Count 10 over him - he'll get up
The devil is so subtle that he dominates man and persuades him at the same time that he is not being dominated.
It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie upon our death beds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what we have done, but the Grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life starts with grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace. Grace wondrous grace. By the grace of God I am what I am. Yet not I, but the Grace of God which was with me.
The Christian faith is ultimately not only a matter of doctrine or understanding or of intellect, it is a condition of the heart.
The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.
I am not asking whether you know things about Him but do you know God, are you enjoying God, is God the centre of your life, the soul of your being, the source of your greatest joy? He is meant to be.
Whenever you put happiness before righteousness, you will be doomed to misery. That is the great message of the Bible from beginning to end. They alone are truly happy who are seeking to be righteous.
We are using all of our brain, all of the time; all of it is in use. However, you could probably argue that we don't use it effectively. Some of us are not trained to use our brains to their full potential. But definitely, all of it is there.
It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
Anyone can see that an ass laden with books remains a donkey. A human being laden with the undigested results of a tussle with thoughts and books, however, still passes for wise.
A sentence from Psalm 101 has been both challenging and convicting for me: 'I will walk in my house with blameless heart' (Psalm 101-2, NIV). When God speaks to me about being more loving, this verse reminds me to make application in my family first-and then to others. It forces me to ask, 'Am I more spiritual, more loving, or more fun somewhere else? Who gets my best-my family or others?'