And make sure to check out these and .
1. “There is nothing worth living for, unless it is worth dying for.”
2. “God has promised to supply all our needs. What we don’t have now, we don’t need now.”
3. “You can never lose what you have offered to Christ.”
4. “The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”
5. “The question remains, ‘Is God paying attention? If so, why doesn’t He do something?’ I say He has, He did, He is doing something, and He will do something.”
6. “Of one thing I am perfectly sure, God’s story never ends with ashes.”
7. “Leave it all in the hands that were wounded for you.”
8. “When obedience to God contradicts what I think will give me pleasure, let me ask myself if I love Him.”
9. “God never denies us our heart’s desire, except to give us something better.”
10. “Faith does not eliminate questions, but faith knows where to take them.”
11. “Restlessness and impatience change nothing except our peace and joy. Peace does not dwell in outward things, but in the heart prepared to wait trustfully and quietly on Him who has all things safely in His hands.”
12. “The will of God is not something you add to your life. It’s a course you choose. You either line yourself up with the Son of God, or you capitulate to the principle which governs the rest of the world.”
13. “One way to begin to see how vastly indulgent we usually are is to fast. It is a long day that is not broken by the usual three meals. One finds out what an astonishing amount of time is spent in the planning, purchasing, preparing, eating, and cleaning up of meals.”
14. “While I disparage the exercise of building one’s self-esteem, I indulge in it every time I imagine myself free from the defects I perceive in someone else.”
15. “Throughout the millennia of human history, up until the past two decades or so, people took for granted that the differences between men and women were so obvious as to need no comment. They accepted the way things were. But, our easy assumptions have been assailed and confused, we have lost our bearings in a fog of rhetoric about something called equality, so that I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to belabor to educated people what was once perfectly obvious to the simplest peasant.”
16. “Virginity is something that can be offered to God.”
17. “I have one desire now—to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and strength into it.”
18. “The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian, makes me a different kind of woman.”
19. “I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are honestly able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray, ‘Thy will be done.’”
20. “We are women, and my plea is, let me be a woman—holy through and through, asking for nothing but what God wants to give me, receiving with both hands and with all my heart whatever that is.”
21. “God never witholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God’s refusals are always merciful—severe mercies at times, but mercies all the same.“
22. “God is God. Because He is God, He is worthy of my trust and obedience. I will find rest nowhere but in His holy will that is unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to.”
23. “Don’t dig up in doubt what you planted in faith.”
24. “Lord, break the chains that hold me to myself; free me to be your happy slave—that is, to be the happy foot washer of anyone today who needs his feet washed, his supper cooked, his faults overlooked, his work commended, his failure forgiven, his griefs consoled or his button sewed on. Let me not imagine that my love for You is very great if I am unwilling to do for a human being for something very small.”
25. “The will of God is never exactly what you expect it to be. It may seem to be much worse, but in the end it’s going to be a lot better and a lot bigger.”
26. “The Devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements—noise, hurry, and crowds. He will not allow quietness.”
27. “The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the Cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy.”
28. “Today is mine. Tomorrow is none of my business. If I peer anxiously into the fog of the future, I will strain my spiritual eyes so that I will not see clearly what is required of me now.”
29. “Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself.”
30. “I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.”
31. “By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere.”
32. “It is God to whom and with whom we travel, and while He is at the end of our journey, He is also at every stopping place.”
33. “Teach me never to let the joy of what has been pale, the joy of what is.”
34. “When you don’t know what to do next, just do the thing in front of you.”
35. “We cannot give our hearts to God and keep our bodies to ourselves.”
36. “Things happen which would not happen without prayer. Let us not forget that.”
37. “Fear arises when we imagine that everything depends on us.”
38. “Everything, if given to God, can become your gateway to joy.”
39. “The world cries for men who are strong, strong in conviction, strong to lead, to stand, to suffer.”
40. “We are not meant to die merely in order to be dead. God could not want that for the creatures to whom he has given the breath of life. We die in order to live.”
41. “If you believe in a God who controls the big things, you have to believe in a God who controls the little things.”
42. “If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd.”
43. “One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.”
44. “You are loved with an everlasting love, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
45. “Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship,‘in spirit and in truth.’ Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.”
46. “I believe a woman, in order to be a good wife, must be—among other things—both sensual and maternal.”
47. “I remember what Jim wrote to me in one of his letters: ‘Let not our longing slay the appetite of our living.’ And I think there are a lot of single women who are allowing their longing to slay the appetite of their living. They are not throwing their heart and soul into the will of God for today, because they are simply dying inside for something that God has not given them.”
