Sometimes the end God has in mind is to exercise our faith, so He brings us into straitened circumstances so that we might look up to Him and see His deliverance.

Instead of living in the sunshine of God's forgiveness through Christ, we tend to live under an overcast sky of guilt most of the time.

Prayer assumes the sovereignty of God. If God is not sovereign, we have no assurance that He is able to answer our prayers. Our prayers would become nothing more than wishes. But while God's sovereignty, along with his wisdom and love, is the foundation of our trust in Him, prayer is the expression of that trust.

Truth is we must plant and we must water if we are to make progress with our children in holiness but only the Holy Spirit can change our children more and more into the likeness of Jesus. Our problem is we tend to depend upon our planting and watering rather than the Lord.

Only those who walk in holiness experience true joy.

The cure for the sin of envy and jealousy is to find our contentment in God

This is the secret of being content: To learn and accept that we live daily by God's unmerited favor given through Christ, and that we can respond to any and every situation by His divine enablement through the Holy Spirit.