Faith in the nearness of God creates the resilience needed to keep leading, loving, giving, evangelizing, serving, praying for, and preaching to.

Charles Spurgeon said: The Lord knows how to educate you up to such a point that you can endure in years to come what you could not endure today; just as today He may make you to stand firm under a burden, which, ten years ago, would have crushed you into the dust.

A real spiritual attack, in the form of temptation, tells you that the way to endure sin is to sin.

How many intellectuals do we know who will not let God into their mind because it isn’t big enough to hold Him?

Even on His dying day, He met with God about a cup, and while it was poured, He spoke with God on a cross (Matt. 26:39; 27:46).

Our personalities aren’t in the way of our fruitfulness; sin is.

The very part of Peter that caused him to fail was the very part God used.

Maybe, just maybe, we have become so rational that we’ve become unreasonable. Being ignorant to the devil’s schemes is utterly unreasonable, and such ignorance is, in fact, one of his schemes.

But if your fear of people discourages you from being faithful to the text and to God, then somewhere in there you don’t believe God is with you.