Brian Eshleman > Recent Status Updates

Faith that is sure of itself isn’t faith. Faith that is sure of God is the only faith there is.

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My experiences aren’t worth anything unless they keep me at the source, Jesus Christ.

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Try to get at people where they are, until they realize what they lack. Then erect the standard of Jesus Christ for their lives.

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As redemption creates the life of God in a human soul, it also creates the things belonging to that life, including a sense of needing the Lord.

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He asks us to meet these things head–on, not to be like jellyfish, floating along and saying, “Oh, well, it’s the Lord’s will.” Beware of drifting lazily before God instead of putting up a glorious fight so that you may lay hold of his strength.

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Always make a practice of challenging your mind to think out what it accepts easily. Our position is not truly ours until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you isn’t the one who tells you something you didn’t know before; it’s the one who gives expression to the truth that has been struggling for utterance inside you.

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If you can’t clearly express your thoughts on a truth God has given you, struggle until you can. Otherwise, you’ll be unable to pass it on, and someone will be poorer for it all the days of his life.

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What we need today isn’t a new gospel; it’s men and women who can restate the gospel of the Son of God in terms that will reach the very heart of people’s problems.

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If you intercede without believing, you’ll wind up turning intercession into pointless sympathy. Sympathy never leads people to God; it only makes them more content to stay out of touch with him.

Hite put forth the opinion (beloved by writing teachers everywhere) that the more exacting a recounting of an event, the more widespread its potential appeal: “Specificity equals universality.”

From this week's New Yorker. That will have legs on this site.

Confusion is always the result of an undisciplined spiritual nature.

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The natural life is not spiritual, and it can only be made spiritual by sacrifice. If we do not resolutely sacrifice the natural, the supernatural can never become natural in us.

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It is not a question of giving up sin, but of giving up my right to myself, my natural independence and self-assertiveness, and this is where the battle has to be fought. It is the things that are right and noble and good from the natural stand point that keep us back from God’s best.

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It is not a question of giving up sin, but of giving up my right to myself, my natural independence and self-assertiveness, and this is where the battle has to be fought. It is the things that are right and noble and good from the natural stand point that keep us back from God’s best.

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there is boundless entrance into the holiness of Christ by the way he has designated for us

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All the pleading we do with God amounts to a deliberate refusal to recognize the cross and is of no use. When we plead, it’s like we’re pounding on a door other than the one Jesus has opened.

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When we realize all that Christ has done for us, the boundless joy of God begins. Wherever the joy of God is absent, the death sentence is at work.

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Strictly speaking, we can’t choose to repent; repentance is a gift from God, the result of “godly sorrow.” The Puritans used to pray for “the gift of tears.” If you ever stop knowing the virtue of repentance, you are in darkness.

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The forgiven prove they are forgiven by becoming, by the grace of God, the opposite of what they were before.

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Who tells the Sun to rise every morning?
Colors the sky with the shades of His glory?

We the Kingdom, "Jesus Does"

Waiting for God is like unbelief; it means that I lack faith in him, that I’m waiting for a specific thing to happen so that then I can have faith in that.

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All of God’s great blessings are finished and complete, but they aren’t mine until I enter into a relationship based on his covenant.

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I have to learn to face down the things that come against me, and in that way produce the balance of holiness; then it becomes a delight to meet opposition. Holiness is the balance between my disposition and the law of God as expressed in Jesus Christ.

No one is virtuous by accident; virtue is acquired.

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Everything that doesn’t partake of the nature of virtue is the enemy of virtue in me.

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Life without war is impossible, either in nature or in grace. The basis of physical, mental, moral, and spiritual life is antagonism.

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God puts his disapproval on our experiences when we begin to think of them as ends in themselves. Sanctification isn’t merely an experience; sanctification itself has to be sanctified.

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If your faith is rooted only in your experiences, anything that happens is likely to disturb it. But nothing can ever disturb God or the almighty reality of redemption.

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Never substitute your own experience of salvation or sanctification for confidence in the power of the gospel.

https://utmost.org/modern-classic/by-...

Laurie Paul argues for revelation. She contends that we should make our choices with humility—on the basis of “whether we want to discover who we’ll become.”

In this week's New Yorker.