Patience is...clearly not fatalistic, shoulder-shrugging resignation. It is the acceptance of a divine rhythm to life; it is obedience prolonged. Patience stoutly resists pulling up the daisies to see how the roots are doing.
Our journey is demanding enough that the need for reassurance as well as reminders is constant.
Those who turn against the Church do so to play to their own private gallery, but when, one day, the applause has died down and the cheering has stopped, they will face a smaller audience, the judgment bar of God.
If we knew how often the obedience of others is affected by our own, and how often our stepping forth soon brings forth a whole platton of helpers, and how often our speaking forth soon creates a chorus - we would be even more ashamed of our slackess and our silence.
God’s grace will cover us like a cloak-enough to provide for survival but too thin to keep out all the cold.
Personal, spiritual symmetry emerges only from the shaping of prolonged obedience. Twigs are bent, not snapped into shape.
It is so easy to be confrontive without being informative; indignant without being intelligent; impulsive without being insightful.
We can learn that at the center of our agency is our freedom to form a healthy attitude toward whatever circumstances we are placed in! Those, for instance, who stretch themselves in service- though laced with limiting diseases-are often the healthiest among us! The Spirit can drive the flesh beyond where the body first agrees to go!
We must not fail, individually, for if we fail, we fail twice - for ourselves and for those who could have been helped, if we had done our duty.
At times God's best pupils experience the most rigorous and continuous courses. Eventually those who prove to be men of Christ will thereby become distinguished alumni of life's school of affliction, graduating with honors.
Promptings for us to do good come from the Holy Ghost. These promptings nudge us further along the straight and narrow path of discipleship. The natural man doesn't automatically think of doing good. It isn't natural. How many people worry about the car behind them or the person below them? The natural man just doesn't do it. For us, however, these promptings enlarge our awareness of other people's needs and then prod us to act accordingly.
Those few members who desert the cause are abandoning an oasis to search for water in the desert.
The overwhelming joy of conversion or a new calling is often followed by feelings of being overwhelmed with duties and doctrines. The first joyous feelings are real and give one much-needed initial momentum. But the genuine exhilaration is soon followed by the need to perspire and to pedal.
I find that goal setting, when done this way, leads to goal achieving. The chronic failure to achieve goals lowers self-esteem. Show me a failure to achieve a goal, and usually I can show you the violation of one or more of the above criteria. Imposed goals, vague goals, and unrealistic goals tend to produce only partial successes and outright failures.
The true Christian is a communicator.
Letting off steam always produces more heat than light.
Daily hope is vital, since the ‘Winter Quarters’ of our lives are not immediately adjacent to our promised land either. An arduous trek still awaits, but hope spurs weary disciples on.
How can we truly understand who we are unless we know who we were and what we have the power to become?
Blessed is he who will not be offended
It is understandable how some people could give way to this kind of pervasive pessimism, but we speak of a gospel which brings good tidings of great joy and this must be reflected in our lives, if we are to be believable especially as we suggest to others that there is, in fact, not only a better way, but also the way. Scriptures that speak of man as a being who "might have joy" have more impact when falling from the lips or pens of men and women whose lives give fresh evidence of the validity of that scripture.
If we are not serving Jesus, and if he is not in our thoughts and hearts, then the things of the world will draw us instead to them! Moreover, the things of the world need not be sinister in order to be diverting and consuming.
Within what is allotted to us, we can have spiritual contentment.
Sometimes we are so busy being the hammer or the anvil, that we forget who really needs the shaping.
Our little pebble of poor performance helps to start, or to sustain, an avalanche.
As we come closer to Him, we not only "stand all amazed"-we even kneel all amazed!
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