A calling is simply God’s shaping of your burden and beckoning you to your service to him in the place and pursuit of his choosing.
Thomas Merton once said, “We cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we cannot be at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.
More than anything else, prayer enables you to see your own heart and brings you into alignment with God’s heart. Prayer is not a monologue in which we imagine ourselves to be communing with God. Rather, it is a dialogue through which God fashions your heart and makes his dream of you a reality. It is truly the treasured gift of the Christian that through direct answers and not-so-direct answers, the follower of Jesus begins to love God for who he is, not for what he may get out of him.
The apostle Paul says in Romans 13:14, “Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” In other words, do not put yourself in a place where you can fall.
The Bible offers a beautiful passage from the heart of one who knew much, suffered much, endured much, and wrote much: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceivedwhat God has prepared for those who love him.” 1 CORINTHIANS 2:9.
We are all priests before God, there is no such distinction as ‘secular or sacred.’ In fact, the opposite of sacred is not secular; the opposite of sacred is profane. In short, no follower of Christ does secular work. We all have a sacred calling.
Legalism always breeds compliance over purpose.
Giving yourself the privilege of destroying other positions while parking your own position in an unidentifiable location is a form of linguistic terrorism.
The denial of Christ has less to do with facts and more to do with the bent of what a person is prejudiced to conclude.
The love of God shows us that God alone bridges the distance between him and us, enabling us to see this world through Calvary.
Fatalism is the creed of a will that is dying to its possibilities and seeks to drag the imagination with it.
The components of gratitude and truth, love and hope bring the realization of wonder. The disciplines of study, of reading and reflecting, of dialoguing in depth and praying with belief sustain the wonder.
Let your devotional life be the beacon that guides you through the tough terrain you will face.
Any nation that neglects teaching the sacredness of life and the family does so at its own peril. Any nation that sanctions the removal of God’s boundaries will destroy its own.
Malcolm Muggeridge, that peripatetic journalist who traveled the globe for more than six decades of his life, said that if God is dead somebody else is going to have to take His place. It will either be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner. To.
His first step is to make temptation appear as a natural desire. It is something unequivocally physical and human.
Denying the existence of God leads us to preposterous conclusions so that, in the end, the amoral world of the skeptic who simply cannot explain good is worse than the world of the theist who has an explanation for evil.
There is a difference between a belief and a conviction. A belief can become something you merely hold; a conviction is that which holds you.
To the young woman I say, This is the moment in your life when he who is wooing you will be at his kindest. And if you do not see kindness in the man you are dating, beware! For the partnership you are looking for will be nourished and nurtured only on the basis of a love that is not arrogant or prideful, but kind.
When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer heat with air-conditioning – when we have overcome all these and much more besides, then there will abide two things with which we must cope: the evil in our hearts and death.