Having learned a little of God’s greatness, we need to seek His glory day in and day out. God is our King. That fact is not altered by the fluctuations in our circumstances or feelings, and our gratitude ought not to depend on these things either.
We must be captivated by higher values: the love of God and His creatures. Freedom does not mean having no master; it means having a wise and loving Master. To bind ourselves to Him is to be set free from the consequences of every lesser love.
Being conformed to God’s character is what we desire, and being able, when the time comes, to see His face is what we long for. It does not matter whether our passage is comfortable. What matters is that we are making progress toward God.
Living in a society where competition in all its myriad forms is almost a national obsession, we need to watch out. When we find ourselves in conflict with another person over some spiritual matter, what are our real motives for waging war?
Every path to heaven leads through territory occupied by the devil. To reach our desired destination, we’re going to have to fight. Indeed, it sometimes seems that we have to fight every step of the way. Heaven will not be reached by the cowardly.
God is working toward a lasting solution to our real problem. Rather than patch our wounds with a superficial bandage, He gave His Son to atone for our sins. That opens the door to HOPE — hope that our hearts will be filled up when we reach home.
Spiritual maturity often grows in a “wilderness” of difficulty. When tribulations test us and we’re driven out into the desert, it’s critically important that we discipline our minds. The wilderness is no place for the weak-minded or the careless.
Love is the very antithesis of selfishness. It lifts us out of self-centered thinking and sets us free to enjoy a better focus. It gets us out of ourselves and into a connection with all those external things that we were meant to be related to.
Why not see our suffering through the eyes of love? If we have no honorable choice but to suffer, we can at least choose to suffer lovingly. From the list of possible reasons why we would submit to pain, we can select love and let that be our motive.
Temporal concerns have a seductive, powerful pull on virtually every human being. And if we say we’ve got our this-worldly desires under control, almost any objective person could probably look at the way we spend our time and see that we don’t.