The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our “within” is astonishingly complex and subtle – even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do.
If the Bible says something once, notice it but don’t count it as a fundamental principle. If it says it twice, think about it twice. If it is repeated many times, then dwell on it and seek to understand it. What you want to believe from the Bible is its message on the whole and use it as a standard for interpreting the peripheral passages.
Much of our effort to do things for the Lord is really the resurgence of our desire to dominate and make things happen in our own strength.
Christians certainly aren’t perfect. There will always be need for improvement. But there is a lot of room between being perfect and being “just forgiven” as that is nowadays understood. You could be much more than forgiven and still not be perfect.
An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person that he calls us to be.
Hell is not an ‘oops!’ or a slip. One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God.
Old ways of doing things cease to be effective, though they may have been very powerful in the past. There arises a very real danger that we will set ourselves in opposition to what God truly is doing now and aims to do in the future.
To live strongly and creatively in the kingdom of the heavens, we need to have firmly fixed in our minds what our future is to be like. We want to live fully in the kingdom now, and for that purpose our future must make sense to us. It must be something we can now plan or make decisions in terms of, with clarity and joyful anticipation. In this way our future can be incorporated into our life now and our life now can be incorporated into our future.
Living in the kingdom of God is a matter of living with God’s action in our lives.
Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.
Love is not God, but God is love. It is who he is, his very identity.
But taking love itself – God’s kind of love – into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first.
Your thoughts cannot be empty. As the old saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum. If you are not entertaining God’s truth, you will be entertaining Satan’s lies.
Why is it,” comedian Lily Tomlin asks, “that when we speak to God we are said to be praying but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?” Such a response from ourselves or others to someone’s claim to have heard from God is especially likely today because of the lack of specific teaching and pastoral guidance on such matters.
Blessed are the spiritual zeros – the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’ – when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.
Christian spiritual formation rests on this indispensable foundation of death to self and cannot proceed except insofar as that foundation is being firmly laid and sustained.
Circumstances and other people are not in control of an individual’s character or of the life that lies endlessly before.
Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.
You may be very sure that if your sincere intent is to glorify God and bless others in your efforts, and you are not motivated by unloving attitudes, you will see the hand of God move with you as you expectantly do your work. Your part is simply to expect it, watch for it, give thanks as you see it, and, on the basis of your experience, encourage others to do the same.
It is confidence in the invariably overriding intention of God for our good, with respect to all the evil and suffering that may befall us on life’s journey, that secures us in peace and joy.