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.
If God chooses to be patient with those who’ve wronged us, punishing them less than they deserve, shouldn’t we be grateful for that? And besides, we may not even have been wronged. As the Lord sees things, our enemies may have a better case than we.
After eternity has begun, it will be too late to begin acquiring a taste for the things that make God glad. Now is the time to do that. Now is the time to make sure that what we like most of all is to rejoice at the joy of our Father.
When we turn to God, faithfully obeying the gospel, what we’re seeking salvation from is the wreckage of our own sinful hearts and lives. And the wonder of the gospel is that God can do this. He can rebuild a heart that we have wrecked.
As Christians, the new delight we can have in God is the real thing. It’s what we were made for. It’s all we’ve ever dreamed of and then some. And the main thing about it is that it centers on God Himself. He, in the end, is all we really desire.
In any contest between the head and the heart, the heart will almost always win. Our loves are powerful things; they direct our actions almost irresistibly. So we must constantly work on our desires and diminish the loves that lead us away from God.
We need to see sin for what it is: a worshiping of the wrong god. Not many of us would want to be known as idolaters, but that’s what it comes down to when, at the devil’s urging, we exchange God, our hearts’ true desire, for anything else at all.
We were created for perfect joy with God, a joy not subject to change and decay. By our sin, the human race broke that perfection, but we still yearn for ...
Light is wonderful, but if we don’t respond to light obediently, the light will condemn us. “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people ...
As in Jesus’ day, people today still “come to Jesus” for a confusing range of reasons. So let’s ask this: in the New Testament, who were those who came to ...
We can’t receive the benefits of the gospel ourselves and not want to do something to share those benefits with other people. In some kind of personal way, we should ...
Learning God’s character is a growth process that takes time. In Christ, we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). ...
We would not have been baptized into Christ if we had not decided to die with Him. It was a choice. And our old self will not stay dead if ...
There is something special about the act of baptism. Whether we understand God’s reasons or not, He has made baptism the doorway separating the old from the new. In the ...
If broken trust in God is the root of sin, then for the problem of sin to be fixed, trust will have to be put back in its rightful place. ...
If we turn away from the gospel because of the costliness of the love involved in discipleship, there is nothing left but lesser loves — counterfeits that offer little more ...
In a “feel-good” age, it is hard for us to see that our first response to the gospel must be grief. Yet if the gospel is about sin, we are ...
We often reject ideas as being “untrue” for no reason except that we don’t want them to be true. But the more painful a truth may be to accept (at ...
Hope is a powerful thing. And one reason the gospel of Christ is the greatest of all messages is that it offers the greatest of all hopes. Here is the ...