"God will never disappoint us. He loves us and has only one purpose for us : holiness, which in His kingdom equals joy."

"It is altogether fitting and proper that we should enjoy things made for us to enjoy. What is not at all fitting or proper is that we should set our hearts on them. Temporal things must be treated as temporal things - received, given thanks for, offered back, but enjoyed. They must not be treated like eternal things."

"George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life."

"If we hold tightly to anything given to us unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used we stunt the growth of the soul. What God gives us is not necessarily 'ours' but only ours to offer back to him, ours to relinguish, ours to lose, ours to let go of, if we want to be our true selves. Many deaths must go into reaching our maturity in Christ, many letting goes."

"It is through the tender austerity of our troubles that the Son of Man comes knocking. In every event He seeks an entrance to my heart, yes, even in my most helpless, futile, fruitless moments. The very cracks and empty crannies of my life, my perplexities and hurts and botched-up jobs, He wants to fill with Himself, His joy, His life...He urges me to learn of Him: 'I am gentle and humble in heart."

"One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime."

"Don't dig up in doubt what you planted in faith."

"We fundamentalists are a pack of mood-loving showoffs. I'm sure the Minor Prophets would have found subject for correction."

"Women still dream and hope, pin their emotions on some man who doesn't reciprocate, and end up in confusion."

"But you will find yourself disarmed utterly, and your accusing spirit transformed into loving forgiveness the moment you remember that you did, in fact, marry only a sinner, and so did he."

"The gate is narrow but not the life. The gate opens out into largeness of life."

"Jim devoted ten days largely to prayer to make sure that this was indeed what God intended for him. He was given new assurance, and wrote to his parents of his intention to go to Ecuador. Understandably, they, with others who knew Jim well, wondered if perhaps his ministry might not be more effective in the United States, where so many know so little of the Bible's really message He replied: 'I dare not stay home while Quiches perish. What if the well-filled church in the homeland needs stirring? They have the Scriptures Moses, and the prophets, and a whole lot more. Their condemnation is written on their bank books and in the dust on their Bible covers."

"If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline."

"It would seem that unless we see through and beyond the physical, we shall not even see the physical as we ought to see it: as the very vehicle for the glory of God."

"I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done."

"If I am to love the Lord my God with all my mind, there will not be room in it for carnality, for pride, for anxiety, for the love of myself. How can the mind be filled with the love of the Lord and have space left over for things like that?"

"Where does your security lie? Is God your refuge, your hiding place, your stronghold, your shepherd, your counselor, your friend, your redeemer, your saviour, your guide? If He is, you don't need to search any further for security."

"To be a follower of the Crucified means, sooner or later, a personal encounter with the cross. And the cross always entails loss. The great symbol of Christianity means sacrifice and no one calls himself a Christian can evade this stark fact."

"Christ is sufficient. We do not need 'support groups' for each and every separate tribulation. The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the same old rugged cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy."

"The devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements: noise, hurry, crowds. He will not allow quietness."

"A man must at times be hard as nails: willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman's resentment like tenderness."

"Often a Christian man or woman falls prey to that cruel and vexatious spirit, wondering how to find marriage, who, when, where? It is on God that we should wait, as a waiter waits--not for but on the customer--alert, watchful, attentive, with no agenda of his own, ready to do whatever is wanted. 'My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.' (Ps. 62:5 KJV) In Him alone lie our security, our confidence, our trust. A spirit of restlessness and resistance can never wait, but one who believes he is loved with an everlasting love, and knows that underneath are the everlasting arms, will find strength and peace."

"Prayer is a law of the universe. As God has ordained that certain physical laws should govern the law of this universe, so He has ordained the spiritual law. Books simply will not stay put on the table without the operation of gravity - although God could cause them, by divine fiat, to stay. Certain things simply will not happen without the operation of prayer, although God could cause them, by divine fiat, to happen. The Bible is full o examples of people doing what they could do and asking God to do what they couldn't do. In other words, the pattern given to us is both to work and pray."

"Nothing has done more damage to the Christian view of life than the hideous notion that those who are truly spiritual have lost all interest in the world and its beauties."

"The spirit is liquid and easily flows and surges, sinking and boiling with the currents of circumstances. Bringing every thought into the obedience of Christ is no easy-chair job."

"I took it for granted that there must be a few men left in the world who had that kind of strength. I assumed that those men would also be looking for women with principle. I did not want to be among the marked-down goods on the bargain table, cheap because they'd been pawed over. Crowds collect there. It is only the few who will pay full price. 'You get what you pay for."

"Cold prayers, like cold suitors, are seldom effective in their aims."

"A Christian sees all men as made in the image of God. All are sinners too, which means that the image is marred, but it is a divine image nonetheless, capable of redemption and therefore to be held in honor."

"Do you often feel like parched ground, unable to produce anything worthwhile? I do. When I am in need of refreshment, it isn't easy to think of the needs of others. But I have found that if, instead of praying for my own comfort and satisfaction, I ask the Lord to enable me to give to others, an amazing thing often happens - I find my own needs wonderfully met. Refreshment comes in ways I would never have thought of, both for others, and then, incidentally, for myself."

"Choices will continually be necessary and -- let us not forget -- possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them."

"Needs multiply as they are met. Woe to the man who would live a disentangled life. Be on guard, my soul, of complicating your environment so that you have neither time nor room for growth!"

"Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures."

"If God gave it to me,' we say 'it's mine. I can do what I want with it.' No. The truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of - if we want to find our true selves, if we want real Life, if our hearts are set on glory."

"There is no such thing as Christian work. That is, there is no work in the world which is, in and of itself, Christian. Christian work is any kind of work, from cleaning a sewer to preaching a sermon, that is done by a Christian and offered to God. This means that nobody is excluded from serving God. It means that no work is 'beneath' a Christian. It means there is no job in the world that needs to be boring or useless. A Christian finds fulfilment not in the particular kind of work he does, but in the way in which he does it."

"Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one's thoughts."

"He is always doing something--the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory."

"By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere."

"God is God. Because he is God, He is worthy of my trust and obedience. I will find rest nowhere but in His holy will that is unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to."

"When ours are interrupted, his are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always (including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable)."