Suppose God wants to teach you to say, "I know how to be abased"--are you ready to be offered up like that? Are you ready to be not so much as a drop in a bucket--to be so hopelessly insignificant that you are never thought of again in connection with the life you served? Are you willing to spend and be spent; not seeking to be ministered unto, but to minister?

Beware of being obsessed with consistency to your own convictions instead of being devoted to God. The important consistency in a saint is not to a principle but to the divine life. It is easier to be an excessive fanatic than it is to be consistently faithful, because God causes an amazing humbling of our religious conceit when we are faithful to Him.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of principles to be obeyed apart from identification with Jesus Christ. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting his way with us.

The path of peace for us is to hand ourselves over to God and ask Him to search us, not what we think we are, or what other people think we are, or what we persuade ourselves we are or would like to be, but 'Search me out, O God, explore me as I really am in Thy sight.'

But the miracle of the redemptive reality of God is that the worst and the vilest offender can never exhaust the depths of His love.

Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations

When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message.