There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.
Interpretation
True maturity often comes from enduring and learning through difficult experiences.
This quote highlights the idea that personal growth and maturity are often achieved through the challenges we face in life. Suffering can be a catalyst for discipline, resilience, and deeper understanding, ultimately leading to a more mature perspective on life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming obstacles and personal growth.
Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.
It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
Imagination is a God-given gift; but if it is fed dirt by the eye, it will be dirty. All sin, not least sexual sin, begins with the imagination. Therefore what feeds the imagination is of maximum importance in the pursuit of kingdom righteousness.
But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
There's a way that the force of disappointment can be alchemized into something that will paradoxically renew you.
Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.
Force a hand, the voice warned, and it will fight you. But convince a mind to think as you want it to think, and you have an ally.
Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.
It is a sad thing when men have neither enough intelligence to speak well nor enough sense to hold their tongues; this is the root of all impertinence.
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