November 10, 2014 
4 Comments
“Why are there wars in the world? Why is there this constant international tension? What is the matter with the world? Why war and all the unhappiness and turmoil and discord amongst men? According to this Beatitude, there is only one answer to these questions-sin. Nothing else; just sin.”
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount
October 24, 2014 2 Comments
“Too often, we say we are defeated by this or that sin. No, we are not defeated. We are simply disobedient. It might be good if we stop using the terms victory and defeat to describe our progress in holiness. Rather, we should use the terms obedience and disobedience. When I say I am defeated by some sin, I am unconsciously slipping out from under my responsibility. I am saying something outside of me has defeated me. But when I say I am disobedient, that places the responsibility for my sin squarely on me. We may in fact be defeated, but the reason we are defeated is because we have chosen to disobey.
We need to brace ourselves up and to realize that we are responsible for thoughts, attitudes, and actions. We need to reckon on the fact that we died to sin’s reign, that it no longer has any dominion over us, that God has united us with the risen Christ in all His power and has given us the Holy Spirit to work in us. Only as we accept our responsibility and appropriate God’s provisions will we make any progress in our pursuit of holiness.”
Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness
October 22, 2014 6 Comments
“To make it quite practical I have a very simple test. After I have explained the way of Christ to somebody I say “Now, are you ready to say that you are a Christian?” And they hesitate. And then I say, “What’s the matter? Why are you hesitating?” And so often people say, “I don’t feel like I’m good enough yet. I don’t think I’m ready to say I’m a Christian now.” And at once I know that I have been wasting my breath. They are still thinking in terms of themselves. They have to do it. It sounds very modest to say, “Well, I don’t think I’ good enough,” but it’s a very denial of the faith. The very essence of the Christian faith is to say that He is good enough and I am in Him. As long as you go on thinking about yourself like that and saying, “I’m not good enough; Oh, I’m not good enough,” you are denying God – you are denying the gospel – you are denying the very essence of the faith and you will never be happy. You think you’re better at times and then again you will find you are not as good at other times than you thought you were. You will be up and down forever. How can I put it plainly? It doesn’t matter if you have almost entered into the depths of hell. It does not matter if you are guilty of murder as well as every other vile sin. It does not matter from the standpoint of being justified before God at all. You are no more hopeless than the most moral and respectable person in the world.”
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure
October 20, 2014 1 Comment
“Love is amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
Isaac Watts
October 11, 2014 5 Comments
“Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it. You can make more money, but you can’t make more time. When you give someone your time, you are giving them a portion of your life that you’ll never get back. Your time is your life. That is why the greatest gift you can give someone is your time.
It is not enough to just say relationships are important; we must prove it by investing time in them. Words alone are worthless. “My children, our love should not be just words and talk; it must be true love, which shows itself in action.” Relationships take time and effort, and the best way to spell love is “T-I-M-E.”
Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
October 7, 2014 4 Comments
“The Church has been trying to preach morality and ethics without the Gospel as a basis; it has been preaching morality without godliness; and it simply does not work. It never has done, and it never will. And the result is that the Church, having abandoned her real task, has left humanity more or less to its own devices.”
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers
September 27, 2014 3 Comments
“It is amazing how little we know about ourselves. God has to take us through all kinds of failures to reveal the self-focused pride that lies dormant in the corners or our character.
The only way we can be of any use to God is to respond with discernment to our disappointments. Discernment leads us to truth- and the truth punctures our pride, all for His purpose of molding us to the image of His Son.”
June Hunt, Success Through Failure
September 25, 2014 2 Comments
“Vice does not lose its character by becoming fashionable.”
John Wesley
September 21, 2014 1 Comment
“Grace is everywhere, like lenses that go unnoticed because you are looking through them.”
Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing about Grace?
September 20, 2014 3 Comments
“I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”
William Shakespeare, Othello
September 16, 2014 3 Comments
“Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to KILL IT! No half measures will do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self—in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
September 15, 2014 1 Comment
“My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”
Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel
September 13, 2014 2 Comments
It is one thing for sin to live in us; it is another for us to live in sin.
John Murray
September 12, 2014 1 Comment
To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. Power to become children! … Born, says John, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
N. T. Wright, Sermon at the Eucharist on Christmas Morning 2007
September 11, 2014 4 Comments
“Where Is Your Sanctuary? Where do you go when you’re hurting? Let’s say it’s been a terrible day at the office. You come home and go — where? To the refrigerator for comfort food like ice cream? To the phone to vent with your most trusted friend? Do you seek escape in novels or movies or video games or pornography? Where do you look for emotional rescue? The Bible tells us that God is our refuge and strength, our help in times of trouble — so much so that we will not fear though the mountains fall into the heart of the sea (Ps. 46:1 – 2). That strikes me as a good place to run. But it’s so easy to forget, so easy for us to run in other directions. Where we go says a lot about who we are. The “high ground” we seek reveals the geography of our values.”
