Best Loved Prayers and Words of Wisdom

continue to assail me. But I wonder now if my deep sense of

homelessness does not bring me closer to you than my occasional

feelings of belonging. Where do I truly celebrate your birth: in a

cosy home or in an unfamiliar house, among welcoming friends

or among unknown strangers, with feelings of well-being or with

feelings of loneliness?

I do not have to run away from those experiences that are

closest to yours. Just as you do not belong to this world, so I do

not belong to this world. Every time I feel this way I have an

occasion to be grateful and to embrace you better and taste more

fully your joy and peace.

Come, Lord Jesus, and be with me where I feel poorest. I

trust that this is the place where you will find your manger and

bring your light. Come, Lord Jesus, come. Amen.

Henri Nouwen (1932–1996)

Christ’s ladder to heaven

Herbert Hensley Henson was bishop of both Hereford and Durham in the first half of the twentieth century. He spoke out on national and international affairs, protesting about what he saw as Britain’s appeasement when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in the 1930s and condemning the anti-semitic policies of Nazi Germany. In this sermon extract he likens Communion to the ladder seen by Jacob in Genesis, reaching up to heaven and providing access to God.

The Holy Communion is Christ’s ladder set up on the earth,

whose top reaches to heaven. Thereby we ascend to God

through him, for through him we have our access in one Spirit

unto the Father. The patriarch’s dream revealed what actually

had been in existence all the while, though he knew it not. Holy

Communion protests to us the unsuspected sanctity of common

life, and bids us know the nearness of God. That is the central

and vitalising reality of sacramental worship. All else is picture,

and parable, and vesture of truth. Words, gestures, the ‘creatures

of Bread and Wine’, have their worth and meaning as tokens

and pledges of a spiritual fact, that ‘in him we live and move and

have our being’, that ‘we are Christ’s and Christ is God’s’.

Therefore on the threshold of Holy Communion the words of

the Gospel come to us with direct and luminous relevance: ‘Let

not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in

me.’

Herbert Hensley Henson (1863–1947)

Christ’s second coming

Aiden Wilson Tozer was an American Protestant pastor best known as the author of many books. Among them at least two, The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy, are regarded as Christian classics. His books stress the possibility of and need for a deeper relationship with God. This extract is from Who Put Jesus on the Cross?

The people of God, Christians who are living between the

two mighty events of Christ’s incarnation and his promised

second coming, are not living in a vacuum.

It is amazing that segments in the Christian church that deny

the possibility of the imminent return of the Lord Jesus accuse

those who do believe in his soon coming of sitting around,

twiddling their thumbs, looking at the sky, and blankly hoping

for the best!

Nothing could be further from the truth. We live in the

interim between his two appearances, but we do not live in a

vacuum. We have much to do and little time in which to get it

done!

A W Tozer (1897–1963)

The church