discipleship

It takes courage to seek God, and courage to wait for His reply.

Help our response, Lord, not to be, "WHAT are You doing?!" Instead, give us the perspective to ask, "Lord, what would You teach?

The Atreides are known to start late getting there growth.

Embrace who you are and your divine purpose. Identify the barriers in your life, and develop discipline, courage and the strength to permanently move beyond them, and keep moving forward.

Being that 'reason is not antithetical to faith' (Woods) and that Pentecost established the Reality of super-nature (Lewis) and that 'theology matters' (Wimber), then 'empowered evangelicalism' (Nathan) is the natural expression of discipleship."~R. Alan Woods [2013]

Be fervent in God, and let nothing grieve you, whatever you encounter.

Prayer is listening.

If thou rememberest that thou art going to heaven, thou wilt not sleep on the road. If thou thinkest that hell is behind thee, and the devil pursuing thee, thou wilt not loiter.

I found myself with a perseverance worthy of a much better cause.

There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete.

We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world.

The nobility of England would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount. But you'll labor like scholars over a bulldog's pedigree.

Many beginners also at times possess great spiritual avarice. They hardly ever seem content with the spirit God gives them. They become unhappy and peevish because they don't find the consolation they want in spiritual things. Many never have enough of hearing counsels, or learning spiritual maxims, or keeping them and reading books about them. They spend more time in these than in striving after mortification and the perfection of the interior poverty to which they are obliged.

Trying to know God and serve Him before we come to love Him is exhausting.

She had been carried away by the need to defend herself.

The whitest robes, unless their purity be preserved by divine grace, will be defiled by the blackest spots.

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.