Arthur John (A. J.) Gossip

You will not stroll into Christlikeness with your hands in your pockets, shoving the door open with a careless shoulder. This is no hobby for one’s leisure moments, taken up at intervals when we have nothing much to do, and put down and forgotten when our life grows full and interesting… It takes all one’s strength, and all one’s heart, and all one’s mind, and all one’s soul, given freely and recklessly and without restraint. This is a business for adventurous spirits; others would shrink out of it. And so Christ had a way of pulling up would-be recruits with sobering and disconcerting questions, of meeting applicants – breathless and panting in their eagerness – by asking them if they really thought they had the grit, the stamina, the gallantry, required. For many, He explained, begin, but quickly become cowed, and slink away, leaving a thing unfinished as a pathetic monument of their own lack of courage and of staying power.

Samuel M. Shoemaker

The surest symbol of a heart not yet fully subdued to God and His will is going to be found in the areas of money, sex, and power: in wanting these things for ourselves. The surest symbol of spiritual earnestness will be the checkbook, the affections, and the ego-drive surrendered to Him. A disciple must have discipline. He must not be afraid of being asked by God for some of the time, the money, and the pleasure he has been in the habit of calling his own. This does not mean that there will not be time for the family, and time for some healthy diversion. But it does mean that we are never – on vacation, or wherever we may be – exempt from our primary commitment to Him.

Eli E. Stanley Jones

Prayer is co-operation with God. It is the purest exercise of the faculties God has given us – an exercise that links these faculties with the Maker to work out the intentions He had in mind in their creation. Prayer is aligning ourselves with the purposes of God…Prayer is commitment. We don’t merely co-operate with God with certain things held back within. We, the total person, co-operate. This means that co-operation equals committment. Prayer means that the total you is praying. Your whole being reaches out to God, and God reaches down to you. Prayer is communion. Prayer is a means, but often it is an end in itself. There are times when your own wants and the needs of others drop away and you want just to look on His face and tell Him how much you love Him…Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you…

Francois Fenelon

What then are we afraid of? Can we have too much of God? Is it a misfortune to be freed from the heavy yoke of the world, and to bear the light burden of Jesus Christ? Do we fear to be too happy, too much delivered from ourselves, from the caprices of our pride, the violence of our passions, and the tyranny of this deceitful world?

John Flavel

No husband is so undying and everlasting a husband as Christ is; death separates all other relations, but the soul’s union with Christ is not dissolved in the grave. Indeed, the day of a believer’s death is his marriage day, the day of his fullest enjoyment of Christ. No husband can say to his wife, what Christ says to the believer, “I will never leave you, nor forsake you”