Thousands of Purposes in Thousands of Things We Cannot See
God is never doing just one thing in what He does with us. He is always doing thousands of things that we cannot see. He never has only one purpose in what He does. He always has thousands of purposes in everything He does. He is infinitely wise, and everything He does relates to everything else that He does sooner or later. For those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, all of them — all of them! — work together for good.
John Piper, You Will Never Be Thirsty Again
Worship Changes Us
When we glorify God, we are not giving Him something substantial that He would not otherwise have. We are simply ascribing to Him what is His. But when we are glorified … we are being made more like Him, we are being strengthened or empowered to exhibit characteristics that we would not otherwise display.
D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 59.
Take God’s Viewpoint as Yours
Siding with God against Yourself
Repentance is simply a man taking sides with God against himself.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834 – 1892)
The Church Is a Spiritual Workshop
The local church, therefore, may be viewed as a spiritual workshop for the development of agape love. Thus the stresses and strains of a spiritual fellowship offer the ideal situation for the testing and maturing [of love]…. The local congregation is one of the very best laboratories in which individual believers may discover their real spiritual emptiness and begin to grow in agape love.
Were You There
Faith Rests on What You Think about God
Faith rests not primarily upon promises, but upon character. A believer’s faith can never rise higher than his conception of God. A promise is never better or worse than the character of the one who makes it. An inadequate conception of God must result in a weak faith, for faith depends upon the character of God just as a building rests upon its foundations.
A. W. Tozer, The Set of the Sail, p. 38
The Cross Crosses Us
The cross … is that divine grace and power which crosses the carnal wills of men, and gives a contradiction to their corrupt affections, and that constantly opposes itself to the inordinate and fleshly appetite of their minds, and so may be justly termed the instrument of man’s holy dying to the world, and being made conformable to the will of God. For nothing else can mortify sin, or make it easy for us to submit to the divine will, in things otherwise contrary to our own.
William Penn, No Cross, No Crown, p. 20
Cultural Christianity
You cannot be a Christian on your own terms. That is Cultural Christianity. You must be a Christian on God’s terms. That is Biblical Christianity. The former is counterfeit; the latter is authentic.
Patrick Morley, Seven Seasons of the Man in the Mirror, p. 81
Life Is Worship 