J. C. Ryle observed, “A man may preach from false motives. A man may write books, and make fine speeches, and seem diligent in good works, and yet be a Judas Iscariot. But a man seldom goes into his closet, and pours out his soul before God in secret, unless he is serious.
We wake up most days not trying to serve, just trying to survive.
You can exaggerate your authority in handling the Scriptures, but you cannot exaggerate the Scriptures’ authority to handle you. You can use the word of God to come to wrong conclusions, but you cannot find any wrong conclusions in the word of God.
Jesus understood his mission. He was not driven by the needs of others, though he often stopped to help hurting people. He was not driven by the approval of others, though he cared deeply for the lost and the broken. Ultimately, Jesus was driven by the Spirit. He was driven by his God-given mission. He knew his priorities and did not let the many temptations of a busy life deter him from his task.
God’s will for your life is not very complicated. Obviously, living a Christlike life is hard work, and what following Jesus entails is not clear in every situation. But as an overarching principle, the will of God for your life is pretty straightforward: Be holy like Jesus, by the power of the Spirit, for the glory of God.
The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. We cannot be any of these things. We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance – and choose wisely.
God’s will is always your sanctification.
Most moms and dads think they are either the best or the worst parents in the world. Both are wrong.
He calls us to run hard after Him, His commands, and His glory. The decision to be in God’s will is not the choice between Memphis or Fargo or engineering or art; it’s the daily decision we face to seek God’s kingdom or ours, submit to His lordship or not, live according to His rules or our own.
You can borrow time, but you can’t steal it.
We will have to work hard to rest.
We’re not only living lives of vanity; our passion for God is often nothing more than a passion to have God make our search for vanity a successful one.
To paraphrase Titus 3:3, we live as slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in chaos and envy, hassled by others and hassling one another. We are all very busy, but not with what matters.
The more my brain was fed, the hungrier it became.
Many of us have had it so good that we have started looking for heaven on earth. We have lost any sort of pilgrim attitude. It’s all a matter of perspective. If you think that God has promised this world will be a five-star hotel, you will be miserable as you live though the normal struggles of life. But if you remember that God promised we would be pilgrims and this world may feel more like a desert or even a prison, you might find your life surprisingly happy.
What is wrong, and heartbreakingly foolish and wonderfully avoidable, is to live a life with more craziness than we want because we have less Jesus than we need.
We don’t get to pick the age we will live in, and we don’t get to choose all the struggles we will face. Faithfulness is ours to choose; the shape of faithfulness is God’s to determine.
Busyness is like sin: kill it, or it will be killing you.
Our feelings matter. Our stories matter. Our friends matter. But ultimately we must search the Scriptures to see what matters most.
Jesus submitted his will to the Scriptures, committed his brain to studying the Scriptures, and humbled his heart to obey the Scriptures. The Lord Jesus, God’s Son and our Savior, believed his Bible was the word of God down to the sentences, to the phrases, to the words, to the smallest letter, to the tiniest specks – and that nothing in all those specks and in all those books in his Holy Bible could ever be broken.