48. “It is a naive sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do. This is a distortion and a travesty. Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria? Women can and ought to be judged by the criteria of femininity, for it is in their femininity that they participate in the human race. And femininity has its limitations so has masculinity. That is what we’ve been talking about. To do this is not to do that. To be this is not to be that. To be a woman is not to be a man. To be married is not to be single, which may mean not to have a career. To marry this man is not to marry all the others. A choice is a limitation.”
49. “To understand the meaning of womanhood, we have to start with God. If He is indeed ‘Creator of all things visible and invisible,’ He is certainly in charge of all things. Visible and invisible, stupendous and minuscule, magnificent and trivial. God has to be in charge of details if He is going to be in charge of the overall design.”
50. “To me, a lady is not frilly, flouncy, flippant, frivolous, and fluff-brained, but she is gentle, she is gracious, she is godly, and she is giving. You and I have the gift of femininity. The more womanly we are, the more manly men will be, and the more God is glorified. Be women, be only women, be real women in obedience to God.”
51. “Stand true to your calling to be a man. Real women will always be relieved and grateful when men are willing to be men.”
52. “A man must at times be hard as nails, willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman’s resentment like tenderness.”
53. “A woman ought to be honest with a man who shows interest in her.”
54. “The way you keep your house, the way you organize your time, the care you take in your personal appearance, the things you spend your money on, all speak loudly about what you believe. The beauty of thy peace shines forth in an ordered life. A disordered life speaks loudly of disorder in the soul.”
55. “The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment. ‘If a man will let himself be lost for My sake,’ Jesus said, ‘he will find his true self.’”
56. “I took it for granted that there must be a few men left in the world who had that kind of strength. I assumed that those men would also be looking for women with principle. I did not want to be among the marked-down goods on the bargain table, cheap because they’d been pawed over. Crowds collect there. It is only the few who will pay full price. ‘You get what you pay for.’”
57. “What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpent’s offer and had said to him instead, ‘Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be—let me be a woman?’”
58. “So, the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations— her gifts.”
59. “Eve’s daughters are as flowers and none can ever say they are through unfolding. And what man can predict the consummate end of such a life when its ultimate center is Sharon’s Rose?”
60. “No woman who has not learned to master herself can be trusted to submit willingly to her husband. And that word willingly means that she does not merely resign herself to something she cannot avoid. It means that by an act of her own will she gives herself.”
61. “The husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the Head of the Church. And the wife is there to bless and support and help him.”
62. “No marriage can survive without forgiveness. Marriage is a long term commitment between two sinners.”
63. “If you are married, then accept that. Accept the husband that God has given you. If you are single, accept your singleness and take it as if today was the last day of your life. Don’t be looking constantly to the future.”
64. “Unless a man is prepared to ask a woman to be his wife, what right has he to claim her exclusive attention? Unless she has been asked to marry him, why would a sensible woman promise any man her exclusive attention? If, when the time has come for a commitment, he is not man enough to ask her to marry him, she should give him no reason to presume that she belongs to him.”
65. “But you will find yourself disarmed utterly, and your accusing spirit transformed into loving forgiveness the moment you remember that you did, in fact, marry only a sinner, and so did he.”
66. “A wedding is a celebration of marriage, of an institution ordained by God at the creation of man, to be entered into with solemnity as well as with joy.”
67. “God might have given Adam another man to be his friend, to walk and talk and argue with if that was his pleasure. But, Adam needed more than the companionship of the animals or the friendship of a man. He needed a helper, specially designed and prepared to fill that role. It was a woman God gave him, a woman, meet, fit, suitable, entirely appropriate for him, made of his very bones and flesh.”
68. “Finally, and I think most importantly, marriage is a vocation. It is a task to which you are called. If it is a task, it means you work at it. It is not something which happens. You hear the call, you answer, you accept the task, you enter into it willingly and eagerly, you commit yourself to its disciplines and responsibilities and limitations and privileges and joys. You concentrate on it, giving yourself to it day after day in a lifelong yes. Having said yes to the man who asked you to marry him, you go on saying yes to marriage.”
69. “Marriage teaches us that even the most intimate human companionship cannot satisfy the deepest places of the heart. Our hearts are lonely, ‘til they rest in Him.’”
70. “God is forever luring us up and away from this one, wooing us to Himself and His still invisible Kingdom, where we will certainly find what we so keenly long for.”
71. “It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.”
72. “Faith’s most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith in vain.”
73. “Heaven is not here, it’s there. If we were given all we wanted here, our hearts would settle for this world rather than the next.”
74. “The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived, not always looked forward to as though the real living were around the next corner.”
75. “Where does your security lie? Is God your refuge, your hiding place, your stronghold, your shepherd, your counselor, your friend, your redeemer, your Savior, your guide? If He is, you don’t need to search any further for security.”
