“A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?”

Bodily pleasure is not in itself a bad thing. But when it is exalted to a necessity and we become dependent upon it, then we are slaves of our body and its feelings. Only misery lies ahead.

The will is transformed by experience, not information.

The open secret of many Bible believing Churches is that a vanishingly small percentage of those talking about prayer and Bible reading are actually doing what they are talking about.

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.

This life is not something that is imposed upon us; we receive it and work with it.

Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. First, what is our plan for making disciples? And second, does our plan work?

Theology is a part of our lives. It’s unavoidable. A thoughtless theology guides our lives with just as much force as a thoughtful and informed one.

The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.

Grace is not opposed to effort; it’s opposed to earning.

Almost everything worth doing in human life is very difficult in its early stages and the good we are aiming at is never available at first, to strengthen us when we seem to need it most.

Spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.

Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.

The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.

Why doesn’t God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.

The greatest challenge the church faces today is to be authentic disciples of Jesus.

The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him.

Cultivated people should be superior to any consideration so sordid as a mercenary interest.

When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited.

By consciously meditating upon spiritual truths and cultivating personal integrity, one need never fear negative circumstances.

We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we’re barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.

Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.

The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.

The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.

We are on a mission: we are called to the cultivation of the earth .