“As large and as various as are our wants, so large and various are His mercies. So we may come boldly to find grace and mercy to help us in time of need, a mercy for every need. All the mercies that are in His own heart He has transplanted into several beds in the garden of the promises, where they grow, and He has abundance of variety of them, suited to all the variety of the diseases of the soul.” Thomas Goodwin
“God has no pleasure in the destruction or calamity of persons or people. He had rather they should turn and continue in peace. He is well-pleased if they forsake their evil ways, that He may not have occasion to execute His wrath upon them. He is a God that delights in mercy, and judgment is His strange work.” Jonathan Edwards
“Be frequent in thoughts of faith, comparing Christ with other beloveds, sin, world, legal righteousness; and preferring him before them, counting them all loss and dung in comparison of him.” John Owen
“Sin seems beloved to us only when Christ does not. So go ahead and compare your sins to him: their blackness with his light, their shame with his glory, their cruelty with his mercy, their hell with his heaven. For now, we see only the rays of Christ’s beauty. But even the faintest of them outshines the most attractive sin. Only beloved sins undo us. And the only Savior from beloved sins is a beloved Christ.” Scott Hubbard
“Feelings are meant be fully felt and then fully surrendered to God. “Pain begs to be felt—or life will beg you to feel not one emotion at all. Emotion means movement — and emotions are meant to move you toward God.” Ann Voskamp
“Whatever the story is today — it’s okay. Because we know the ending — and how it will be the beginning of the truest happily ever after. Whatever the story is today — it’s okay. Because the Writer of the story has written Himself into the hardest places of yours and is softening the edges of everything with redeeming grace.” Ann Voskamp
“The bent of God’s heart is mercy. His glory is His goodness.” Dane Ortlund
“You can’t love God with your hands and feet and heart until you have also come to love him with your head.” Scott Sauls
“Those who honor Christ as holy in their hearts cannot help but witness to him. Their lives and conversations are filled with evidence of sovereign love.” Marshall Segal
“The world will malign us for what we believe about Jesus, about abortion, about homosexuality, about race, about hell. In most places in America today, if everyone in our lives knew what we really believe, many would hate what we believe. And they may hate us — whether loudly or quietly, whether to our faces or to a coworker — for what we believe.” Marshall Segal
“For any Christian in any society during any century, the question is not if we will suffer, but when we will suffer. And more importantly, will how we suffer call attention to our hope in Jesus — or call it into question?” Marshall Segal
“Can the Christ we proclaim really bear the awful weight of our fears, anxieties, insecurities, and sins? He can, and he does, and he will. So honor him as holy, especially when suffering comes, and be ready to tell whoever might ask why you still have hope.” Marshall Segal
“Of one thing I am sure. Complaining is self-perpetuating and counterproductive. Whenever I express my complaints in the hope of evoking pity and receiving the satisfaction I so much desire, the result is always the opposite of what I tried to get. A complainer is hard to live with, and very few people know how to respond to the complaints made by a self-rejecting person. The tragedy is that, often, the complaint, once expressed, leads to that which is most feared: further rejection. . . . Joy and resentment cannot coexist.” Henri Nouwen
“‘He will abundantly pardon’(Isaiah 55:7), is profound consolation for us as we feel ourselves time and again wandering away from the Father, looking for soul calm anywhere but in His embrace and instruction…He will not tepidly pardon, He will abundantly pardon.” Dane Ortlund
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