As I worship, my perspective shifts. I focus on His attributes: His goodness, His power, His name, and His mercy. Crises that once overwhelmed me become insignificant in comparison to God’s vast power and all-encompassing love for me as His child.

What do we advertise about You by how we serve? Do we reflect the belief shown in Jesus’ parable that You are a hard master taking what isn’t Yours? Forgive us for even brief lapses into such churlishness. Or, do we reflect a joy in serving that radiates from an intimate and time-tested knowledge of the goodness of the One we serve? Paul and Daniel were confident of this sovereign goodness even when they were prisoners rather than courtiers, and we can likewise tap into a joy that defies circumstances. When this happens, the oft-disappointed world will notice and investigate.11/02/2010 blog

Become a man or woman of prayer...Let your heart and mind be kept close to the principal calling of your life, which is to hunger and thirst after God and His righteousness...Let the thoughts and intents of your heart be shaped and guided by time spent in His presence.

Intimacy with God is not experienced through monolog prayers but through reflective listening as well as earnest petitioning.

Just as teenagers can live in the same house as their parents, yet choose not to live “close” to them in partnership, so we can choose to be children of God, yet live very distant from God in our hearts. On the other hand, we can choose to have the closest partnership with Him, in which we know what He thinks, believes, and acts and what is important to Him. In this place of intimacy, we also discover just how close He wants to be with us.

A fair vision had welcomed him in this land of disease.

You will find it a stronghold in the day of trial to plead your adoption. You have no rights as a subject, you have forfeited them by your treason; but nothing can forfeit a child's right to a father's protection.

Faith is the angelic messenger between the soul and the Lord Jesus in glory.

The Christian knows no change with regard to God. He may be rich to-day and poor to-morrow; he may be sickly to-day and well to-morrow; he may be in happiness to-day, to-morrow he may be distressed-but there is no change with regard to his relationship to God. If He loved me yesterday, He loves me to-day.

Worldlings pray to the Lord in times of need, when it serves their turn. They cry to Him in trouble, but forsake Him in prosperity.

See, loving heart, how He delights in you. When you lean your head on His bosom, you not only receive, but you give Him joy; when you gaze with love upon His all-glorious face, you not only obtain comfort, but impart delight.

He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.

It’s easier to be close to God during prayer time when you’re close to God all the time.

Will You help me hear the song You're singing over all this noise?

The spirit of divinity is the spirit of being.

The only freedom that lasts comes from pursuing what we want when we want what we ought.

There is no balm in Gilead, but there is balm in God. There is no physician among the creatures, but the Creator is Jehovah-rophi.

Where doest Thou feed Thy flock? In Thy house? I will go, if I may find Thee there. In private prayer? Then I will pray without ceasing. In the Word? Then I will read it diligently. In Thine ordinances? Then I will walk in them with all my heart. Tell me where Thou feedest, for wherever Thou standest as the Shepherd, there will I lie down as a sheep.

Prayer is the forerunner of mercy.

Even though every identity marker I have can be taken from me, the grace and peace of the Trinity overflows into the life of the believer.

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

We don't need to pray to prove that we're properly pious or really serious. Instead, we pray because we are completely assured, and because the Father hears our prayers because they come to Him through the lips of His dear Son.

Our intimacy with God broadens our influence on earth.

Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.

Faith is the road, but communion with Jesus is the well from which the pilgrim drinks.

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.

J.R.R. Tolkien told a questioning correspondent, life's purpose is to know, praise, and thank God.

It is the heaven-born instinct of a gracious soul to seek shelter from all ills beneath the wings of Jehovah. A hypocrite, when afflicted by God, resents the infliction, and, like a slave, would run from the Master who has scourged him

Everything in Scripture is either preparation for the Gospel, presentation of the Gospel, or participation in the Gospel.

Nothing but the infinite can ever satisfy me; I am such a great sinner that I must have infinite merit to wash my sin away;" but we have had our sin removed, and found that there was merit to spare; we have had our hunger relieved at the feast of sacred love

Down deep in His innermost soul Christ carried an inexhaustible treasury of refined and heavenly joy.

Holy desire can be learned. All prayer is part work and part rest.

So highly revered was commingle, that the Jews called him "the beauty of the Law".

Dost thou want another eye beside that of Him who sees every secret thing?

Almightiness and wisdom combined will make no failures.

He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.

A faithful dependent, I overlook his folly.

Christ loved the sons of men before there were sons of men, and me before there was me. If he was going to get tired of me, he would have done so before now.

There is a wide distinction between confessing sin as a culprit, and confessing sin as a child. The Father's bosom is the place for penitent confessions.

The obedience which God's children yield to Him must be loving obedience. Do not go about the service of God as slaves to their taskmaster's toil, but run in the way of His commands because it is your Father's way.

God's Fatherly prerogative, " is a kingly attribute so sweetly veiled in love, that the King's crown is forgotten in the King's face, and His sceptre becomes, not a rod of iron, but a silver sceptre of mercy—the sceptre indeed seems to be forgotten in the tender hand of Him who wields it.

A servile spirit you have nothing to do with: you are not a slave, but a child; and now, inasmuch as you are a beloved child, you are bound to obey your Father's faintest wish, the least intimation of His will.

Prayer is a way of language practiced in the presence of God in which we become more than ourselves while remaining ourselves.

Unlike mere action, prayer is not subject to immediate evaluation or verification. If we are addicted to "results" we will quickly lose interest in prayer.

To obey the commands of Scripture can finally become a delight when we see that the reasons almost always center around God's love and provision for us in Christ.

As we grow into maturity in Christ our distinctiveness is accentuated, not blunted. General directions, useful as they are, don't take into account the details that face us as holiness takes root in the particular social and personal place we are planted.

Preaching reveals God in action here and now -- for ME.

Private worship excites us for public worship.

No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and no faith is as solid as a wounded faith." Elie Wiesel

Salvation is the creation of new desires, not just new goodies.

You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through the experience.

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

The church has a deep well of joy, of which none can drink but her own children. There are stores of wine, and oil, and corn, hidden in the midst of our Jerusalem, upon which the saints of God are evermore sustained and nurtured; and sometimes, as in our Saviour's case, we have our seasons of intense delight

We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.