If I am to love the Lord my God with ALL my mind, there will not be room in it for carnality, for pride, for anxiety, for the love of myself. How can the mind be filled with the love of the Lord and have space left over for things like that?
– Elisabeth Elliot –
in Discipline: The Glad Surrender (page 74)
A pure heart is one to which all that is not of God is strange and jarring.
– John Tavler –
as was often quoted by Amy Carmichael
Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?
– Leonard Ravenhill –
Christians don’t tell lies, they just go to church and sing them.
– AW Tozer –
No one whose senses have been exercised to know good and evil but must grieve over the sight of zealous souls seeking to be filled with the Holy Spirit while they are yet living in a state of moral carelessness or borderline sin. Such a things is a moral contradiction. Whoever would be filled and indwell by the Spirit should first judge his life for any hidden iniquities; he should courageously expel from his heart everything which is out of accord with the character of God as revealed by the Holy Scriptures.
– AW Tozer –
The words of the Lord hurt and offend until there is nothing left to be hurt or offended. Jesus has no tenderness whatsoever toward anything that is ultimately going to ruin a person in his service to God. If the Spirit of God brings to your mind a word of the Lord that hurts you, you may be sure that there is something He wants to hurt to death.
– Oswald Chambers –
Keep as far as you can from those temptations that feed and strengthen the sins which you would overcome. Lay siege to your sins, and starve them out, by keeping away the food and fuel which is their maintenance and life.
– Richard Baxter –
Sometimes people talk about how they are “struggling with” certain things, or “working through” them, when what they really mean is that they are delaying obedience. “I have a problem with this,” they say, or, “I don’t feel comfortable with that yet,” meaning, “Who me? Disobedient?” . . . Obedience will very likely earn you nasty labels nowadays. There’s nothing new about that. Obedience has never been the route to popularity. The question is simply, who is your master?
– Elisabeth Elliot –
All practical power over sin and over men depends on maintaining closet communion. Those who abide in the secret place with God show themselves mighty to conquer evil, and strong to work and to war for God. They are seers who read His secrets; they know His will; they are the meek whom He guides in judgment and teaches His way. They are His prophets who speak for Him to others, and even forecast things to come. They watch the signs of the times and discern His tokens and read His signals.
– Arthur T. Pierson –