If you want to live a godly life, then choose to put the things into your mind that lead to living a godly life.
Discipline
Mrs Charles E. Cowman
The Great Shepherd makes his servant to lie down there. There are times when men say they are too busy to stop; when they think they are doing God service by going on. Now and then God makes such a one to lie down. He has been driving through the pastures so fast that he has not known their greenness, nor apprehended their sweet savor; and God does not mean that he shall lose all that, and so He makes him lie down. Many a man has had to thank God for some such enforced season of rest, in which he first learned the sweetness of meditation on the Word, and of lying still in God’s hands and waiting God’s pleasure.
Ed Stetzer
Are you weary of the pace of this world? Does the never-ending deluge of information from the media wear you out? God promises that when we meet him, we find our true rest along these ancient paths—not in a new technology, a new medication, or the passage of new legislation, but through intentionally and habitually coming to Jesus and casting our burdens upon him. Only there do we find true and enduring rest. When we submit our inputs and outputs to the gospel, we will find that the voices of outrage dim and the peace of God grows.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Birds sing on a bare bough; O, believer, canst not thou?
John Arnott
Even when God brings discipline and correction to our lives, He does so to save us from ruin. His intent is always life-giving and redemptive.
Christine Caine
Being set free and walking in freedom are not the same. The first was done for us by Jesus, but the second we must choose to do ourselves in His strength and by His grace.
Julia Loren
How do we overcome? First, we focus on the character of God—He is good, His love never fails, nothing can separate us from His love, He is full of compassion, He will never leave us or abandon us and He is our refuge. Second, we recognize that we cannot see the good or the glory that comes out of heartache while we are in the middle of it. Hindsight is our greatest ally. Third, we choose to practice the presence of joy! We can prepare for the heartaches and troubles to come by anticipating our response and preparing a response of faith—a response that offers a sacrifice of praise and determines not to let the enemy of our souls steal our joy. We refuse to take offense at God and cut ourselves off from His love and compassion.
N T Wright
Training in godliness is emphatically not what people today expect or want to hear. We expect and want to be told that “spirituality” is simply the sense I have of being in God’s presence, being surrounded with his love, sensing a transcendent dimension in the affairs of everyday life. It comes as a shock to be told that it’s something you have to work at-and something, moreover, which will take the same kind of hard work as going into training for athletics.
Phillips Brooks
Someday, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day or your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.
Martin Luther
Pray hardest when it is hardest to pray.