Maturity

April 16, 2014

Improve the present moment! Why delay?
Why wait tomorrow when you have today?

– Unknown –

April 15, 2014

We must go back to the doctrines. I fear that the new generation does not know the doctrines as our fathers knew them.

– John A. Broadus –

March 11, 2014

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

– DA Carson –

February 9, 2014

The greater perfection a soul aspires after, the more dependent it is upon divine grace.

– Brother Lawrence –

February 5, 2014

You may have your own bed, but I know God’s grace.

– Jackie Pullinger –

January 8, 2014

One doesn’t learn to speak a language in a couple of months. It will be plugging for a good while yet. Seems that I’ll never get through ‘preparing’ for the mission field. But I’ve been comforted this week thinking of our Lord’s thirty silent years of readying Himself at home with His family and bending over a carpenter’s bench. Were those days any less of a fragrance to God than His later work before the eyes of the people? I think not. A well-made piece of furniture and a healed blind man represented the same thing to the Father—a job well done; mission accomplished. So with us here. Nothing great, but what is that to Him with whom there is no great or small?

– Jim Elliot –

January 4, 2014

. . . in the whole work we desire to stand with God, and not to depend upon the favourable or unfavourable judgment of the multitude . . .

– George Müller –

December 25, 2013

We have to make the preparation now before we are imprisoned . . . I personally use an exercise. I live in the United States of America. Can you imagine what an American supermarket looks like? You find there many delicious things. I look at everything and say to myself, “I can go without this thing and that thing; this thing is very nice, but I can go without: this third thing I can go without, too.” I visited the whole supermarket and did not spend one dollar. I had the joy of seeing many beautiful things and the second joy to know that I can go without.

 – Richard Wurmbrand –
From Preparing for the Underground Church

December 24, 2013

Dear friend, salvation would be a sadly incomplete affair if it did not deal with the whole part of our ruined estate. We want to be purified as well as pardoned. Justification without sanctification would not be salvation at all. It would call the leper clean, and leave him to die of his disease; it would forgive the rebellion, and allow the rebel to remain an enemy of his King. It would remove the consequence but overlook the cause, and this would leave an endless and hopeless task before us. It would stop the stream for a time, but leave an open fountain of defilement which would sooner or later break forth with increased power.

– Charles Spurgeon –