From Recent Reading . . .

I wanted to share a few quotations from my reading over the past two months that have touched me. I hope they might uplift someone else!

“God will let you know what He’s doing in your life when and if you need to know.” –Henry Blackaby & Claude King in Experiencing God

“If I had come when you asked me to, I would have healed [Lazarus]. But you would never have known any more about Me than you already know. I knew that you were ready for a greater revelation of Me than you have ever known in your life . . . . My refusal and My silence were not rejection. It was an opportunity for Me to disclose to you more of Me than you have ever known.” –Henry Blackaby & Claude King in Experiencing God

“Whenever a silence comes, continue doing the last thing God told you and watch and wait for a fresh encounter with Him.” –Henry Blackaby & Claude King in Experiencing God

“Go to God and ask Him to show you His perspective on your circumstance. Look back at your circumstance from the heart of God.” –Henry Blackaby & Claude King in Experiencing God

“The cross is the pain involved in doing the will of God.” –Oswald Chambers in Approved Unto God

“A true saint never says, ‘I can’t,’ because it never occurs to him that he can!” –Oswald Chambers in Approved Unto God

“See that you never bind any yoke on others that Jesus Christ Himself does not place.” –Oswald Chambers in Approved Unto God

“The stresses of life, the interruptions, the disappointments, the conflicts, the physical ailments, the losses—all of these may well be the very lens through which we see the meaning of God’s Word as never before. Paradoxically, the pain of life may open us to the Word that becomes the pathway to joy.” –John Piper in When I Don’t Desire God

“How we pray reveals the desires of our hearts.” –J.I. Packer, quoted in John Piper’s When I Don’t Desire God

“an offering up of our desires to God” –Westminster Catechism definition of prayer, quoted in John Piper’s When I Don’t Desire God

“Never let us be distracted by the [devil’s] substitutes, and never let us infer from our miseries that God is not our all-satisfying Friend.” –John Piper in When I Don’t Desire God

“I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.” –Clyde Kilby, quoted in John Piper’s When I Don’t Desire God

“One of the ways the Spirit produces his fruit in our lives is by humbling us to believe we are not God and that God can run the world without our staying up too late and getting up too early. God has united the body and the spirit in such a way that careless use of the body will ordinarily diminish our sight of the hope-giving glory of God.” –John Piper in When I Don’t Desire God

“Ah my dear angrie Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my soure-sweet dayes
I will lament and love.”
--George Herbert, “Bittersweet,”
Quoted in John Piper’s When I Don’t Desire God

“Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others’, that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties were not sureties. While we have the light, let us cultivate distrust of the certainties of despair.” –John Piper in When I Don’t Desire God

“The providence of God goes on in all things, with strength and power, and will not be altered by our power. Suppose we are discontented and vexed and troubled, and we fret and rage, yet we need not think we will alter the course of providence by our discontent.” –Jeremiah Burroughs in Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

“In a clock, stop but one wheel and you stop every wheel, because they are dependent upon one another. So when God has ordered a thing for the present to be thus and thus, how do you know how many things depend upon this thing? God may have some work to do twenty years hence that depends on this passage of providence that falls our this day or this week.” –Jeremiah Burroughs in Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

“Certainly our contentment does not consist in getting the thing we desire, but in God’s fashioning our spirits to our conditions.” –Jeremiah Burrough in Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

“I have noticed that often the first thing attacked is peace. (I suppose in earthly war, the sentinel is likely to be the first to be put out of action, if possible, and Peace is our sentinel.) –Amy Carmichael in Edges of His Ways

“Faith keeps us laying hold of the grace and mercy of Christ and thereby avoiding despair. Repentance keeps us facing our ongoing struggle with sin and thereby avoiding pride.” –Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp in How People Change

“In difficulty our hearts are exposed. Trials give us an opportunity to know and guard them more effectively.” –Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp in How People Change

“Each morning that greets me is full of hope
Not because I am successful at what I am doing,
Or because people near me appreciate me,
Or because circumstances are easy,
But because God is, and he is my Father.
To look at the morning any other way
Is to believe a lie.
To live in hope is to live in truth;
To live in truth is to bring him glory;
To bring God glory in my daily living
Is the highest form of worship.”

--Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp in How People Change