“An anxious person cannot pray with faith; when troubled about the world, instead of serving your Master, your thoughts are serving you. If you would ‘seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,’ all things would then be added to you. You are meddling with Christ’s business and neglecting your own when you fret about your lot and circumstances. You have been trying ‘providing’ work and forgetting that it is your job to obey. Be wise and attend to the obeying, and let Christ manage the providing. Come and survey your Father’s storehouse, and ask whether He will let you starve while He has laid up so great an abundance in His garner? Look at His heart of mercy; see if that can ever prove unkind! Look at His inscrutable wisdom; see if that will ever be at fault. Above all, look up to Jesus Christ your Intercessor, and ask yourself, while He pleads, can your Father deal ungraciously with you? If He remembers even sparrows, will He forget one of the least of His poor children? ‘Cast your cares on the LORD and He will sustain you; He will never let the righteous fall.'”
– C. H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
“Among conservative Christians there is sometimes the mistaken notion that if we are truly gospel-centered we won’t talk about rules or imperatives or moral exertion. We are so eager not to confuse indicatives (what God has done) and imperatives (what we should do) that we get leery of letting biblical commands lead uncomfortably to conviction of sin. We’re scared of words like diligence, effort, and duty. We know legalism (salvation by law keeping) and antinomianism (salvation without the need for law keeping) are both wrong, but antinomianism feels like a much safer danger.
“Then there’s the reality that holiness is plain hard work, and we’re often lazy. We like our sins, and dying to them is painful. Almost everything is easier than growing in godliness. So we try and fail, try and fail, and then give up. It’s easier to sign a petition protesting man’s inhumanity to man than to love your neighbour as yourself. It’s one thing to graduate from college ready to change the world. It’s another to be resolute in praying that God would change you.”
– Kevin DeYoung, The Hole in our Holiness
“My soul, begin this wintry month with your God. The cold snows and the piercing winds all remind you that He keeps His covenant with day and night, and tend to assure you that He will also keep that glorious agreement which He has made with you in the person of Christ Jesus. He who is true to His Word in the revolutions of the seasons of this poor sin-polluted world will not prove unfaithful in His dealings with his own dearly-loved Son.”
– C.H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
“It is at once the most Christlike and the most happy course for a believer to cease from living for himself. He who blesses others cannot fail to be blessed himself. On the other hand, to seek our own personal greatness is a wicked and unhappy plan of life, its way will be grievous and its end will be fatal.
Here is the place to ask you, my friend, whether you are to the best of your power seeking the wealth of the church in your neighborhood? I trust you are not doing it mischief by bitterness and scandal, nor weakening it by your neglect. Friend, unite with the Lord’s poor, bear their cross, do them all the good you can, and you shall not miss your reward.”
– C.H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
My friend James is always posting quotes on his blog from great writers. They sometimes make my head hurt as I wrap my mind around the language, but my heart expands in the process as well. In an age where everyone has an opinion and voices it loudly, it is helpful to listen to people who have walked before us and speak with an eloquence that is nearly extinct. It’s all been said, and likely with strings of words that exceed my writing ability.
Greetings, friends. It’s been a while.
I’ve been thinking lately about returning, then I wonder what I would write, and then I am flooded with ideas yet am bone dry at the same time. So I stay away.
I read something this morning I just had to share. I first thought I would put it on Facebook, but my relationship with it seems to wax and wane with the moon. That’s another topic for another day, if I ever approach it at all.
On Sunday I began reading Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening. I’m three days in, and I can already say I recommend it. The lack of worldly introspection and self-centredness is a welcome breath of fresh air in contrast to what is often written today in the name of personal devotions.
I hope you’re blessed by this reminder of the the all-sufficiency and trustworthiness of Jesus, and fight against unbelief when it will tempt you away from our beautiful Saviour.
“Jesus is the Son of the Highest, and has unbounded wealth; it is shameful to doubt the Omnipotence and distrust all-sufficiency. The cattle on a thousand hills will suffice for our most hungry feeding, and the granaries of heaven are not likely to be emptied by our eating. If Christ were only a cistern, we might soon exhaust His fullness, but who can drain a fountain? Myriads of spirits have drawn their supplies from Him, and not one of them has murmured at the scantiness of His resources. Away, then, with this lying traitor unbelief, for his only errand is to cut the bonds of communion and make us mourn an absent Saviour. Bunyan tells us that unbelief has “as many lives as a cat:” if so, let’s kill one life now, and continue the work until the whole nine are gone. Down with you, you traitor, my heart despises you.”