May not the inadequacy of much of our spiritual experience be traced back to our habit of skipping through the corridors of the Kingdom like children in the market place, chattering about everything, but pausing to learn the value of nothing.

To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator. God has a voluntary relationg to everything He has made, but He has no Necessary relation to anything outside of Himself. His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply nor from any completeness they can dring to Him who is complete in himself.

If He put tribulation before you and said He will give you patience by giving you a little trouble along the way, wouldn't you take a little trouble? You say, 'Lord, I want all my highways paved.' the Lord says, 'I'm sorry, I can't accommodate you. I'm going to let you run over some bumps occasionally, so you will have patience.' You do not like the bumps, but you like the patience, and if you want the patience, you will have to take the bumps. And what is patience but experience?

Now, brethren, this is one of our greatest faults in our Christian lives. We are allowing too many rivals of God. We actually have too many gods. We have too many irons in the fire. We have too much theology that we don't understand. We have too much churchly institutionalism. We have too much religion. Actually, I guess we just have too much of too much.

Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and bring Him nearer to our own image.

Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there.

The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians... The 'worship' growing out of such a view of life is as far off center as the view itself - a sort of sanctified nightclub without the champagne and the dressed-up drunks.