all this to say

For our tasting of Him leaves behind a painful, burning, incessant, and incurable wound that will not leave the heart alone and will not allow it to return to the old chasings. These divine wounds of love perfectly impair us from living satisfied in a world of fabricated pleasures, leaving us unfulfilled until we finally see the face for which we long and know the true beauty for which we have forsaken all.

We are justified freely, for Christ’s sake, by faith, without the exertion of our own strength, gaining of merit, or doing of works. To the age-old question, ‘What shall I do to be saved?’ the confessional answer is shocking: ‘Nothing! Just be still; shut up and listen for once in your life to what God the Almighty, creator and redeemer, is saying to his world and to you in the death and resurrection of his Son! Listen and believe!

Do not be much taken with the joys that are here. If ever you are so much engrossed with any enjoyment here that it takes away your love for prayer, or for your Bible, or that it would frighten you to hear the cry, Behold the Bridegroom cometh—then your heart is “overcharged”.

The glory of the gospel is that God has declared Christians to be rightly related to him in spite of their sin. But our greatest temptation and mistake is to try to smuggle character into his work of grace. How easily we fall into the trap of assuming that we can only remain justified so long as there are grounds in our character for justification. But Paul’s teaching is that nothing we do ever contributes to our justification.

A Christian scrambling to be known is like a millionaire standing in line for food stamps.

Awful things happen to people who pray. Their plans are frequently disrupted. They end up in strange places… How embarrassing to have to admit not only that prayer may get you into a prison, as it did Jeremiah, but also that while you’re moldering away in a miry pit there, you may have a long list of lamentations and unanswered questions to present to your Lord. How are we going to tell them they may end up lame and vagrant if they grasp hold of this God?

If I could hear Christ praying for me in the next room, I would not fear a million enemies. Yet distance makes no difference. He is praying for me.

So we witness about the light, even though we know that people are blind to this light. But that does not daunt us, because we know that God’s eye-opening power accompanies the witness about his Son.

God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead…He has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace.