The saddest thing one meets is a nominal Christian. I had not seen it in Japan where missions is younger. The church here is a “field full of wheat and tares.

Prayer is the core of the day. Take prayer out, and the day would collapse.

Joy is not gush. Joy is not mere jolliness. Joy is perfect acquiescence ~ acceptance, rest ~ in God’s will, whatever comes.

It is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war. We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them. We are not winning them as we should, because the fact of the reverses is so little realized, and the needed reinforcements are not forthcoming, as they would be in the position were thoroughly understood...So we have tried to tell you the truth the uninteresting, unromantic truth.

We must look upon the world, with all its delights and all its attractions, with suspicion and reserve. We who love our Lord and whose affections are set on Heavenly things voluntarily and gladly lay aside the things that charm and ravish the world, that our hearts may be ravished with the things of Heaven; that our whole being may be poured forth in constant and unreserved devotion in the service of the Lord who died to save us.

If I cannot hear "The sound of rain' long before the rain falls, and then go out to some hilltop of the Spirit, as near to my God as I can and have faith to wait there with my face between my knees, though six times or sixty times I am told "There is nothing', till at last there arises a little cloud out of the sea, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

But all the great staining temptations, to selfishness, ambition, and other strong sins that violently affront the soul, appear first in the region of the mind, and can be fought and conquered there. We have been given the power to close the door of the mind. We can lose this power through disuse or increase it by use, by the daily discipline of the inner man in things which seem small and by reliance upon the word of the Spirit of Truth. “It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure. It is as though He said, 'Learn to live in your will, not in your feelings.'