When we bless God for mercies, we usually prolong them. When we bless God for miseries, we usually end them. Praise is the honey of life which a devout heart extracts from every bloom of providence and grace.
Interpretation
Expressing gratitude for both good and bad experiences can enhance our lives and lead to personal growth.
In this quote, Charles Spurgeon highlights the importance of blessing God for both blessings and trials in life. He suggests that when we express gratitude for our mercies, we invite more of them, and when we bless God for our miseries, we find a way to transcend them. The metaphor of praise being the 'honey of life' emphasizes how a grateful heart can extract sweetness from life's experiences, thus enriching our existence through both providence and grace.
In practice
During a speech about overcoming challenges, you might say this quote to encourage gratitude.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
If you look at the developments in the international scene over the past many years, we haven't been able to resolve many problems and many crises, because we have approached them from a zero-sum perspective. My gain has always been defined as somebody else's loss, and through that, we never resolve problems.
There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.
Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.
There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.
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