A leader enables people to love and honor the role they play in the organization or group they are part of.
Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God’s kingdom and God’s cleverness.
What we can accomplish as good as it may be does not compare to what God can accomplish.
In Spiritual formation we are aiming at a character and life that is so shaped that the deeds of Christ routinely and easily come from what is inside.
Grace is not just about forgiveness but about life.
Obedience to Christ is the easy way. Take my yoke...
The Spiritual disciplines are wisdom and not righteousness.
What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.
If we allow everything access to our mind, we are simply asking to be kept in a state of mental turmoil or bondage. For nothing enters the mind without having an effect for good or evil.
Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.
The prospering of God’s cause on earth depends upon his people thinking well.
When the will is enslaved to a desire, it will in turn enslave the mind.
In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot-psychologically cannot-sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself.
Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.
Clinical depression is an extreme form of a ‘bad mood.’
If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.
Spiritual formation cannot, in the nature of the case, be a ‘private’ thing, because it is a matter of whole-life transformation. You need to seek out others in your community who are pursuing the renovation of the heart.
The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.
Almost everything worth doing in human life is very difficult in its early stages and the good we are aiming at is never available at first, to strengthen us when we seem to need it most.
Many Christians were suddenly prepared to look at traditional methods of spiritual formation. They could not help but see that spiritual growth and vitality stem from what we actually do with our lives, from the habits we form, and from the character that results.