Before God enlarges you, He strengthens you. Your promotion will not break you. Promotion was meant to propel you. The testing of your character, in private, was meant to strengthen you behind the scenes in order to prepare you for your public platform. Many collapse under the weight and pressure of self-promotion and self-exaltation. But when God promotes, His promotion is sustainable.
Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.
When we’ve had a good year in our own kingdom, we aren’t necessarily looking for God’s Kingdom.
Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn’t really matter.
God is more concerned with our character than with our achievements. Achievements have importance only in the realm of time. Character is eternal. It determines what we will be through eternity.
How mistaken people are who think they can play over the hole of an asp and not be stung, or touch tar without being defiled, or set their clothes on fire and not be burnt. So if something in your business, your lifestyle…suits your lusts, you have already entered into temptation. If we have a propensity for unclean thoughts, ambition in high places, sexual passion, perusal of bad literature, or anything else, temptation will use various things in our society to entrap us.
Honestly, what use do we make of our God-given reason? I know what use I make of it. I use it chiefly to provide reasons for what I want to do without admitting it is for pursuing some personal ambition. A man may have his conscience so well disciplined and trained that, instead of blazing a trail before him, it is like a pet dog which just trots obediently at his heels and never so much as barks! “If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”
Carve your name on hearts, and not on marble.