76. “Faith is not an instinct. It certainly is not a feeling, feelings don’t help much when you’re in the lions’ den or hanging on a wooden Cross. Faith is not inferred from the happy way things work. It is an act of will, a choice, based on the unbreakable Word of a God who cannot lie, and who showed us what love and obedience and sacrifice mean, in the person of Jesus Christ.”
77. “I cannot close my heart to Thee. This is the response of a humble heart, one that admits its poverty and recognizes the gentle love that waits, the joy that is seeking Him precisely because he is in such pain that he can hardly seek anything but death. Then, although he is blind, he sees with the eye of faith, and what he sees, through the mist of tears, is a rainbow. He comes to believe that the promise is true, tears are not forever. There will be a morning without them. His faith lays hold of the promise and, mysteriously, he finds that pain has been exchanged for joy.”
78. “Well, that’s what faith is about, isn’t it? If you really believe that somebody loves you then you trust them. The will of God is love. And love suffers. That’s how we know what.”
79. “Faith need never ask, ‘But what good did this do me?’ Faith already knows that everything that happens fits into a pattern for good to those who love God. An inconvenience is always, whether we see it or not, a blessed inconvenience. We may rest in the promise that God is fitting together a good many more things than are any of our business. We need never see what good it did, or how a given trouble accomplishes anything. It is peace to leave it all with Him, asking only that He do with me anything He wants, anywhere, anytime, that God may be glorified.”
80. “Does our faith rest on having prayers answered as we think they should be answered, or does it rest on that mighty love that went down into death for us?”
81. “There is a popular notion about prayer that assumes that the thing asked for ought to be the object of faith—. ‘Lord, give me this or that,’ wherefore, ‘this’ and ‘that’ become the realities. No. The Bible states the absolutes that we can be certain of the character of God, His love, His will that we be conformed to His Son’s likeness, His sovereign control of all the universe. When faith latches on to those realities that we do not see with our eyes, it can never be confused. If it makes the thing asked for its object, faith itself will dissolve if the Lord’s answer is no, not yet or wait. In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust, let me never be put to confusion.”
82. “Faith is not a feeling. Faith is willed obedience in action.”
83. “And so it often is. Faith, prayer, and obedience are our requirements. We are not offered in exchange immunity and exemption from the world’s woes. What we are offered has to do with another world altogether.”
84. “Faith is not merely feeling good about God, but a conscious choice, even in the utter absence of feelings or external to obey His word when He says, ‘Trust Me.’ This choice has nothing to do with mood but is a deliberate act of laying hold of the character of God whose circumstances never change.”
85. “The deepest things I have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering. And out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things I know about God.”
86. “‘Do the next thing.’ I don’t know any simpler formula for peace, for relief from stress and anxiety than that very practical, very down-to-earth word of wisdom. Do the next thing. That has gotten me through more agonies than anything else I could recommend.”
87. “The hand of the Gardener holds the knife. It is His glory that is at stake when the best grapes are produced so we need not think He has something personal against us, or has left us wholly to His enemy, Satan. He is always and forever for us.”
88. “For a Christian, the pattern is Jesus. What did He do? He offered himself, a perfect and complete sacrifice, for the love of God. And you and I should be prepared, also, to be broken bread and poured out wine for the world.”
89. “If your prayers don’t get answered the way you thought they were supposed to be, what happens to your faith? The world says God doesn’t love you. The scriptures tell me something very different.”
90. “How often I am troubled about something that looms ahead, wondering how I am to cope when the time comes. Why do I not bring it at once to the Lord, who stands ready with next grace for the next thing.”
91. “Some of God’s greatest mercies are His refusals. He says no in order that He may, in some way we cannot imagine, say yes.”
92. “This grief, this sorrow, this total loss that empties my hands and breaks my heart, I may, if I will, accept, and by accepting it, I find in my hands something to offer. And so I give it back to Him, who in mysterious exchange gives Himself to me.”
93. “My heart was saying, ‘Lord take away this longing, or give me that for which I long.’ The Lord was answering, ‘I must teach you to long for something better.’”
94. “He puts those tears into His bottle, for He gave you the love that brings those tears and He made you so you could cry, and you cast it all on the rock that never moves.”
95. “There is in fact no redemptive work done anywhere without suffering.”
96. “The bigger our pain now, the bigger that ‘weight of glory’ will be. It’s mysterious, it’s unimaginable, but it’s going to be, and for that we give thanks.”
97. “Things to do in suffering; recognize it, accept it, offer it to God as a sacrifice, and offer yourself with it.”
