Not that our salvation should be the effect of our work, but our work should be the evidence of our salvation.
Interpretation
Our actions should reflect our beliefs rather than be a means to achieve them.
Charles Spurgeon's quote emphasizes the idea that genuine faith or salvation is not measured by the deeds we perform but rather that our deeds should naturally arise as evidence of that faith. It suggests that true belief and inner transformation will manifest in our actions, and therefore, our work is an outward expression of our inward state.
In practice
During a church service when discussing how faith should motivate action.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
Providence is like a curious piece of tapestry made of a thousand shreds, which, single, appear useless, but put together, they represent a beautiful history to the eye.
Painful memories didn't just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once
If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.
The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.
The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.
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