Grieve not the Christ of God, who redeems us; and remember that we grieve Him most when we will not let Him pour His love upon us, but turn a sullen, unresponsive unbelief towards His pleading grace, as some glacier shuts out the sunshine from the mountain-side with its thick-ribbed ice.
Make no mistake: Satan’s specialty is psychological warfare. If he can turn us on God (“It’s not fair!”), or turn us on others (“It’s their fault!”), or turn us on ourselves (“I’m so stupid!”), we won’t turn on him. If we keep fighting within ourselves and losing our own inner battles, we’ll never have the strength to stand up and fight our true enemy.
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.
We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave--us!
When God calls you to something, He is not always calling you
to succeed, He’s calling you to obey! The success of the calling is up to Him;the obedience is up to you.
I think we've overstated that God is the God who wants us to obey. Obedience is not the end game. Obedience is only our calling so that we can step into our freedom.
Our economy's growth functions by inciting us to produce more and more with each passing year. In turn, we require cultural forms to enable us to sort through the glut, and our rituals are once again directed towards the immaterial, towards quality and not quantity.
God is teaching me to really just take small increments towards Him every single day. One thing about Jesus. He's always walking towards us because he wants to guide us. But all we have to do, we have to be willing to be vulnerable and take steps towards Him.
This is the amazing story of God’s grace. God saves us by His grace and transforms us more and more into the likeness of His Son by His grace. In all our trials and afflictions, He sustains and strengthens us by His grace. He calls us by grace to perform our own unique function within the Body of Christ. Then, again by grace, He gives to each of us the spiritual gifts necessary to fulfill our calling. As we serve Him, He makes that service acceptable to Himself by grace, and then rewards us a hundredfold by grace.
God is not calling us to work for Him. He is calling us to walk with Him.
God is not calling us to go to church; he is calling us to be his church, the hope of the world.
Our deepest calling is not to grow in our knowledge of God. It is to make disciples. Our knowledge will grow -- the Holy Spirit, Jesus promised, will guide us into all truth. But that's not our calling, it is His. Our calling is to prepare the world for Christ's return. The world is not ready yet. And so, we go about introducing a dying world to the Savior of Life. Anything we do toward our own growth must be toward that end.
Photography has all the rights, and all the merits,
necessary for us to turn towards it as the art of our time.
Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.
Trusting God means transferring our confidence and hope from ourselves to him, acknowledging that we have no ability in ourselves to live in a way that pleases him. Only he can change us by the power of his Spirit in us. This trust is manifested in a context of obedience in our lives to the biblical mandates God calls us to pursue. Training means acting upon that trust by doing things that help us rely upon God more and live out his desire for us.
The very voices of the night, sounding like the moan of the tempest, may turn out to be the disguised yet tender voices of God, calling away from all earthly footsteps, to mount with greater singleness of eye and ardor of aim the alone ladder of safety and peace - upward, onward, heavenward, homeward.