Best Loved Prayers and Words of Wisdom. Martin Manser

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

       Charles Morrison was a British journalist and biographer. His famous saying about the church summarizes the paradox that the church consists of those who, in order to follow Christ, have first to acknowledge their own sin and therefore their unworthiness to be his followers.