sovereignty-of-god

Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, 'Prayer happened, and I was there" more than "I prayed today". All you know is that you are being led, being guided, being loved, being used, being prayed through -- and you are no longer in the drivers seat.

What we do every time we pray is to confess our impotence and God's sovereignty.

We do not pray to inform God of our needs, because He knows what we need before we ask.What is prayer like for you?Is it a religious ritual that you perform out of habit?Is it a spiritual discipline that you practice because you want to be the best Christian you possibly can be?Is it a mechanism by which you can bring your __hopping list_ to God in order to have your needs met?Or are you running to meet your Lover, to commune with Him, hungering to find your joy in Him, and to be fulfilled in His presence?

We are not trying to manipulate God and tell Him what to do. Rather, we are asking Him to tell us what to do.

I understood that I was being shown the future: shards of what would come to be. Often, I cried out for the pain of it. But other times, I was comforted, because I saw, for an instant, the pattern of the whole.

If it pleases Him to bid our patience exercise itself, shall He not do as He wills with His own!

Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary.

Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.

You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.

Winter in the soul is by no means a comfortable season: but there is this comfort, namely, that the Lord makes it.

If my words don't flow out of a heart that rests in God's control, sovereignty, then they come out of the heart that seeks control so I can get what I want.

God's relationship with man does not work in a way in which man stumbles and then God has to drop what he is doing in order to lift him up; rather, man stumbles so that God can lift him up. Hence it is utterly impossible to truly diminish his glory.

God chose to introduce Himself to us in the first verse of Genesis as a Creator. And yet so few Christians really understand the power of creativity to influence the culture.

The consequence model, the logical one, the amoral one, the one which refuses any divine intervention, is a problem really for just the (hypothetical) logician. You see, towards God I would rather be grateful for Heaven (which I do not deserve) than angry about Hell (which I do deserve). By this the logician within must choose either atheism or theism, but he cannot possibly through good reason choose anti-theism. For his friend in this case is not at all mathematical law: the law in that 'this equation, this path will consequently direct me to a specific point'; over the alternative and the one he denies, 'God will send me wherever and do it strictly for his own sovereign amusement.' The consequence model, the former, seeks the absence of God, which orders he cannot save one from one's inevitable consequences; hence the angry anti-theist within, 'the logical one', the one who wants to be master of his own fate, can only contradict himself - I do not think it wise to be angry at math.

She did not find these riches (of fulfillment). They were a gift from God.

Those who understand God's sovereignty have joy even in the midst of suffering, a joy reflected on their very faces, for they see that their suffering is not without purpose.

What is most decisive is God's Joy Project is not that we fully grasp it, but that our sovereign God fully grasps us.

One of the great wonders of Christianity is that you were born into your times, to set your times aright.