Even when we acknowledge the primary role God must play in our progress, we sometimes still don’t move ahead. We fail to see the need on our part to take the spiritual steps we could take and to make the progress that is available to us each day.
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Applying that to our spiritual lives, we can learn to grasp the simple things that lie right before us and squeeze the maximum good out of each moment. We grow toward God by just such steps.
Loving our Father’s desires does not come naturally. We have to learn this kind of love. The much easier thing is to love what we want for ourselves, and then love what God wants for us only insofar as it coincides with our predetermined wishes.
Obedience can’t be put on autopilot. It always requires moment-by-moment choices. Even those who live a long time and make much spiritual progress face this reality: there is never anything more than a decision standing between us and disobedience.
Christ went to the Cross to make possible more than mere insurance against the loss of our souls in hell. He aims to save us from sin, both its guilt and its power. Our deliverance from sin will culminate in heaven, but the process begins right now!
Godly sorrow for sins committed is good. But for all those who have enough character to feel sorry afterward for what they’ve done, there are far fewer who have the character to feel sorry in advance and “repent” of the deed before it takes place.
We desire other people to think about us as we wish them to think, but we also desire to think about ourselves as we wish to think. We tend to deceive ourselves about ourselves. We all have “secret faults” that are “hidden” from our own sight.
Between actively growing toward God and actively growing away from Him, there is no safe middle course. To do nothing is to deteriorate. Either we choose to seek God diligently or our hearts will fall into darkness, decay, and finally . . . death.
Sacrifice is measured in terms of what it costs us personally, not the degree to which someone else might have been able to afford the loss. Strictly speaking, a sacrifice is the relinquishing of something we could hardly afford to do without.
There is an important sense in which we are strongest at our most painful moments of weakness. At least this much is true: our greatest opportunities to grow in strength come when we respond to reminders of our weakness with humility and honesty.