“Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is. C. S. LEWIS Surprised by Joy1”

“It’s a season for cherishing and worshiping this characteristic of God—that he is a searching and saving God, that he is a God on a mission, that he is not aloof or passive or indecisive. He is never in the maintenance mode, coasting or drifting. He is sending, pursuing, searching, saving. That’s the meaning of Advent.”

“The difference is that when you develop patterns of sin in the majority race, they have no racial connotation. Since majority people don’t think of themselves in terms of race, none of our dysfunctions is viewed as a racial dysfunction. When you are the majority ethnicity, nothing you do is ethnic. It’s just the way it’s done. When you are a minority, everything you do has colour.”

“Spiritual emotions, which are more than physical, can have chemical effects, and not just the reverse.”

“Jesus’ primary concern—the very first petition of the prayer he teaches—is that more and more people, and more and more peoples, come to hallow God’s name. This is the reason the universe exists. Missions exists because this hallowing does not.”

“what makes the prosperity gospel so attractive is that it caters to the desires of the fallen human heart. It promises much while requiring little. It panders to the flesh.”

“In his work on the sinner’s soul, Christ remakes the heart of stone into a heart of flesh, and he opens the sinner’s eyes to the incredible riches of God’s Word. This divine illumination comes from Christ alone as the Logos, or Word. Christ is our all-sufficient Prophet, our teacher, and the self-disclosure of the invisible God (John 8:26; 14:9; 17:8). Christ is the telescope by which we see God in creation, and the clue that leads us through the history of divine providence. Through Christ the Bible is applied to the hearts and lives of Christians.”

“The Bible teaches that our roles are not just areas of responsibility, but callings. Our roles are each callings given to us by God and through which we serve God and others.”

“But the most important thing to realize is that the biggest interruptions are those that we do to ourselves — like multitasking.13”

“As John Wesley said, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”

“our conscious mind is intended as a focusing tool, not a storage place.”

“Bad management hurts people, and bad leadership hurts people; in fact, doing anything badly hurts people. Doing anything poorly that pertains to the practical arena is unloving because it brings harm to others.”

“The ideas that move industries forward are not the result of tremendous creative insight but rather of masterful stewardship.”

“The great purpose of prayer is not getting things from God but getting God.”

“While the point of Christianity is not first to make society a better place, the call to do that is an implication of the gospel simply because the gospel sends us into the world to serve in love.”

“people actually operate best from a routine, not a set of lists.”

“To be a gospel-driven Christian means to be on the lookout to do good for others to the glory of God, in all areas of life, and to do this with creativity and competence.”

“Yet this book is written in the desire—perhaps in a measure of inner certainty—that we shall see the great Head of the Church once more bring into being His special instruments of revival, that He will again raise up unto Himself certain young men whom He may use in this glorious employ. And what manner of men will they be? Men mighty in the Scriptures, their lives dominated by a sense of the greatness, the majesty and holiness of God, and their minds and hearts aglow with the great truths of the doctrines of grace. They will be men who have learned what it is to die to self, to human aims and personal ambitions; men who are willing to be “fools for Christ’s sake”, who bear reproach and falsehood, who will labour and suffer, and whose supreme desire will be, not to gain earth’s accolades, but to win the Master’s approbation when they appear before His awesome judgment seat. They will be men who will preach with broken hearts and tear-filled eyes, and upon whose ministries God will grant an extraordinary effusion of the Holy Spirit, and who will witness “signs and wonders following” in the transformation of multitudes of human lives.”

“The great end of the gospel is holiness and happiness. It is the complete restoration of the soul to the image of God. It sets aright all the evil in this world. The plan has been put in motion, the payment price of the cross has been made. The wedding feast has been planned. The all-sufficient Husband is in place.29”

“In these experiences we feel our sin again, and by them we feel our need for the delivering power of Christ again. These experiences are meant to humble and benefit us, ultimately building our assurance in Christ rather than destroying us, and we should never lose heart in the darkness. “For sin the Lord will often hide his face and permit dark clouds to hang over us. Yet we must not give way. We cannot recover ourselves but by believing.” But God is genuinely grieved by our willful sins, a profoundly important reality in the Christian life well captured by Puritan Thomas Watson: “The sins of God’s own children go nearer to his heart.”56”