It’s like an American tradition. A person gets successful and then he’s supposed to change for the worse. It’s silly.
humility is beyond our reach. if it were a product of reaching, we would instinctively be proud of reaching it. it is a gift.
There is a great gulf between the Christianity that wrestles with whether to worship at the cost of imprisonment and death, and the Christianity that wrestles with whether the kids should play soccer on Sunday morning.
You may be going through things right now that are painfully preparing you for some precious service to Jesus and to his people. When a person strikes rock bottom with a sense of nothingness or helplessness, he may find that he has struck the Rock of Ages
Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It's a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don't want God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.
The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.
The highest mental health is not liking myself but being joyfully interested in everything but myself.
A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!
Poor body, time and the long years were the first tailors to teach you the merciless use of clothes. Though some scold today because you are too much seen, to my mind, you are not seen fully enough or often enough when you are beautiful.
Thou hast been called, O sleep! the friend of woe; But 't is the happy that have called thee so.
Sometimes people don't have to make you love them. . . you just do, and there's no help for it.