Kyle Idleman, Gods at War: Defeating the Idols that Battle for Your Heart
September 10, 2014 4 Comments
The story is told of a church that secured a new preacher, and the word spread around town about how well he preached. The church members were abuzz about what an improvement he was over their former preacher, and how much more attention they gave to his sermons. When the town cynic asked what made this new preacher so much better than his predecessor, he was told, “The old preacher told us that we’re all sinners, and that if we didn’t repent, we’d burn in hell forever!” This cynic then asked, “And what does this new one say?” The answer was, “That we’re all sinners, and that if we don’t repent, we’ll burn in hell forever!” When the cynic responded that he didn’t see any difference between the two of them, he was told, “This new preacher says it with tears in his eyes.”
Tony Campolo
September 8, 2014 5 Comments
“Man’s thought is always of the punishment that will come to him if he sins. God’s thought is always of the glory man will miss if he sins. God’s purpose for redemption is glory, glory, glory.”
Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life
September 5, 2014 4 Comments
“Don’t believe something just because you want to, and don’t embrace an idea just because you’ve always believed it. Believe what is biblical. Test all your assumptions against the precious words God gave us in the Bible.”
Francis Chan, Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Things We’ve Made Up
September 2, 2014 11 Comments
“And so seated next to my father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, “Father, what is sexsin?”
He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case off the floor and set it on the floor.
Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said.
I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
It’s too heavy,” I said.
Yes,” he said, “and it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger, you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”
Corrie ten Boom – The Hiding Place
September 1, 2014 12 Comments
“You win over people just like you win over a dog. You see a dog passing down the street with an old bone in his mouth. You don’t grab the bone from him and tell him it’s not good for him. He’ll growl at you. It’s the only thing he has. But you throw a big fat lamb chop in front of him, and he’s going to drop that bone and pick up the lamb chop, his tail wagging to beat the band. And you’ve got a friend. Instead of going around grabbing bones from people… I’m going to throw them some lamb chops. Something with real meat and life in it. I’m going to tell them about New Beginnings.”
David Wilkerson, The Cross and the Switchblade
August 28, 2014 4 Comments
“Worry is the darkroom in which negatives can develop.”
Wanda E. Brunstetter
August 27, 2014 3 Comments
“People think of faith as being something that you don’t really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument…
He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom
August 25, 2014 2 Comments
“The irony is that while God doesn’t need us but still wants us, we desperately need God but don’t really want Him most of the time.”
Francis Chan
August 22, 2014 0 Comments
“Faith in the biblical sense is substantive, based on the knowledge that the One in whom that faith is placed has proven that He is worthy of that trust. In its essence, faith is a confidence in the person of Jesus Christ and in His power, so that even when His power does not serve my end, my confidence in Him remains because of who He is.”
Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods
August 20, 2014 0 Comments
“And Grace calls out, ‘You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold. You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken or potbellied. Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you. But you are not just that. You are accepted.’ Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.”
Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out
August 19, 2014 5 Comments
Christ died for the ungodly. Christ died for me. Without his sacrificial death, without God’s grace, I am powerless to save myself or make myself righteous. Jesus did for me what I could not do and paid off my debt to sin which I could not pay. He did it for me; not because I was good enough to be worthy of his death, but because I couldn’t be worthy without him.
August 16, 2014 2 Comments
“Lord, give me an open heart to find You everywhere, to glimpse the heaven enfolded in a bud, and to experience eternity in the smallest act of love.”
Mother Teresa
August 15, 2014 11 Comments
Once upon a time a man whose ax was missing suspected his neighbor’s son. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief. But the man found his ax while digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor’s son, the boy walked, looked, and spoke like any other child.
Lao Tzu
August 14, 2014 11 Comments
“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”
Helen Keller
This quote really hits home for me in so many ways. I spent 24 years of being fully sighted just feeling lost, empty, angry and wasting my selfish life, being pulled one way and the other, not caring who i hurt.
Then in 2004 after losing most of my sight, Jesus became the light of my world. “I was blind but now I see”. see my About Steve page…
Now with Jesus as my destination on my “Spiritual Sat Nav” I have Vision, purpose, worth, and directions to follow. 🙂
How is your vision?
