The surf that distresses the ordinary swimmer produces in the surf-rider the super-joy of going clean through it. Apply that to our own circumstances, these very things - tribulation, distress, persecution, produce in us the super-joy; they are not things to fight. We are more than conquerors through Him in all these things, not in spite of them, but in the midst of them. The saint never knows the joy of the Lord in spite of tribulation, but because of it - “I am exceeding joyful in all our tribulation,” says Paul.
Oswald Chambers
“Brother, sister: John Piper isn’t your pastor. John MacArthur knows nothing about you. Dave Hunt never got on his knees and prayed for you. Lloyd-Jones won’t come to your house when you’re recovering from surgery, or one of your children shatters your heart, or your marriage is shaking and rocking and barely hanging on. Charles Spurgeon won’t weep with you as you weep.
You could buy or not buy _____’s next book, and he’d never know it. But if you’re in a manageable-size church with a caring pastor and you’re suddenly gone next Sunday, he’ll be concerned. He may call. He may ask if everything’s okay.
God gave you the pastor He gave you.”
John Phillips from his article “Porn and Paper Pastors“
Great way for you to get involved in the restoration of women who have been trafficked.
Ask me anything http://formspring.me/peterong
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them task and work, but rather teach them long for the endless immensity of the sea” -Antoine De Saint-Exupery
“The Incarnation turned out to be not a means of getting in touch with us … . It was not a matter of telling man, but of being man. [Christ] did not come primarily to correct history, but to inhabit history … . The Incarnation was not an experiment in divine slumming; God did not come as some potentate to address his inferiors; He did not come … with the right contacts and the right advice; He did not come to patronize us … . Our Lord came to be, and to be in the form of a man—to be man, and to endure whatever might have to be endured by Eternal God when being man.” — The Offering of Man, Harry Blamires