Bitterness is like drinking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.
The “with God” life is not a life of more religious activities or devotions or trying to be good. It is a life of inner peace and contentment for your soul with the maker and manager of the universe. The “without God” life is the opposite. It is death. It will kill your soul.
A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances.
A soul without a center has difficulty making a decision. One of the pictures James uses of this condition is that the double-souled person is like a wave on the sea, driven forward one moment and backward the next. People whose souls are rooted in a center find it brings clarity to their decisions.
Being right is actually a very hard burden to be able to carry gracefully and humbly. That’s why nobody likes to sit next to the kid in class who’s right all the time. One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.
The soul is not well when we rush so much. If it does not get the rest it needs, it becomes fatigued.
Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done – like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.
What repeatedly enters your mind and occupies your mind, eventually shapes your mind, and will ultimately express itself in what you do and who you become.
Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.
If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. Especially the people nobody else notices.
The most important task of your life is not what you do, but who you become.
Peace doesn’t come from finding a lake with no storms. It comes from having Jesus in the boat.
The decision to grow always involves a choice between risk and comfort. This means that to be a follower of Jesus, you must renounce comfort as the ultimate value of your life.
When we live in the love of God, we begin to pay attention to people the way God pays attention to us.
Solitude is the one place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society that will otherwise relentlessly mold us. Solitude requires relentless perseverance.
The goal of prayer is to live all of my life and speak all of my words in the joyful awareness of the presence of God. Prayer becomes real when we grasp the reality and goodness of God’s constant presence with ‘the real me.’ Jesus lived his everyday life in conscious awareness of his Father.
If we do not become changed from the inside-out – if we don’t morph – we will be tempted to find external methods to satisfy our need to feel that we’re different from those outside the faith. If we cannot be transformed, we will settle for being informed or conformed.
We must assess our thoughts and beliefs and reckon whether they are moving us closer to conformity to Christ or farther away from it.