I ask you who love Jesus—does religion ever make you unhappy? Does love to Jesus distress you and make you miserable? It may bring you into trouble, sometimes, and cause you to endure persecution for His name’s sake. If you are a child of God, you will have to suffer tribulation. But all the afflictions which you may be called upon to endure for Him will work for your good, and are not worthy to be compared with the glory which is to be revealed hereafter!
– Charles Spurgeon –
A sight of Christ, Brothers and Sisters, will keep you from despondency, and doubts, and despair. A sight of Christ! How shall I stir you to it? It will fire you to duty; it will deliver you from temptation; it will, in fact, make you like He. A man is known by his company; and if you have become acquainted with Christ, and know Him, you will be sure to reflect His light! It is because the moon has converse with the sun, that she has any light for this dark world’s night; and if you talk with Christ, the Sun, He will shine on you so gloriously, that you, like the moon, shall reflect His Light, and the dark night of this world shall be enlightened by your radiance. The Lord help us to know Him!
– Charles Spurgeon –
God will not protect you from anything that will make you more like Jesus.
– Elizabeth Elliot –
The flowers smell sweetest after a shower;
vines bear the better for bleeding;
the walnut-tree is most fruitful when most beaten;
saints spring and thrive most internally,
when they are most externally afflicted.
Afflictions are the mother of virtue.
Manasseh’s chain was more profitable to him than his crown.
All of the stones that came about Stephen’s ears
did but knock him closer to Christ, the corner-stone.
– Thomas Brooks –
It would be no better than madness to despair of the providence of God now.
– Eric Ludy –
As in the book of Daniel when the three young men who were put in the furnace did not smell like fire upon being delivered from it, so the Christians who have been in Communist prisons don’t smell like bitterness against Communists. A flower if you bruise it under your feet, rewards you by giving its perfume. Likewise Christians, tortured by the Communists, rewarded their torturers by love. We brought many jailors to Christ. And we are dominated by one desire: to give Communists who have made us suffer the best we have, the salvation that comes from our Lord Jesus Christ.
– Richard Wurmbrand –
Yes, there lies before us a beautiful possible life – one that shall have a passion for giving: that shall be poured forth to God – spent out for man: that shall be consecrated for the hardest work and the darkest sinners.
– Lillias Trotter –
My Lord was pleased to die for my sins; why should I not be glad to give up my poor life out of love for Him.
– Girolamo Savanarola –