Remember always that there are two things which are more utterly incompatible even than oil and water, and these two are trust and worry. Can you call it trust, when you have given the saving and keeping of your soul into the hands of God, if day after day you are spending hours of anxious thought and questionings about the matter? When believers really trust anything, they cease to worry about the thing they have trusted.

I wonder how many of our tombstones will have to be inscribed with the epitaph 'Died of too many meetings'?

You find no difficulty in trusting the Lord with the management of the universe and all the outward creation, and can your case be any more complex or difficult than these, that you need to be anxious or troubled about His management of it?

Look upon your chastening as God's chariots sent to carry your soul into the high places of spiritual achievement.

When all else is gone, God is left, and nothing changes Him.

To sum it all up, then, what is needed for happy and effectual service is simply to put your work into the Lord's hands, and leave it there. Do not take it to Him in prayer, saying, “Lord, guide me, Lord, give me wisdom, Lord, arrange for me,” and then arise from your knees and take the burden all back, and try to guide and arrange for yourself. Leave it with the Lord; and remember that what you trust to Him you must not worry over nor feel anxious about. Trust and worry cannot go together.

I saw that the kingdom must be interior before it can be exterior, that it is a kingdom of ideas, and not one of brute force; that His rule is over hearts, not over places; that His victories must be inward before they can be outward; that He seeks to control spirits rather than bodies; that no triumph could satisfy Him but a triumph that gains the heart; that in short, where God really reigns, the surrender must be the interior surrender of the convicted free men, and not merely the outward surrender of the conquered slave.