98. “The Cross means suffering. Suffering’s meaning is to be learned through the Cross.”
99. “We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive His poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others.”
100. “We’re not adrift in chaos. We’re held in the everlasting arms.”
101. “All things come from You, Lord, and of Your own we have given to You.”
102. “I do not make Him Lord, I acknowledge Him Lord.”
103. “Nothing that comes to me is devoid of divine purposes.”
104. “If my life is broken when given to Jesus, it may be because pieces will feed a multitude when a loaf would only satisfy a little boy.”
105. “There would be no intellectual satisfaction on this side of Heaven to that age-old question why. Although I have not found intellectual satisfaction, I have found peace. The answer I say to you is not an explanation but a person, Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God.”
106. “To God, nothing is finally lost. All the scriptural metaphors about the death of the seed that falls into the ground, about losing one’s life, about becoming the least in the kingdom, about the world’s passing away—all these go on to something unspeakably better and more glorious. Loss and death are only the preludes to gain and life.”
107. “Whatever is in the cup that God is offering to me, whether it be pain and sorrow and suffering and grief along with the many more joys, I’m willing to take because I trust Him. Because I know that what God wants for me is the very best.”
108. “To my amazement and delight, I discovered that the word burden in the Hebrew is the same word as gift. This is a very transforming truth for me. If I thank God for this very thing which is killing me, I can begin dimly and faintly to see it as a gift. I can realize that it is through that very thing which is so far from being the thing I would have chosen, that God wants to teach me His way of salvation.”
109. “So when the answer was no with the thorn in the flesh, and for Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, we know there’s nothing wrong with praying that God will solve our problems and heal our diseases and pay our debts and sort out our marital difficulties. It’s right and proper that we should bring our requests to God. We’re not praying against His will. But when the answer is no, then we know that God has something better at stake. There is another level, another kingdom, an invisible kingdom which you and I cannot see now but toward which we move and to which we belong.”
110. “If the Cross is the place where the worst thing that could happen happened, it’s also the place where the best that could happen happened. Ultimate hatred and ultimate love met on those two crosspieces. Suffering and love were brought into harmony.”
111. “The first principle is that of the Cross; life comes out of death. I bring God my sorrows, He gives me His joy. I bring Him my losses, he gives me His gains. I give Him my sins, He gives me His righteousness. I bring Him my deaths, He gives me His life.”
112. “I am not a theologian or a scholar, but I am very aware of the fact that pain is necessary to all of us. In my own life, I think I can honestly say that out of the deepest pain has come the strongest conviction of the presence of God and the love of God.”
113. “Do you often feel like parched ground, unable to produce anything worthwhile? I do. When I am in need of refreshment, it isn’t easy to think of the needs of others. But I have found that if, instead of praying for my own comfort and satisfaction, I ask the Lord to enable me to give to others, an amazing thing often happens—I find my own needs wonderfully met. Refreshment comes in ways I would never have thought of, both for others, and then, incidentally, for myself.”
114. “There is no qualitative or quantitative measurement for pain. It is simply there—sharp or dull, shooting or stabbing, bearable or excruciating, local or general, it is unexplained, uninvited, unavoidable. It takes command. It is all-encompassing, implacable, exigent.”
115. “Does it make sense to pray for guidance about the future if we are not obeying the thing that lies before us today? How many momentous events in Scripture depended on one person’s seemingly small act of obedience! Rest assured; do what God tells you to do now, and, depend upon it, you will be shown what to do next.”
116. “If we hold tightly to anything given to us unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used we stunt the growth of the soul. What God gives us is not necessarily ‘ours’, but only ours to offer back to him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of, if we want to be our true selves. Many deaths must go into reaching our maturity in Christ, many letting goes.”
117. “Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.”
118. “Choices will continually be necessary and—let us not forget—possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.”
119. “One reason we are so harried and hurried is that we make yesterday and tomorrow our business, when all that legitimately concerns us is today. If we really have too much to do, there are some items on the agenda which God did not put there. Let us submit the list to Him and ask Him to indicate which items we must delete. There is always time to do the will of God. If we are too busy to do that, we are too busy.”
120. “To love God is to love His will. It is to wait quietly for life to be measured by One who knows us through and through. It is to be content with His timing and His wise appointment.”
121. “Christ is sufficient. We do not need ‘support groups’ for each and every separate tribulation.”
122. “God will never disappoint us. If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline. To the unbeliever the fact of suffering only convinces him that God is not to be trusted, does not love us. To the believer, the opposite is true.”
123. “If my life is surrendered to God, all is well. Let me not grab it back, as though it were in peril in His hand but would be safer in mine!”
