He who is able to accept everything gladly from the Lord - including darkness, dryness, flatness - and completely disregard self is he who lives for Him.
Yes, beloved reader, our God reigneth, and if we crown Him Lord of all, Lord of our soul, Lord of our body, Lord of all the circumstance in our lives, we shall find that He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.
The Christian experiences and lives a paradox. He possesses joy in sorrow, fulfillment in exile, light in darkness, peace in turmoil, consolation in dryness, contentment in pain and hope in desolation.
Breezy, self-confident Christians tell us how wonderful it is to accept Christ and then have a good time all the rest of your life; the Lord won't demand anything of you. Yes, He will, my friend! The Lord will demand everything of you. And when you give it all up to Him, He may bless it and hand it back, but on the other hand He may not.
When Jesus is truly our Lord, He directs our lives and we gladly obey Him. Indeed, we bring every part of our lives under His lordship - our home and family, our sexuality and marriage, our job or unemployment, our money and possessions, our ambitions and recreations.
Whatever you accept completely will take you to peace, including the acceptance that you cannot accept, that you are in resistance.
My oh my, think of what you're going to be like when you have your completely Heavenly body that can do all the things you can do now and more, including flying and floating and appearing and disappearing and walking through walls and locked doors and having marvelous supernatural miraculous powers of defense and judgement upon your enemies, protection for your friends, and to be able to help the poor humans that are still living on Earth during the Millennium to learn more about the Lord and love Him and serve Him even as you do.
I accept myself completely here and now and consciously experience everything I feel, think, say and do (including my emotion backed addictions) as a necessary part of my growth into higher consciousness.
You see, it's one thing to accept Him as Lord, another to recognize Him as Savior - but it's another matter entirely to accept Him as Father.
In order to have bliss you have to be able to accept all the parts of the other, all the wildness and the darkness. You have to be able to hold on.
It is a time of darkness, of faith. We shall not see Christ's radiance in our lives yet; it is still hidden in our darkness; nevertheless, we must believe that He is growing in our lives; we must believe it so firmly that we cannot help relating everything, literally everything, to this almost incredible reality.
The signs of the soundness of the servant's love for his Lord are three: absence of self-willing; pleasure in every event which takes place through divine decree; and seeing the perfection of the Beloved in everything and being content with Him in everything through submission to Him in all things.
Darkness had fallen upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.
Loving ourselves is about acceptance, not always liking and feeling comfortable. In the same way I love my fiancé, I love him but don't always like his behavior. I don't always like what he says. But I accept him. I accept him because of these things. It doesn't mean I don't want our relationship to grow or progress. But I don't feel the need to change him. When I accept him for him, we grow naturally, and the same for our own self-love.
A person who is really saved by Grace does not need to be told that he is under solemn obligations to serve Christ. The new life within him tells him that. Instead of regarding it as a burden, he gladly surrenders himself, body, soul, and spirit, to the Lord.
I love Clint Eastwood, and I wish to work with him again. He's completely irreverent about everything, including his own beautiful work.
When the Lord Jesus Christ became my surety . . . He went to Calvary's cross, and all my guilt was charged against Him. He settled for everything, and then He cried, 'It is finished.' And on the basis of that finished work, God can freely forgive, and justify completely, every poor sinner who trusts in the Lord Jesus Christ.