I’m redoing my filing system and moving things out of old notebooks, etc. So I am, of course, running across a number of little quotes and sayings that I’ve saved. Putting some here for easy reference.
It is usually we, not God, who struggle to preserve what we have ruined. Derek Kidner in Message of Jeremiah p62
Paraphrase from Scripture:
Those who truly believe the Word of the Lord will forsake all else to become worshippers of the Lord and serve Him to bring blessings to the world. (taken from Gen 12:1-3)
One I struggle with (I find comfort in it when someone else is the cause of my pain or the pain someone is experiencing, I still regret when I was the cause of my own pain or the pain of someone else).
Regret and faith are incompatible. If we really trust God, we trust Him with everything – the good and the bad. Arterburn
Lastly – from a work called Uniformity with God’s Will by St. Alphonsus de Liguori (translated from the Italian by Thomas W Tobin) probably written in 1755. I recommend this short document. I always find it convicting and encouraging and frequently bring it to mind. Yes, it’s Catholic and very Catholic in a few places, but it is also biblical is most places.
Furthermore, we must unite ourselves to God’s will not only in things that come to us directly from his hands, such as sickness, desolation, poverty, death of relatives, but likewise in those we suffer from man — for example, contempt, injustice, loss of reputation, loss of temporal goods and all kinds of persecution. On these occasions we must remember that whilst God does not will the sin, he does will our humiliation, our poverty, or our mortification, as the case may be….From God come all things, good as well as evil. We call adversities evil; actually they are good and meritorious, when we receive them as coming from God’s hands.
Then in the conclusion, talking about people who say “if I lived here, I would do this” or “if I had more time, I would do such and such”:
If, If, If — all these ifs! In the meantime such a person goes from bad to worse. These idle fancies are often temptations of the devil, because they are not in accord with God’s will. Hence we should dismiss them summarily and rouse ourselves to serve God only in that way which he has marked out for us. Doing his holy will, we shall certainly become holy in those surroundings in which he has placed us.
