Welcome to New Loft Chamber...

To all who stumble upon this little blog, I hope you will find something here to encourage you in your travels along the way...something to comfort you, something to help you, something to uplift you.

Jay Bruce


Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world. And self-sacrifice will lead us, His followers, not way from, but into the midst of men. Wherever men suffer, there will we be to comfort. Wherever men strive, there will we be to help. Wherever men fail, there will we be to uplift. Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our fellows, it means absorption in them. It means forgetfulness of self in others. It means not that we should live one life, but a thousand lives—binding ourselves to a thousand souls by the filaments of so loving a sympathy that their lives become ours. Only when we humbly walk this path, seeking truly in it not our own things but those of others, we shall fined the promise true, that he who loses his life shall find it. Only when, like Christ, and in loving obedience to His call and example, we take no account of ourselves, but freely give ourselves to others, we shall find, each in his measure, the saying true of himself also: 'Wherefore also God hath highly exalted him.' The path of self-sacrifice is the path to glory.”

-- Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, from his sermon Imitating the Incarnation


Friday, December 12, 2008

The Purpose and Use of Comforts


"Blessed be the God of comfort, who comforts us that we may be able to comfort them that are in tribulation."



"The truth is that we are at our best when we try to be it not for ourselves alone, but for our brethren; and that we take God's gifts most completely for oursevles when we realize that He sends them to use for the benefit of other men, who stand beyond us needing them...I am sure that you or I could be strengthened to meet some great experience of pain if we really believed that by our suffering we were made luminous with help to other men. They are to get from us painlessly what we have got most painfully from God."

--Philips Brooks (author of O Little Town of Bethlehem), Sermon on The Purpose and Use of Comforts


May we follow the example of the good Samaritan, even more so that of Jesus Christ, and help those in distress. Lord give us grace and strength to give our best for the benefit of others.

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