August 13, 2014 18 Comments
Every Sunday the ducks waddle out of their houses and waddle down Main Street to their church. They waddle into the sanctuary and squat in their proper pews. The duck choir waddles in and takes its place, then the duck minister comes forward and opens the duck Bible. He reads to them: “Ducks! God has given you wings! With wings you can fly! With wings you can mount up and soar like eagles. No walls can confine you! No fences can hold you! You have wings. God has given you wings and you can fly like birds!” All the ducks shouted, “Amen!” And they all waddled home.
Soren Kierkegaard
July 25, 2014 6 Comments
There is a story behind every person, a reason why they are the way they are. Don’t be quick to judge. Be kind, show love and assume the best.
July 24, 2014 5 Comments
Proverbs 15:30 Amplified Bible
The light in the eyes [of him whose heart is joyful] rejoices the hearts of others, and good news nourishes the bones.
July 23, 2014 10 Comments
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Edmund Burke
July 21, 2014 1 Comment
In the midst of winter, I finally learned there was within me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
July 18, 2014 3 Comments
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
Philo of Alexandria
July 14, 2014 4 Comments
Love is a fruit, in season at all times and within the reach of every hand. Anyone may gather it and no limit is set. Everyone can reach this love through mediation, the spirit of prayer, and sacrifice.
Mother Teresa
July 11, 2014 3 Comments
If a bird is flying for pleasure, it flies with the wind, but if it meets danger it turns and faces the wind, in order that it may rise higher.
Corrie ten Boom
June 10, 2014 5 Comments
The greatest wonder that I ever heard of is that God should ever justify me. I feel myself to be a lumpy of unworthiness, a mass of corruption, and a heap of sin apart from His almighty love. I know and am fully assured that I am justified by faith which is in Christ Jesus, and I am treated as if I had been perfectly just and made an heir of God and a joint-heir with Christ. And yet, by nature I must take my place among the most sinful. I, who am altogether undeserving, am treated as if I had been deserving. I am loved with as much love as if I had always been Godly, whereas before I was ungodly. Who can help being astonished at this? Gratitude for such favor stands dressed in robes of wonder.
Charles H. Spurgeon
June 5, 2014 4 Comments
Each of us leads a secret thought life, an invisible life known only to us- it is not known to others. This secret life is usually very different from the visible you- the you that is known by others. Yet it is the real you, the you that is known by our God.
Patrick Morley
June 4, 2014 5 Comments
“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
May 31, 2014 3 Comments
Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while and leave beauty in our hearts, and we’re never, ever the same.
May 27, 2014 4 Comments
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
Albert Schweitzer
May 21, 2014 0 Comments
Our gracious heavenly Father entrusts us to confess our mess. And to show us that it’s okay to let down our pretenses, His Word is full of stories about unlikely people becoming heroes- a stuttering ex-con who leads God’s people out of slavery; an unethical little “IRS agent” who becomes a friend of Jesus; a sleazy woman whose testimony triggers a revival in her hometown. If you’re embarrassed by your past, you’re in good company!
Lisa Harper
May 17, 2014 3 Comments
if we don’t meet ppl in the darkness, how will we EVER expect them to follow us into the light?
A profound comment to one of my posts, by sister in Christ Adjustedsails
May 9, 2014 2 Comments
People can’t believe in Jesus
If the gospel they don’t hear,
So we must proclaim its message
To the world both far and near.
Any place can be the right place to witness for Christ.
April 29, 2014 10 Comments
An American tourist in India stood by in awe as he watched Mother Teresa lovingly clean the infected wounds of a horribly disfigured leper, “Sister,” he commented, “I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars!” Her response, “Neither would I, brother. Neither would I.”
Mother Teresa
April 16, 2014 3 Comments
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
Melody Beattie
April 8, 2014 3 Comments
Homes that are built on anything other than love are bound to crumble.
Billy Graham
March 25, 2014 3 Comments
God leaves us here because He has a mission for us to fulfill. We aren’t here by accident; neither are we here simply to enjoy the good things life has to offer. We are here because God put us here, and He has a sovereign purpose in keeping us here. It’s true for us as individuals, and it’s true for His body, the Church, in all of its fullness. As Jesus prayed just before His arrest and trial, “I am not praying that You take them out of the world…As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.” (John 17:15,18)
Billy Graham
March 20, 2014 6 Comments
“The Samaritan woman grasped what He said with fervor that came from an awareness of her real need. The transaction was fascinating. She has come with a bucket. He sent her back with a spring of living water. She had come as a reject. He sent her back being accepted by God Himself. She came wounded. He sent her back whole. She came laden with questions. He sent her back as a source for answers. She came living a life of quiet desperation. She ran back overflowing with hope. The disciples missed it all. It was lunchtime for them.”
Ravi Zacharias
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