Look at the Book

The question is not if you are imitating, but who. We either imitate those who walk toward heaven or those who walk toward hell.

God has given you life to honor him, display him, and summon others to follow him.

Though God may take away, he has made a promise — and sealed it with his Son’s blood — that he will give back more.

We have a refuge in times of trouble, safety amid life’s storms. Only a fool curses the shelter and runs into the eye of the storm.

No suffering takes God by surprise. He alone is the perfect help in our pain. Should all around our soul give way, he then is all our hope and stay.

We cannot respond however we want when we suffer. Though we can grieve and mourn, if we never get to worship, we’ve stopped short.

If God stripped away our gifts — our income, our family, even our own health — would we curse him or bless his name?

Job remained steadfast in his suffering and has left us with a model for how to trust God with our pain.

No one starts as a mature Christian. Keep seeking God. Keep laboring to grow. And keep trusting that God will bring about our maturity.

God changes minds through ordinary means: Our gaze fixed upon his word, our knees bowed in prayer, and our time spent with our eternal family.

We cannot disagree with Christians in any way we want. God has given us boundaries and ways forward.

A heavenly mindset will not be lofty and self-righteous, but humble and God-dependent.

God wants us to grow up and leave behind childish ways. And he has done everything necessary to ensure it can happen.

Those who live for riches and the praise of man today will have hunger, mourning, and weeping tomorrow.

Do we err when we love others for the reward God offers us? No. Only those who labor for what God promises are rich enough to love others selflessly.

Those who follow Christ can weep now, can be poor and temporarily hated now, and yet remain wildly blessed because theirs is the coming kingdom.

If we are Christ’s disciples — whether poor, hungry, weeping, or persecuted — we are blessed.

All of the New Testament commandments are a call to become in experience what we are in Christ. And what we are in Christ is a new creation.

The Christian’s life on earth will always be walking along the narrow path. Living for sin is easy. Following Christ requires carrying a cross daily.

When we read commands and obligations, we are being summoned to become in experience what we are in Christ.

We are going to win this race. We are going to get the crown. Not because we are great runners, but because Christ has made us his own.

Pursue, strain forward, press on. God wants us to put all energy into making it to the end, not revisiting the life we had before we started the race.

Devote your whole life to this one pursuit: attaining the fullest possible experience of Christ imaginable.

God wants to give his children the assurance that they will be saved. But not the kind of assurance that ignores the warnings along the way.

The crown of life belongs to those who seek holiness, who hold fast to Christ, who finish the race. The crown of life belongs to Christians.