If we care at all about ourselves, then we must accept full responsibility for our own feelings. We must learn to guard against those feelings that have the capacity to lead our attitude down the wrong path and to strengthen those feelings that can lead us confidently into a better future.
Staying committed is a challenging concept in a world where possibilities are endless. Decide what's most important. Learn to delegate, Set aside a specific time of day to return phone calls and emails, and keep distractions to a minimum. Stay focused as best you can, and don't let things happen to you - not when you can make things happen.”
A lie cannot live." — Martin Luther King Jr.
One of the difficulties we face in our industrialized age is the fact we’ve lost our sense of seasons. Unlike the farmer whose priorities change with the seasons, we have become impervious to the natural rhythm of life. As a result, we have our priorities out of balance.
If you aim at nothing you will hit it every time.
Live for something or die for nothing.
"God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another." - 1 Peter 4:10 NLT.
God has given each of us gifts—and he wants us to use those gifts to serve one another. Galatians 5:13 admonishes us to "serve one another in love."
We each have a responsibility to develop our gifts and use them to serve others. We are to serve one another in the family of God in love … and reach out with that same loving service to those outside the church, demonstrating the love of Christ to them.
Grace is God’s best idea. Rather than tell us to change, he creates the change! Do we clean up so God can accept us? No, he accepts us and begins cleaning us up. His dream isn’t just to get you into heaven but to get heaven into you. Can’t forgive your enemy? Can’t face tomorrow? Can’t forgive your past? Christ can. Forgiven people, forgive people. Deep sighs of relief happen when grace happens. We still stumble aplenty, but we despair seldom. Grace changes everything! To be saved by grace is to be saved by Christ—not by an idea, doctrine, or church membership, but by Jesus Himself. I have no tips on how to get grace. Truth is, we don’t get grace. But it sure can get us! If you wonder whether God can do something with the mess of your life, then grace is what you need. “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen. Ephesians 3:20″
“In Christ are treasures that will require digging to the end of the world.” — Thomas Goodwin
“… for the strength of faith is not found in my trusting but in his trustworthiness. Faith takes it character and strength not from its subject (the believer) but from its object (the Lord and his promises).” — Sinclair Ferguson, To Seek and To Save, 65-66.
One of this world's greatest contradictions: a Christian who is prideful. We have been united to a Christ who was so humiliated he hung upon a cross. If we boast we boast in the humility of Christ.
“That is the joy of the gospel. God offers you everything he has in his Son.” — Sinclair Ferguson
“Let us be careful not to pitch matters too high, making things necessary evidences of grace which do not equal the experience of many a good Christian, and laying salvation and damnation upon things that are not fit to bear so great a weight.” — Richard Sibbes on Matthew 23:4
“No man shall ever become ‘like unto Him’ by bare imitation of His actions, without that view or intuition of His glory which alone is accompanied with a transforming power to change them into the same image.” — John Owen “Nothing is stronger than humility, which goes out of itself; nothing is weaker than pride, which rests on its own foundation.” — Richard Sibbes Turn your eyes upon Jesus. “I began to consider, that that which is highly esteemed among Men, is an abomination with God—therefore, thought I, what God says is best, though all the men in the world are against it.” Faithful, in The Pilgrim’s Progress “It is dangerous to look for that from ourselves which we must have from Christ.” —
Richard Sibbes
Weakness also is the fittest seat and subject for God to perfect his strength in; for the consciousness of our infirmities drives us out of ourselves to him in whom our strength lies. — Richard Sibbes
"Go to bed seasonably, and rise early. Redeem your precious time: pick up the fragments of it, so that not one moment of it may be lost. Be much in secret prayer. Converse less with man, and more with God." — George Whitefield
“We see that light often enrages men. Those that plead and plot for liberties for the flesh show themselves strangers from the life of God.” — Richard Sibbes
“Spiritual tyranny is the greatest tyranny, especially when it is where most mercy should be shown.” — Richard Sibbes
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