124. “We never know what God has up His sleeve. You never know what might happen; you only know what you have to do now.”
125. “You either believe God knows what He’s doing or you believe He doesn’t. You either believe He’s worth trusting or you say He’s not. And then, where are you? You’re at the mercy of chaos not cosmos. Chaos is the Greek word for disorder. Cosmos is the word for order. We either live in an ordered universe or we are trying to create our own reality.”
126. “Great longing was to have a ‘single eye’ for the glory of God. Whatever might blur the vision God had given her of His work, whatever could distract or deceive or tempt others to seek anything but the Lord Jesus Himself she tried to eliminate.”
127. “Freedom begins way back. It begins not with doing what you want but with doing what you ought, that is, with discipline.”
128. “If God gave it to me, we say, ‘It’s mine, I can do what I want with it.’ No. The truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of—if we want to find our true selves, if we want real life, if our hearts are set on glory.”
129. “The disciplined Christian will be very careful what sort of counsel he seeks from others. Counsel that contradicts the written Word is ungodly counsel. Blessed is the man that walketh not in that.”
130. “To be a follower of the Crucified Christ means, sooner or later, a personal encounter with the Cross. And the Cross always entails loss.”
131. “Young people sometimes say to me, ‘I’ll just die if the Lord calls me to be a missionary,’ or words to that effect.”
132. “Let not him who accepts light in an instant despise him who gropes months in the shadows.”
133. “This job has been given to me to do. Therefore, it is a gift. Therefore, it is a privilege. Therefore, it is an offering I may make to God. Therefore, it is to be done gladly, if it is done for Him. Here, not somewhere else, I may learn God’s way. In this job, not in some other, God looks for faithfulness.”
134. “It takes a while for revelry to turn to reverence, and much repetition of truth to eventually turn young zeal into habitual channels for good.”
135. “The conditions for discipleship begin with ‘dying,’ and if you take the first step, very likely you will find that you have indeed been ‘called.’”
136. “There are those who insist that it is a very bad thing to question God. To them, ‘Why?’ is a rude question. That depends, I believe, on whether it is an honest search, in faith, for His meaning, or whether it is the challenge of unbelief and rebellion.”
137. “I seek the lessons God wants to teach me, and that means that I ask why.”
138. “Worry is the antithesis of trust. You simply cannot do both. They are mutually exclusive.”
139. “Well, that sounds pretty brave and strong, doesn’t it? But listen to the last stanza, ‘But not of us this strength, O Lord, and not of us this constancy. Our trust is Thine eternal Word, Thy presence our security.’”
140. “God seems so much ‘for us’ these days. I have not lost one nameable thing by putting her and our whole affair in the simplest way possible into His hands. There has been no careful planning, no worrying over details in the matter. I have simply recognized love in me, declared it to her, and to Him, and as frankly as I could tell Him I wanted His way in it. There has been no leading thus far to engagement, but the symptoms of a beautiful courtship prevail—not, perhaps, a routine one, or a ‘normal’ one, but a good one, nevertheless, and, withal, a deep sense that it is God-directed.”
141. “We are encompassed on all sides by the Almighty. His tender mercies are over all His works, ‘Steadfast love surrounds him who trusts in the Lord,’ and ‘Underneath are the Everlasting Arms.’ Over, around, underneath. We are enfolded. Can you think of a safer place to be?”
142. “A willing acceptance of all that God assigns and a glad surrender of all that I am and have constitute the key to receiving the gift of a quiet heart. Whenever I have balked, the quietness goes. It is restored, and life immeasurably simplified, when I have trusted and obeyed.”
143. “Whatever dark tunnel we may be called upon to travel through, God has been there.”
144. “There have been some hard things in my life, of course, as there have been in yours, and I cannot say to you, I know exactly what you’re going through. But I can say that I know the One who knows. And I’ve come to see that it’s through the deepest suffering that God has taught me the deepest lessons. And if we’ll trust Him for it, we can come through to the unshakable assurance that He’s in charge. He has a loving purpose. And He can transform something terrible into something wonderful. Suffering is never for nothing.”
145. “But, in the words of a Portuguese proverb, ‘God writes straight with crooked lines,’ and He is far more interested in getting us where He wants us to be than we are in getting there. He does not discuss things with us. He leads us faithfully and plainly as we trust Him and simply do the next thing.”
146. “Learning to pray is learning to trust the wisdom, the power, and the love of our Heavenly Father, always so far beyond our dreams.”
147. “How long, Lord, must I wait? ‘Nevermind child, trust me.’”
