The Pilgrim Path---Proverbs 4: 7

“The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight.”

Some counsel worth considering:

“The unloving heart imagines a hundred evils to be in one’s neighbor which don’t exist.” John Duncan

“Republican institutions in the hands of a virtuous and God-fearing nation are the very best in the world, but in the hands of a corrupt and irreligious people they are the very worst and effective weapons of destruction…” Philip Schaff

“We’re not the paragons of virtue that we’d all like to think we are. And so, to shatter that myth, God will use suffering to expose the stuff of which we’re made.” Joni Eareckson Tada

“Everyone who wishes to be saved, must have private personal dealings with Christ about his own soul.” Bishop J. C. Ryle

“Repentance, to be of any avail, must work a change of heart and conduct.” Theodore Cuyler

“Whoever wishes to make himself complete in all branches of moral excellence, he should keep his eyes trained on the lives of God’s holy people in Scripture, as if they were living and moving icons, and thus absorb their virtue into himself by imitation.” St. Basil of Caesarea

“The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.” Noah Webster

“When we come to hear or read the Word of God, let us pray, ‘LORD, open my eyes! Persuade my soul! Bow the neck of my soul, the inner man of iron. Take away my hard heart and teach me!’” Richard Sibbes

“God is holy, happy, wise, and good, by his essence. Men are made holy, wise, happy, strong, and good, by the gift and grace of God.” Stephen Charnock

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.” April 30, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln

“If sermons are forgotten they are gone, but books can be read over at our pleasure and leisure. Good books are a mercy to the world. The Spirit can preserve writing to all generations. Books are present, powerful sermons and of great use to our salvation.” Richard Baxter

“Power-hungry leaders have quit being ambassadors. Controlling, bullying leaders are no longer ambassadors. Sexist leaders who do not respect the God-given gifts of women and who even relate to them inappropriately have forsaken their ambassadorial calling. Esteeming bigness and greatness over humility and godliness means you have functionally walked away from your ambassadorial commission. Using God-given gifts and positions in ways that are selfish, materialistic, or self-aggrandizing is a forsaking of your ambassadorial position. Institutional advancement that compromises the gospel is a forsaking of ambassadorial calling. Leading by manipulation or intimidation is not the life of an ambassador. Failing to be patient, self-sacrificing, tender, loving, forgiving, humble, serving, gentle, faithful, and kind is a failure to lead as an ambassador of the Savior King who sent you (Second Corinthians 5: 16—21). Paul David Tripp

“Men of this world wonder what a Christian can have to say to God in so many hours of prayer, and what a strange business he can employ himself in! The carnal mind has no idea to explain it. The saint, on the other hand, considers the spare moments he can find between necessary earthly duties far too little to enjoy those secret pleasures. The children of God pray to their heavenly Father in secret, and feel unknown refreshment and delight in it; and they are well assured, that their ‘Father who sees in secret will reward’ them openly (Matthew 6: 6).” Isaac Watts

“In our culture we are obsessed with one thing: ourselves. In the absence of any transcendent significance to life, creating, loving, and fulfilling the self--- fills the vacuum.” Sinclair Ferguson

“You can always tell when a man is a great way from God---he is always talking about himself, and how good he is.” D. L. Moody

“No pit is so deep that the LORD is not deeper still.” Corrie ten Boom

“The most healthy state of a Christian is to be always empty in self and constantly depending upon the LORD for supplies; to be always poor in self and rich in Jesus; weak as water personally, but mighty through God to do great exploits; and hence the use of prayer, because, while it adores God, it lays the creature where it should be, in the very dust. Prayer is, apart from the answer which it brings, a great benefit to the Christian.” Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“Fill your hearts with the thoughts of the beauty of holiness, since this was the design of Christ in his death.” John Owen

“Whatever God has made is good, but if it is considered the greatest good, it turns into vanity.” Ezekiel Hopkins

“By a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.” Desiderius Erasmus

Grace and Peace in Jesus, the Only Redeemer of broken and wretched souls, Pastor Jason