All work was designed by God to be priestly work.
Ask God to make your work go well today.
Sin is not just the wrong stuff we do; it’s the good we don’t do. It’s the starving children we don’t want to look at, the volunteering we avoid, the poor we don’t want to serve, and the money we don’t want to give.
The greatest battle of life is spiritual. It is the struggles with resentment and anger and greed and superiority that keep me from living in the flow with God.
I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” No, I am its keeper, not its captain. I did not make it, and I cannot save it from death. That’s why soul-care is a different task than self-care. I do not care for my soul only for my own sake. It is only mine on loan, and it is coming due soon.
Don’t wait for passion to lead you somewhere you’re not. Start by bringing passion to the place where you are.
The most important thing in your life,” Dallas said, “is not what you do; it’s who you become. That’s what you will take into eternity. You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.
It may not quite reflect the maturity of “Thy will be done,” but it is better to be an honest mess before God than a dishonest “saint.
The late John Stott wrote, “Paul is not saying he did a careful study of every sinner in human history and found out he came in last place. The truth is, rather, when we are convicted by the Holy Spirit, an immediate result is we give up all such comparisons.” Paul was so vividly aware of his own sins that he could not conceive that anybody could be worse.
The sequence in the Bible is usually not calling; deep feeling of peace about it; decision to obey; smooth sailing. Instead, it’s usually calling; abject terror; decision to obey; big problems; more terror; second thoughts; repeat several times; deeper faith.
The time to love is now. When we love, we enter into the mystery of eternity. Nothing offered in love is ever lost, for this mortal life is not the whole story. This life is to the next a kind of school, a kind of preparation for the me you were meant to be. That person will go into eternity.
Dear God, I sinned yesterday, I sinned again today, and I’m planning to go out and do the same sin tomorrow. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
To follow Jesus means learning to arrange my life around those practices that will enable me to stay connected to him and live more and more like him. In short, this is just another way of defining a spiritual discipline. A spiritual discipline is any activity that can help me gain power to live life as Jesus taught and modeled it.
Self is a stand-alone, do-it-yourself unit, while the soul reminds us we were not made for ourselves. The soul always exists before God. So soul is needed for deep art, poetry, and music.
I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one,” writes Douglas Coupland. “I know because it hurts.
The truth is, the soul’s infinite capacity to desire is the mirror image of God’s infinite capacity to give.
A soul can be saved. But it will take softness and depth and space. The world won’t help much.
Once you’re a little bit to the side, God can come to the center.
Brother Lawrence called this “practicing the presence” of God, and the most important part of that practice lay in “renouncing, once and for all, whatever does not lead to God.
No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and no faith is as solid as a wounded faith.” Elie Wiesel.