148. “We are always held in the love of God. We are never wholly at the mercy of other people, they are only ‘second causes,’ and no matter how many second or third or fiftieth causes seem to be in control of what happens to us, it is God who is in charge, He who holds the keys, He who casts the lot finally into the lap. Trusting Him, then, requires that I leave some things to be decided by others. I must learn to relinquish the control I might wield over somebody else if the decision properly belongs to Him. I must resist my urge to manipulate him, needle and prod and pester until he capitulates. I must trust God in him, trust God to do for both of us better than I know.”
149. “Either we are adrift in chaos or we are individuals, created, loved, upheld and placed purposefully, exactly where we are. Can you believe that? Can you trust God for that?”
150. “Loneliness is a required course for leadership.”
151. “The pain of loneliness is one way in which He wants to get our attention. We may be earnestly desiring to be obedient and holy. But we may be missing the fact that it is here, where we happen to be at this moment and not in another place or another time, that we may learn to love Him—here where it seems He is not at work, where He seems obscure or frightening, where He is not doing what we expected Him to do, where He is most absent. Here and nowhere else is the appointed place. If faith does not got to work here, it will not work at all.”
152. “Loneliness comes over us sometimes as a sudden tide. It is one of the terms of our humanness, and, in a sense, therefore, incurable. Yet I have found peace in my loneliest times not only through acceptance of the situation, but through making it an offering to God, who can transfigure it into something for the good of others.”
153. “Lonely? Give it to Jesus. The loneliness itself is material for sacrifice.”
154. “This is where faith begins—in the wilderness—when you are alone and afraid, when things don’t make sense.”
155. “But safety, as the Cross shows, does not exclude suffering. I learned that trust in those strong arms means that even our suffering is under control. We are not doomed to meaninglessness. A loving purpose is behind it all, a great tenderness, even in the fierceness.”
156. “The work of God is done on God’s timetable. His answers to our prayers come always in time—His time. His thoughts are far higher than ours, His wisdom past understanding.”
157. “Sometimes you can only do the next thing. Whatever that is, just do the next thing. God will meet you there.”
158. “Possibly His very withholding is in order that the boy may learn, at this crucial juncture in his life, to turn to God in prayer for a deeply felt need.”
159. “Prayer is a law of the universe. As God has ordained that certain physical laws should govern the law of this universe, so He has ordained the spiritual law. Books simply will not stay put on the table without the operation of gravity, although God could cause them, by divine fiat, to stay. Certain things simply will not happen without the operation of prayer, although God could cause them, by divine fiat, to happen. The Bible is full of examples of people doing what they could do and asking God to do what they couldn’t do. In other words, the pattern given to us is both to work and pray.”
160. “The heart which has no agenda but God’s is the heart at leisure from itself. Its emptiness is filled with the love of God. Its solitude can be turned into prayer.”
161. “Pray when you feel like praying. Pray when you don’t feel like praying. Pray until you feel like praying.”
162. “Suffering creates the possibility of growth in, holiness, but only to those who, by letting all else go, are open to the training—not by arguing with the Lord about what they did or did not do to deserve punishment, but by praying, ‘Lord, show me what You have for me in this.’”
163. “Cold prayers, like cold suitors, are seldom effective in their aims.”
164. “Prayer never evaporates. It sets into motion forces as inexorable and perhaps as ‘unhurriable,’ as a glacier, but when the Lord’s arm reaches down, no power in heaven or earth will frustrate Him.”
165. “God withholds blessing only in wisdom, never in spite or aloofness.”
166. “I am convinced that the human heart hungers for constancy. In forfeiting the sanctity of sex by casual, nondiscriminatory ‘making out’ and ‘sleeping around,’ we forfeit something we cannot well do without. There is dullness, monotony, sheer boredom in all of life when virginity and purity are no longer protected and prized.”
167. “Love is not touchy.”
168. “Of all things difficult to rule, none were more so than my will and affections.”
169. “Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage.”
170. “Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffering.”
171. “The love of God did not protect His own Son. The Cross was the proof of His love, that He gave that Son, that He let Him go to Calvary’s Cross, though ‘legions of angels’ might have rescued Him. He will not necessarily protect us, not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.”
172. “Love does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails.”
173. “It is Christ who is to be exalted, not our feelings. We will know Him by obedience, not by emotions. Our love will be shown by obedience, not by how good we feel about God at a given moment. And love means following the commands of God. ‘Do you love Me?’ Jesus asked Peter. ‘Feed My lambs.’ He was not asking, ‘How do you feel about Me?’ for love is not a feeling. He was asking for action.”
174. “Love knows no limits to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that stands when all else has fallen.”
175. “Love is not possessive.”
176. “Cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.”
177. “A little quiet reflection will remind me that yes to God always leads in the end to joy.”
178. “Love is not anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own ideas.”
