The most powerful truth you will ever discover is contained in these words from the prophet Habakkuk.

O soul, are you weary and troubled?
No light in the darkness you see?
There’s a light for a look at the Savior,
And life more abundant and free!

“No foreign power or combination of foreign powers could by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.  At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?  I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from among us, it cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.” Abraham Lincoln

“Our spiritual inhibition concerning God’s truth permits us to see, but not perceive.  The truth lies dormant within, mentally apprehended but not spiritually applied.” Arthur Wallis

We measure all things by our comfort level.  The oracles of the past have adjudged that there are seven virtues (four “cardinal” coming from the Latin word that means “hinge of the door”—pivotal) and (three “theological” from God).  The first, “prudence” is not much used of late.

Hunger for the Word is a thermometer of the Faith!  Are you 98.6 degrees?  If not, report to the Great Physician for a selfectomy. Your life depends on this!

Question: From where does the river get its water?

We would never think of sending our troops into combat without first letting them experience a “live fire” exercise.…With spiritual combat this is even more crucial because we never leave the war zone.

One thing above all else we can know from this is that there are a whole lot of deeply hurting people in our world.  One thing we should know is that our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ gives us inexhaustible resources that can be used to heal the hurt.

Some Protestants have the deeply reinforced habit of jumping directly from the first century to the twentieth, overleaping, as with seven league boots, all nineteen centuries of pastoral wisdom in between.  Others are more likely to leap from the early fourth century to the sixteenth or nineteenth century over more than a thousand years of “dark ages,” more dark in our own memories than anywhere else. Oden, T. C. (1987). Becoming a Minister (7). New York: Crossroad.