THE "PANIC ROOM" =
YOUR INNER BEING.
YOUR HEART.
YOUR SOUL.

The soul is the place where man?s supreme and final battles are fought.
-- ABRAHAM NEUMAN

The widest thing in the universe is not space; it is the potential capacity of the human heart. Being made in the image of God, it is capable of almost unlimited extension in all directions. And one of the world?s greatest tragedies is that we allow our hearts to shrink until there is room in them for little beside ourselves.
-- A. W. TOZER (1897?1963)

Everything here but the soul of man is a passing shadow.
The only enduring substance is within.
When shall we awake to the sublime greatness, the perils, the accountableness,
and the glorious destinies of the immortal soul?
-- WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING (1780?1842)

If the soul be lost, the person is lost.
-- JOHN FLAVEL (1627?1691)

The human soul is God?s treasury, out of which he coins unspeakable riches. Thoughts and feelings, desires and yearnings, faith and hope?these are the most precious things which God finds in us.
-- HENRY WARD BEECHER (1813?1887)

Fear imprisons, faith liberates;
fear paralyzes, faith empowers;
fear disheartens, faith encourages;
fear sickens, faith heals;
fear makes useless, faith makes serviceable
?and, most of all,
fear puts hopelessness at the heart of life, while faith rejoices in its God.
-- HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK (1878?1969)

Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.
--GERMAN PROVERB

Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. No one was there.

God planted fear in the soul as truly as he planted hope or courage. It is a kind of bell or gong which rings the mind into quick life on the approach of danger. It is the soul?s signal for rallying.
--HENRY WARD BEECHER (1813?1887)

Only the one who can say, ?The Lord is the strength of my life,? can say, ?Of whom shall I be afraid??
-- ALEXANDER MACLAREN (1826?1910)

Prayer?Battle in ?The Secret Place?

From My Utmost for His Highest
By Oswald Chambers

?When you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly? (Matthew 6:6).

Jesus did not say, ?Dream about your Father who is in the secret place,? but He said, ? pray to your Father who is in the secret place ? Prayer is an effort of the will. After we have entered our secret place and shut the door, the most difficult thing to do is to pray. We cannot seem to get our minds into good working order, and the first thing we have to fight is wandering thoughts. The great battle in private prayer is overcoming this problem of our idle and wandering thinking. We have to learn to discipline our minds and concentrate on willful, deliberate prayer.

We must have a specially selected place for prayer, but once we get there this plague of wandering thoughts begins, as we begin to think to ourselves, ?This needs to be done, and I have to do that today.? Jesus says to ?shut your door.? Having a secret stillness before God means deliberately shutting the door on our emotions and remembering Him. God is in secret, and He sees us from ?the secret place??He does not see us as other people do, or as we see ourselves. When we truly live in ?the secret place,? it becomes impossible for us to doubt God. We become more sure of Him than of anyone or anything else. Enter into ?the secret place,? and you will find that God was right in the middle of your everyday circumstances all the time. Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless you learn to open the door of your life completely and let God in from your first waking moment of each new day, you will be working on the wrong level throughout the day. But if you will swing the door of your life fully open and ?pray to your Father who is in the secret place,? every public thing in your life will be marked with the lasting imprint of the presence of God.

Where the Battle is Won or Lost

From My Utmost for His Highest
By Oswald Chambers

Our battles are first won or lost in the secret places of our will in God?s presence, never in full view of the world. The Spirit of God seizes me and I am compelled to get alone with God and fight the battle before Him. Until I do this, I will lose every time. The battle may take one minute or one year, but that will depend on me, not God. However long it takes, I must wrestle with it alone before God, and I must resolve to go through the hell of renunciation or rejection before Him. Nothing has any power over someone who has fought the battle before God and won there.

I should never say, ?I will wait until I get into difficult circumstances and then I?ll put God to the test.? Trying to do that will not work. I must first get the issue settled between God and myself in the secret places of my soul, where no one else can interfere. Then I can go ahead, knowing with certainty that the battle is won. Lose it there, and calamity, disaster, and defeat before the world are as sure as the laws of God. The reason the battle is lost is that I fight it first in the external world. Get alone with God, do battle before Him, and settle the matter once and for all.

In dealing with other people, our stance should always be to drive them toward making a decision of their will. That is how surrendering to God begins. Not often, but every once in a while, God brings us to a major turning point?a great crossroads in our life. From that point we either go toward a more and more slow, lazy, and useless Christian life, or we become more and more on fire, giving our utmost for His highest?our best for His glory.

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