and the more like Christ we become, the more like God we’ll become; and the more we become like Him and the nearer we are to Him, the more perfect our worship will be.
I think that God has given me a little bit of a spirit of a crusader and I am crusading where I can that Christians of all denominations and shades of theological thought might be restored again to our original purpose. We're here to be worshippers first and workers only second. We take a convert and immediately make a worker out of him. God never meant it to be so. God meant that a convert should learn to be a worshipper, and after that he can learn to be a worker.... Out of enraptured, admiring, adoring, worshipping souls, then, God does his work. The work done by a worshiper will have eternity in it.


AW Tozer

11/28/2020

How can we hope to worship God acceptably when evil elements remain in our natures undisciplined, uncorrected, unpurged, unpurified? Even granted that a man with evil ingredients in his nature might manage through some part of himself to worship God half acceptably. But what kind of a way is that in which to live and continue?..I do not have to do something wrong to feel blistering conviction and repent. I can lose fellowship with God, lose the keen sense of His presence and lose the blessing of spiritual victory by thinking wrong. I have found that God will not dwell in spiteful and polluted thoughts. He will not dwell in lustful and covetous thoughts. He will not dwell in proud and selfish thoughts.
God tells us to make a sanctuary of our thoughts in which He dwell. He treasures our pure and loving thoughts, our meek and charitable and kindly thoughts. These are the thoughts like His own. As God dwells in your thoughts, you will be worshiping, and God will be accepting. He will be smelling the incense of your high intention even when the cares of life are intense and activity is all around you.


AW Tozer

11/21/2020

“The God of the whole earth cannot do wrong! He does not need to be rescued. It is man's inadequate concept of God that needs to be rescued.
I once heard Dr George D Watson, one of the great Bible teachers of his generation, point out that men can have two kinds of love for God - the love of gratitude or the love of excellence. He urged that we go on from gratefulness to a love of God just because he is God and because of the excellence of His character.
Unfortunately, God's children rarely go beyond the boundaries of gratitude. I seldom hear anyone in worshipful prayer admiring and praising God for His eternal excellence.
Many of us are strictly “Santa Clause” Christians. We think of God as putting up the Christmas tree and putting our gifts underneath. That is only an elementary kind of love.
We need to go on. We need to know the blessing of worshipping in the presence of God without thought of wanting to rush out again. We need to be delighted in the presence of utter, infinite excellence.”


AW Tozer

11/09/2020

Today, it is not a question of whether we have Isaiah's cleanness, but a question of whether we have his awareness. He was unclean and, thank God, he became aware of it. But the world today is unclean and seems to be almost totally unaware of it. Uncleanness with unawareness will have terrible consequences. That is what is wrong with the Christian church and with our Protestantism. Our problem is the depravity still found within the circle of the just, among those called to be Saints, among those who claim to be great souls.

We like Isaiah's vision and awareness. But we do not like to think of the live coal out of the fire being placed on the prophet’s lips.

Purification by blood and by fire. Isaiah's lips, symbolic of all his nature, were purified by fire. God could then say to him, “Thine iniquity is taken away.” Isaiah 6:7.

That is how the amazed and pained Isaiah could genuinely come to a sense of restored moral innocence. That is how he instantly found that he was ready for worship and that he was also ready and anxious for service in the will of God.

With each of us, if we already have that assurance of forgiveness and restored moral innocence, the fire of God's grace must touch us. It is only through the depths of the forgiving love of God that men and women can be so restored and made ready to serve him.

AW Tozer

11/01/2020

Much of our problem in continuing fellowship with a holy God is that many Christians repent only for what they do, rather than for what they are.

It should help us to be concerned about the quality of our worship when we consider that Isaiah's reaction was a feeling of absolute profaneness in the presence of the moral purity of the Divine being. Consider that Isaiah was a commendable young man - cultured, religious and a cousin of the king. He would have made a good Deacon in any church. Today he would be asked to serve on one of our mission boards.

But here Isaiah was an astonished man. He was struck with awe, his whole world suddenly dissolving into a vast, eternal brightness. ...

What had happened? Isaiah, only human, had glimpsed One whose character and nature signal perfection. He could only manage the witness: “Mine eyes have seen the King.”

AW Tozer

10/26/2020

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence.”

Colossians 1:15-18

“The average person in the world today, without faith and without God and without hope, is engaged in a desperate personal search throughout his lifetime. He does not really know where he has been. He does not really know what he is doing here and now. He does not know where he is going.

The sad commentary is that he is doing it all on borrowed time and borrowed money and borrowed strength - and he already knows that in the end he will surely die! It boils down to the most bewildered confession of many that “We have lost God somewhere along the way.” What happens to people when they lose God? It seems quite obvious that they get very busy trying to find something else to worship.”

AW Tozer

10/20/2020

...the wisest person in the world is the person who knows the most about God. The only real sage worthy of the name is the one who realizes that the answer to creation and life and eternity is a theological answer - not a scientific answer.

You must begin with God. Then you begin to understand everything in its proper context. All things fit into shape and form when you begin with God.

AW Tozer