Possession (religion)

“ In this last, the possession of wealth must always have assured its possessor a disproportionate rank in the religion, and without the expenditure of a large sum of money, it was impossible, as we have seen, to arrive at its most cherished secrets. ”

“ The gold and the silver will be given to the Saints, the riches of the world will be put in their possession, and they will be legal heirs. We are now passing through a day of trial, to determine whether we will prove worthy of all we may enjoy and possess, for it must be enjoyed and possessed without the spirit of covetousness. Without the pure Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, we cannot enjoy the good things of life.
The fulness of the heavens and the earth—the mountains, the gold, and precious things in them—will all be devoted to those who are devoted to their God and their religion. ”

“ Together with all the other main facts which mark the long travail of man's ethical and social life, they were among the only "evidences" of religion a critical mind allowed itself—the most striking signs of something "greater than we know" working among the dust and ugliness of our common day. Attack wealth as wealth, possession as possession, and civilisation is undone. ”

“ The most frequent symptom in possession is a strong antipathy against everything connected with religion; the holy names of God and Christ, the presence of priests, the singing of hymns and the reciting of prayers, excite intense pain, and provoke outbursts of fury. ”

“ To the church in its ideal signification God makes his grant; the wicked have their share only by virtue of their outward membership of it. [15] But since, as has been said, the sole sufficient title to any possession is the immediate grant of God, it results that such possession as the wicked have is not worthy the name of possession at all: and [16] Whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have. ”

“ It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.335 By being religious we establish ourselves in [pg 501] possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all. ”

“ The possession of both sides is regarded as incomplete, for what we have is the 'earnest' of the 'inheritance,' and 'God's own possession' has yet to be 'redeemed,' in the fullest sense of that word, at some point in the future. ”

“ Now it is certainly remarkable—considering the universal desire for property, for real property, for lasting and inalienable property, and considering the definiteness and certainty of the possession of God, and the universality of the offer to every human being—that comparatively few persons exert themselves to become possessed of God, or bestow anything like the same energy and eagerness of endeavour on securing God as their portion which men show in the acquisition of a great earthly property. ”

“ And the solemn obligations of that most blessed possession by God of us are as solemn as the possession is blessed, and can only be discharged when we turn to Him, and yield the whole control of our nature to His merciful hand, believing that He has not only the right to dispose of us, but that His disposition of us will always coincide with our sanest conceptions of good, and our wisest desires for happiness. Yield yourselves to God, for He has yielded Himself to you, and in the yielding we realise our largest and most blessed possession. ”

“ There is another thing which we have to make an effort to do, if we would have the blessedness of this conviction filling and flooding our hearts. For the possession is reciprocal; we say, 'My God,' and He says, 'My people.' Unless we yield ourselves to Him and say, 'I am Thine,' we shall never be able to say, 'Thou art mine.' We must recognise His possession of us; we must yield ourselves ”

“ Because he has learned that it is not by any plan of his own he is to come into possession; that God Who promised is to give him the land in His own way, and that his part is to act uprightly, mercifully, like God. ”

“ Mark the contrast of this true possession with the false and merely external possessions of the world. Those outward things which a man has stand in no real relation with him. They fade and fleet away, or have to be left, and, even while they last, are not his in any real sense. Only what has indissolubly entered into, and become one with, our very selves is truly ours.
Our possession of God suggests a view of our blessedness and our obligation. It secures blessedness—for we have in Him an all-sufficient object and a treasure for all our nature. ”

“ When the widest and wildest violations of that divine right of Property, the only divine right now extant or conceivable, are sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and the world has lived to hear it asserted that we have no Property in our very Bodies, but only an accidental Possession and Life-rent, what is the issue to be looked for? ”

“ For he who holds possessions, and gold, and silver, and houses, as the gifts of God; and ministers from them to the God who gives them for the salvation of men; and knows that he possesses them more for the sake of the brethren than his own; and is superior to the possession of them, not the slave of the things he possesses ”

“ It sounds harsh and unjust, but it contains the very essence of righteous retribution. The paradox is meant to spur attention, curiosity, and inquiry. The key to it lies here—to use is to have. There is a possession which is no possession. That I have rights of property in a thing, as contradistinguished to your rights, does not make it in any deep and real sense mine. ”

“ It is the best possession to its possessor, rendering man truly blessed. For he whose it is to desire nothing that is not in our power, [300] and to obtain by asking from God what he piously desires, does he not possess much, nay all, having God as his everlasting treasure? ”

“ If we shall be permitted to speak of property, in reference to our and its relation to the Divine Being, then we cannot strictly say that man can own property. Jehovah stands in no need. Behold the cattle upon a thousand hills are his; all is the work of his hand; all, all is his property alone! At most, God has only intrusted the possession, the administration of the subjects of his creation, to man for the time being,—to multiply, to replenish and subdue. It is only in reference to our relation to one another that we can advance the idea of property. ”

“ Let me remind you that if you are a Christian man you have in your possession the thing which will cure the world's woe, and possession involves responsibility. What would you think of a man that had a specific for some pestilence that was raging in a city, and was contented to keep it for his own use, or at most for his family's use, when his brethren were dying by the thousand, and their corpses polluting the air? And what shall we say of men and women who call themselves Christians, who have some faith in that great Lord and His mighty sacrifice ”

