Discipline: The Glad Surrender

Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.

Choices will continually be necessary and -- let us not forget -- possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.

God will never disappoint us… If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline. …To the unbeliever the fact of suffering only convinces him that God is not to be trusted, does not love us. To the believer, the opposite is true.

A young woman asked the great preacher Charles Spurgeon if it was possible to reconcile God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility. “Young woman,” said he. “You don’t reconcile friends

The disciplined Christian will be very careful what sort of counsel he seeks from others. Counsel that contradicts the written Word is ungodly counsel. Blessed is the man that walketh not in that.

Christianity teaches righteousness, not rights. It emphasizes honor, not equality. A Christian's concern is what is owed to the other, not what is owed to himself.

God will never disappoint us. He loves us and has only one purpose for us : holiness, which in His kingdom equals joy.

There is no such thing as Christian work. That is, there is no work in the world which is, in and of itself, Christian. Christian work is any kind of work, from cleaning a sewer to preaching a sermon, that is done by a Christian and offered to God. This means that nobody is excluded from serving God. It means that no work is "beneath" a Christian. It means there is no job in the world that needs to be boring or useless. A Christian finds fulfilment not in the particular kind of work he does, but in the way in which he does it.

The failure to cultivate the power of peaceful concentration is the greatest single cause of mental breakdown," the great physician William Osler told the students of Yale . . .

A Christian sees all men as made in the image of God. All are sinners too, which means that the image is marred, but it is a divine image nonetheless, capable of redemption and therefore to be held in honor.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should enjoy things made for us to enjoy. What is not at all fitting or proper is that we should set our hearts on them. Temporal things must be treated as temporal things - received, given thanks for, offered back, but enjoyed. They must not be treated like eternal things.

Young people sometimes say to me, "I'll just die if the Lord calls me to be a missionary," or words to that effect. "Wonderful!" I say. That's the best possible way to start. You won't be of much use on the mission field unless you 'die' first. The conditions for discipleship begin with 'dying', and if you take the first step, very likely you will find that you have indeed been 'called'.

Worry is the antithesis of trust. You simply cannot do both. They are mutually exclusive.

Nothing has done more damage to the Christian view of life than the hideous notion that those who are truly spiritual have lost all interest in the world and its beauties.

If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline.

If I am to love the Lord my God with all my mind, there will not be room in it for carnality, for pride, for anxiety, for the love of myself. How can the mind be filled with the love of the Lord and have space left over for things like that?

He who had known the ceaseless worship of angels came to be a slave to men. Preaching, teaching, healing the sick, and raising the dead were parts of his ministry, of course, and the parts we might consider ourselves willing to do for God if that is what He asked. He could be seen to be God in those. But Jesus also walked miles in dusty heat. He healed, and people forgot to thank Him. He was pressed and harried by mobs of exigent people, got tired and hungry, was "tailed" and watched and pounced upon by suspicious, jealous, self-righteous religious leaders, and in the end was flogged and spat on and stripped and had nails hammered through His hands. He relinquished the right (or the honour) of being publicly treated as equal with God.

Said the Robin to the Sparrow, “I should really like to know Why these anxious human beings Rush about and worry so.” Said the Sparrow to the Robin, “Friend, I think that it must be That they have no heavenly Father Such as cares for you and me.

The unwillingness on the part of men and women to acknowledge their helpless dependence is a violation of our “creatureliness.” The unwillingness to be obedient is a violation of our humanity. Both are declarations of independence and, whether physical or moral, are essentially atheistic. In both, the answer to the call is no.

God calls me. In a deeper sense than any other species of earthbound creature, I am called. And in a deeper sense I am free, for I can ignore the call.

Lord, where there are interruption, it seems that the disposal of the time I had planned so well have slipped out of my hands. Help me then to remember that it has not slipped out of Yours. In Your hands, these unexpected things will be fashioned into an unexpectedly beautiful design

The ways of the world exalt themselves against God. They sometimes look rational and appealing to the most ernest disciple but Christ says to us then what He said to His disciples long ago, when many of them had given u pin disgust, "Do you also want to leave me?" If we answer as PEter did, "Lord to whom else shall we go? Your words are words of eternal life," our rebel thoughts are captured once more. The way of holiness is again visible.

The believer alone will be able to hear the call. It comes from beyond ourselves, beyond our society, beyond the climate of opinion and prejudice and rebellion and skepticism in which we live, and beyond our time and taste. It draws toward the center of all things, that still place of which T.S. Eliot wrote : Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word.