Literature helps to humanize us. It expands our range of experiences. It fosters awareness of ourselves and the world. It enlarges our compassion for people. It awakens our imaginations. It expresses our feelings and insights about God, nature, and life. It enlivens our sense of beauty. And it is a constructive form of entertainment.
My annual goal is to read seventy-five books, which may sound like a lot.
We cannot look to Christ without looking beyond ourselves. Assurance in the Christian life is measured not by our wins or our losses, even religious and moral wins and losses, but by Christ as we find our daily assurance in his all-sufficiency.
But when Newton focused on his faith in Christ, he focused on three realities: Christ’s death, resurrection, and ongoing reign.
If our awareness of indwelling sin humbles us and makes our sovereign Christ more precious to us, we are safe.39.
The joy of the Lord is our strength in the Christian life; unbelief is our Kryptonite.
Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being.
In the Christian life, new affections for Christ clash with habitual sin patterns. To put it more strongly, new affections for God eject old habits of sin. Or to say it in the negative, failure to find satisfaction in Christ leaves in the soul a vacuum filled by self, idols, and false securities.
I wish you health, peace, and prosperity; but, above all, that your souls may prosper; that you may still prefer the light of God’s countenance to your chief joy; that you may still delight yourselves in the Lord; be daily hungering and thirsting after him, and daily receiving from his fullness, even grace for grace; that you may rejoice in his all-sufficiency.36.
A life of gospel simplicity is a life focused on Christ and his all-sufficiency, a life in which we are aware of our sin and lostness, and confident of what Christ has done on our behalf.
Simplicity of intention, implies that we have but one leading aim, to which it is our deliberate and unreserved desire that every thing else in which we are concerned may be subordinate and subservient – in a word, that we are devoted to the Lord, and have by grace been enabled to choose him, and to yield ourselves to him, so as to place our happiness in his favor, and to make his glory and will the ultimate scope of all our actions.
Humbled I ought to be, to find I am so totally depraved; but not discouraged, since Jesus is appointed to me of God, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption; and since I find that, in the midst of all this darkness and deadness, he keeps alive the principle of grace which he has implanted in my heart.48.
In the healthy Christian life, there are no double standards, no dual aims. The private life and the public life are equally oriented to the glory of God. This is manifested as true Christian authenticity in the world.
The nearness of God is our good. And the trials we endure in this fallen world awaken us to this truth.
In the gospel-simple life we do not live to please men; we live to please the Lord alone.
We lose out on communion with Christ when we gorge on entertainment.
Sin is what makes the things we know we ought to do so difficult and lifeless.
Time, not image, makes Heroes.
The self-boasting life is a direct contradiction to the Christ-boasting life. Pride sucks away our spiritual joy and vitality and clouds over Christ. “O to live in and by and to and for and with Jesus by faith, this is life indeed. How different from that dry contentious self-applauding spirit, which makes so much noise and does so little good.”70 We are prone to exchange the glory of Christ for the lentil stew of self-consumed pride. We.
When you had your smartphone you were a walking vending-machine of whatever you’d ingested that day’, she told him. ‘It was difficult to talk about deeper things that mattered, because you were constantly distracted by Internet litter. You’re now able to focus and give necessary attention to deeper issues.