“ Possess your souls, be your own men, keep up the authority and dominion of reason, and keep under the tumults of passion, that neither grief nor fear may tyrannize over you, nor turn you out of the possession and enjoyment of yourselves." In difficult times, when we can keep possession of nothing else, then let us make that sure which may be made sure, and keep possession of our souls. ”

“ So, dear brethren, seeing that by our own faults the possession is incomplete, and seeing that in the incompleteness there is given to each of us, if we rightly use it, a mighty power which is working ever towards the completion, it becomes us day by day to draw into our spirits more and more of that divine influence, and to [Pg 48] let it work more fully upon the sins and faults which, far more than the body of flesh, or the connection with the world which it brings about, are the reasons for the incompleteness of the possession. ”

“ Surely when Christ calls you to liberty, you will not turn from Him to the tyrannous masters whom you have served, and, like the Hebrew slave, let them fasten you to their door-posts with their awl through your ear. Do you hug your chains and prefer your bondage?
Your Kinsman-Redeemer brings back your squandered inheritance, which is God. God is the only possession that makes a man rich. ”

“ And so, says the Psalmist allusively, in a similar manner, the Divine Power surrounds the man who chooses God for his heritage, and nothing shall take that heritage from him.
The lower forms of possession, by which men are called the owners of material goods, are imperfect, because they are all precarious and temporary. Nothing really belongs to a man if it can be taken from him. What we may lose we can scarcely be said to have. ”

“ For not only are spiritual riches and heavenly gifts received from God, but earthly and material possessions also proceed from His bounty, that He may be justified in requiring an account of those things which He has not so much put in our possession as committed to our stewardship. ”

“ Sometimes we assign our property for religious uses, late in the evening of life, when enjoyment is over, and almost possession. Thus we bequeath to piety, what we can keep no longer. We convey our name to posterity at the expence of our successor, and scaffold our way towards heaven up the walls of a steeple. ”

“ The possession of Christ for ourselves imposes upon us the obligation to impart Him. All property in this world is trust property, and everything that a man has that can help or bless the moral or spiritual or intellectual condition of his fellows, he is thereby under solemn obligation to impart. ”

“ Such a use of the figure is familiar, and brings it into line with the other of inheritance, which is plainly the principal, as that of the cup is dropped in the following words. Every godly man has the same possession and the same prohibitions as the priests had. ”

“ It must, however, not be overlooked that the views of possession have changed essentially in different nations and ages. At the time of Christ's coming the belief in actual possession, the dwelling of real demons in the body of human beings, was universal, and to this belief the language of Holy Writ naturally adapts its records of miracles. ”

“ And so that mutual possession is the real pledge of immortal life, for nothing can be more incredible than that a soul which has risen to have God for its very own, and has bowed itself to accept God's ownership [Pg 42] of it, can be affected by such a transient and physical incident as what we call death. ”

“ Such a spontaneous impulse is ever the natural result of our own personal possession of Christ. In regard to worldly good the instinct, except when overcome by higher motives, is to keep the treasure to oneself. But even in the natural sphere there are possessions which to have is to long to impart, such as truth and knowledge. And in the spiritual sphere, it is emphatically the case that real possession is always accompanied by a longing to impart. ”

“ We must first of all give ourselves away before we have the right to possess, and the measure in which we give ourselves to another is the measure in which we possess another. And so Christ our Lord, according to the deep words of one of Paul's letters, 'gives Himself for us, that He might purchase unto Himself a people for His possession.' 'Ye are not your own ”

“ You appropriate the general blessing, like a man taking in a little piece of a boundless prairie for his very own. Your possession does not make my possession of Him less, for every eye gets its own beam, and however many eyes wait upon Him, they all receive the light on to their happy eyeballs. You can make Christ your own, and have all that He has done for the world as your possession, and can experience in your own hearts the sense of your own forgiveness and deliverance from the power and guilt of your own sin, on the simple condition of looking unto Jesus. ”

“ When a finite spirit cleaves to the infinite God, there must be longing as an element in all possession and possession as an element in all longing; and both will be fed by contemplation of the self-revealing acts which are the syllables of His name. ”

“ Observe that the order of clauses is reversed in the last part of the text. The world cannot receive, because it does not know. The disciple knows, because he receives. Possession and knowledge reciprocally interchange places, and may be regarded as cause and effect of one another. That is to say, at bottom they are one and the same thing. Knowledge is possession, and possession is the only knowledge. These disciples knew Christ in a fashion. ”

“ It was morally impossible that the Divine Son should turn back from making us “a people for His own possession.” Let us strengthen ourselves in the hope that our efforts to fulfil this gracious purpose are never thrown away. ”

“ Likewise, the possession of private property is for a secular man a thing intermediate for he may or may not have property, but for a monk, because he is not permitted to hold property, it is a thing absolutely evil. ”

“ The right use of worldly possessions consists in using them for God and in the practice of good works. Holy men, such as Abraham, Job and Tobias, possessed great riches, but they were not slaves to them. ”

“ That which would justify a damnable sin, and make it a ground of a duty, cannot be owned; but this fancy of owning a very power in possession would justify a damnable sin and make it the ground of a duty; for, resistance to the powers ordained of God is a damnable sin, Rom. xiii. 2. But the resisters having success in providence, may come to the possession of the power, by expelling the just occupant; and, by this opinion, that possession would be ground for the duty of subjection for conscience sake. ”