179. “Women still dream and hope, pin their emotions on some man who doesn’t reciprocate, and end up in confusion.”
180. “God’s command ‘Go ye, and preach the gospel to every creature,’ was the categorical imperative. The question of personal safety was wholly irrelevant.”
181. “It is through the tender austerity of our troubles that the Son of Man comes knocking. In every event He seeks an entrance to my heart, yes, even in my most helpless, futile, fruitless moments. The very cracks and empty crannies of my life, my perplexities and hurts and botched-up jobs, He wants to fill with Himself, His joy, His life—He urges me to learn of Him; ‘I am gentle and humble in heart.’”
182. “Does God ask us to do what is beneath us? This question will never trouble us again if we consider the Lord of heaven taking a towel and washing feet.”
183. “It seems disrespectful to me to see ladies in church in very short skirts or skimpy, sleeveless tops. I would imagine that it could be distracting to men who are trying to keep their minds on God.”
184. “Failure means nothing now, only that it taught me life.”
185. “The Lord’s decrees His promises, His plans, His every word, stand fast, no matter what news we receive.”
186. “There is always enough time to do the will of God. For that we can never say, ‘I don’t have enough time.’ When we find ourselves frantic and frustrated, harried, harassed, and hassled, it is a sign that we are running on our own schedule, not God’s.”
187. “There will be those who can explain to you God’s purposes in all of this. They’ll see what it’s supposed to mean for you. Don’t worry about them. They are blind. No explanation this side of Heaven can possibly cover the data. It’s imponderable, inexplicable, and far, far beyond any explanations. You have to cast all that nonsense on the rock too.”
188. “To ask why implies a conviction that there is a reason somewhere. Somebody must be responsible for this.”
189. “What is good, it is generally assumed, ought to make us feel good. For example, if it is the will of God, we will feel good about it. This is not always the case. Jonah had no good feelings about going to Joppa.”
190. “At the Cross of Jesus, our crosses are changed into gifts.”
191. “Among the most joyful people I have known have been some who seem to have had no human reason for joy. The sweet fragrance of Christ has shown through their lives.”
192. “It is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself.”
193. “Be patient. Is God not fast enough? Are His answers too tough? A quick sympathy from a friend may suggest that you simply drop out, be good to yourself, get away from it all. Someone else will be sure to say, ‘You need counsel.’ Are you sure? One hour at the foot of the Cross may obviate the necessity of professional counseling.”
194. “Life becomes not only far simpler, but surprisingly joyful and free.”
195. “God’s presence did not change the fact of my widowhood. Jim’s absence thrust me, forced me, hurried me to God, my only hope and my only refuge.”
196. “Spiritual strongholds begin with a thought. One thought becomes a consideration. A consideration develops into an attitude, which leads then to action. Action, repeated, becomes a habit, and a habit establishes a ‘power base for the enemy,’ that is, a stronghold.”
197. “Supreme authority in both church and home has been divinely vested in the male as the representative of Christ, who is Head of the church. It is in willing submission rather than grudging capitulation that the woman in the church, whether married or single, and the wife in the home find their fulfillment.”
198. “Lead me, Lord, to the rock that is higher than I. Let me hear your word, give me grace to obey, to build steadily, stone upon stone, day by day, to do what You say. Establish my heart where floods have no power to overwhelm, for Christ’s sake. Amen.”
199. “When the time comes to die, make sure that all you have to do is die!”
200. “Sentimentality takes the place of theology. Our reference point will never serve to keep our feet on solid rock. Our reference point, until we answer God’s call, is merely ourselves. We cannot possibly tell which end is up.”
201. “A broken heart is a reminder of our only source of power.”
202. “Lord, deliver me from the urge to open my mouth when I should shut it. Give me the wisdom to keep silent where silence is wise. Remind me that not everything needs to be said, and that there are very few things that need to be said by me.”
203. “But the question to precede all others, which finally determines the course of our lives is, ‘What do I really want? Was it to love what God commands, in the words of the collect, and to desire what He promises? Did I want what I wanted, or did I want what He wanted, no matter what it might cost?’”
204. “The Word of God I think of as a straight edge, which shows up our own crookedness. We can’t really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.”
205. “Experience had quickly taught her that she could not survive the storms without the anchor of the constraining love of Christ and what she called the ‘rock-consciousness’ of the promise given her, ‘He goeth before.’”
206. “She is free not by disobeying the rules but by obeying them.”
207. “When ours are interrupted, His are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always, including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable.”
208. “The willingness to be and to have just what God wants us to be and have, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else, would set our hearts at rest, and we would discover the simpler life, the greater peace.”
