The Fruit Of Love

Only the Holy Spirit can create in us the kind of love toward our Savior that will overflow in imaginative sympathy and practical helpfulness toward his people. Only the Holy Spirit can train us in love....

In God's Presence, March 3

The Penalty of Sin

One of the penalties of sin is our acceptance of it. It is not only God who punishes for sin, but sin establishes itself in the sinner and takes its toll. No struggling or praying will enable you to stop doing certain things, and the penalty of sin is that you gradually get used to it, until you finally come to the place where you no longer even realize that it is sin. No, power, except the Holy Spirit, can change or prevent the inherit consequences of sin.

My Utmost For His Highest, March 16.

Preparation

God is preparing His heroes; and when opportunity comes, He can fit them into their place in a moment, and the world will wonder where they came from.

Let the Holy Ghost prepare you, dear friend, by the discipline of life; and when the last finishing touch has been given to the marble, it will be easy for God to put it on the pedestal, and fit it into its niche.

Streams In The Desert, April 28

Transformed

Christianity is not an ethical code. It is a love affair, a Spirit-filled way of living aimed at making us professional lovers of God and people.

Christian action follows Christian being. We must live out in our lives what we are. Christian existence means that we have been transformed. Through the Spirit we live in Christ Jesus. Life is doing what comes supernaturally. Noblesse oblige. Nobility obliges. The child of a king must not live like a peasant.

The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus, Brennan Manning

The Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit's distinctive role is to fulfill what we may call a floodlight ministry in relation to the Lord Jesus Christ...He is, so to speak, the hidden floodlight shining on the Savior.

It is as if the Spirit stands behind us, throwing light over our shoulder on to Jesus who stands facing us.  The Spirit's message to us in never, "Look at me; listen to me; come to me; get to know me," but always, "Look at him, and see his glory; listen to him and hear his word; go to him and have life; get to know him and taste the gift of joy and peace." The Spirit, we might say, is the matchmaker, the celestial marriage broker, whose role it is to bring us and Christ together and ensure that we stay together.

In God's Presence by J.I. Packer, February 1