Allan

“There can be no progress in Divine things until there is the personal recognition that God is Supreme, that He is to be feared and revered, that He is to be owned and served as Lord.”
― Arthur W. Pink, The Sovereignty of God

“We quickly learn that God is more interested in our holiness than in our comfort. He more greatly delights in the integrity and purity of his church than in the material well-being of its members. He shows himself more clearly to men and women who enjoy him and obey him than to men and women whose horizons revolve around good jobs, nice houses, and reasonable health. He is far more committed to building a corporate “temple” in which his Spirit dwells than he is in preserving our reputations. He is more vitally disposed to display his grace than to flatter our intelligence. He is more concerned for justice than for our ease. He is more deeply committed to stretching our faith than our popularity. He prefers that his people live in disciplined gratitude and holy joy rather than in pushy self-reliance and glitzy happiness. He wants us to pursue daily death, not self-fulfillment, for the latter leads to death, while the former leads to life. These essential values of the gospel must shape our praying, as they shape Paul’s. Indeed, they become the ground for our praying (“For this reason . . . I pray”): it is a wonderful comfort, a marvelous boost to faith, to know that you are praying in line with the declared will of almighty God.”
― D.A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers

“God has made us this way, in his own image, because he himself is a personal, relational being.”
― Gordon D. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God

“I also saw that he, along with countless others in the church, had fallen prey to our culture’s idolatry of romantic love. To him, the litmus test of human flourishing was sexual expression in marriage.”
― David Bennett, A War of Loves: The Unexpected Story of a Gay Activist Discovering Jesus