If you find yourself loving any pleasure more than your prayers, any book better than the Bible, any house better than the house of the Lord, any table better than the Lord's table, any persons better than Christ, or any indulgence better than the hope of heaven – be alarmed.
Interpretation
Prioritize spiritual devotion over worldly pleasures.
This quote by Thomas Guthrie emphasizes the importance of maintaining spiritual focus and devotion in a world filled with distractions and temptations. It warns that if one starts valuing earthly pleasures and possessions above their prayers, religious texts, communal worship, or deeper connections with Christ, it is a cause for concern, suggesting a misalignment of priorities that could lead to spiritual decline.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a sermon to encourage parishioners to focus on their spiritual lives.
It is not with a rush and a spring that we are to reach Christ's character, and attain to perfect saintship; but step by step, foot by foot, hand over hand, we are slowly and often painfully to mount the ladder that rests on earth, and rises to heaven.
All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.
It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualize as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality. ... In the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerated a scripture may be.
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life!
Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.
We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.
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