209. “We may not say that we have the answers. Questions of how to conduct oneself as a Christian, or how to serve as a Christian, must be answered by life itself—the life of the individual in his direct responsible relationship to God. This is a dynamic, never a static thing. And how can we speak at all of the true meaning of conduct and service if we do not speak first and last of love? For it is love which sums up all other commands. The one who loves knows better than anyone else how to conduct himself, how to serve the one he loves. Love prescribes an answer in a given situation as no mere rule can do.”
210. “Until the will and the affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone accept, His Lordship. The Cross, as it enters the love life, will reveal the heart’s truth.”
211. “Teach me to treat all that comes to me with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all.”
212. “The only basis of peace is the cessation of the conflict of two wills, my will versus God’s.”
213. “He is always doing something—the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.”
214. “The principles of gain through loss, of joy through sorrow, of getting by giving, of fulfillment by laying down, of life out of death is what the Bible teaches, and the people who have believed it enough to live it out in simple, humble, day-by-day practice are people who have found the gain, the joy, the getting, the fulfillment, the life.”
215. “Jesus loved the will of His Father. He embraced the limitations, the necessities, the conditions, the very chains of His humanity as He walked and worked here on earth, fulfilling moment by moment His divine commission and the stern demands of His incarnation. Never was there a word or even a look of complaint.”
216. “Is the distinction between living for Christ and dying for Him so great? Is not the second the logical conclusion of the first?”
217. “A great many things determine how people live, and money is not at the top of the list. Choices are always available. What you choose will depend on how you see things: yourself, your work, your right to express taste and desire and personality, your understanding of the love of God as expressed in His creation and order and harmony.”
218. “It would seem that unless we see through and beyond the physical, we shall not even see the physical as we ought to see it, as the very vehicle for the glory of God.”
219. “He makes His ministers a flame of fire. Am I ignitable? God deliver me from the dread asbestos of ‘other things.’”
220. “The willingness to sacrifice that springs from a loving heart rather than the desire for spiritual distinction is surely acceptable to God. But, as in the case of Abraham’s offering of his Isaac, the sacrifice itself is not always finally required. What is required is obedience.”
221. “The women of the Band were learning that if the Lord of Glory took a towel and knelt on the floor to wash the dusty feet of His disciples, then no work, even the relentless and often messy routine of caring for squalling babies, is demeaning. To offer it up to the Lord of Glory transforms it into a holy task.”
222. “Are we so childish—I do not say childlike—as to think that a God who could scheme a Jesus-plan would lead poor pilgrims into situations they could not bear?”
223. “The spirit is liquid and easily flows and surges, sinking and boiling with the currents of circumstances. Bringing every thought into the obedience of Christ is no easy-chair job.”
224. “She stood, as it were, with her face to God and her back to the people, waiting to receive His word for the ‘chosen people.’ She had a vision of holy living. She would not deviate from that no matter how well-established, rational, and practical the ways of older missions seemed to be.”
225. “Sometimes, fear does not subside, and one must choose to do it afraid.”
226. “A little leavening of dissatisfied temper will spread through a group and change outlooks.”
227. “The question is simply, ‘Who is your master?’ Once that’s settled, you ask whether any word have been spoken. If it has, you have your orders.”
228. “Must we always comment on life? Can it not simply be lived in the reality of Christ’s terms of contact with the Father, with joy and peace, fear and love full to the fingertips in their turn, without incessant drawing of lessons and making of rules?”
229. “The gate is narrow but not the life. The gate opens out into largeness of life.”
230. “If men and women were surer of their God there would be more genuine manliness, womanliness, and godliness in the world, and a whole lot less fear of each other.”
231. “Insistence that both lead means there won’t be any dance.”
232. “Needs multiply as they are met. Woe to the man who would live a disentangled life. Be on guard, my soul, of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth!”
233. “I beg women to wait. Wait on God. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t expect anything until the declaration is clear and forthright. And to the men I say be careful with us, please. Be circumspect.”
234. “He is not all we would ask for, if we were honest, but it is precisely when we do not have what we would ask for, and only then, that we can clearly perceive His all-sufficiency.”
235. “Christianity teaches righteousness, not rights. It emphasizes honor, not equality. A Christian’s concern is what is owed to the other, not what is owed to himself.”
236. “Money holds terrible power when it is loved.”
237. “There is no such thing as Christian work. That is, there is no work in the world which is, in and of itself, Christian. Christian work is any kind of work, from cleaning a sewer to preaching a sermon, that is done by a Christian and offered to God.”
238. “Is it more important to understand than to obey? Is it more important to me to know than to believe?”
239. “But little deaths have to be died just as great ones do. Every reminder that aroused a longing had to be offered up.”
