Suffering times are a Christian's harvest time.
Interpretation
Christian suffering leads to spiritual growth and rewards.
This quote by Charles Spurgeon emphasizes that moments of suffering and hardship can be transformative for Christians, allowing them to grow in faith and ultimately bear fruit in their spiritual lives. Just as a farmer looks forward to harvesting after a season of toil, believers can find hope and purpose in their trials, knowing they are nurturing a deeper relationship with God.
In practice
In a sermon about perseverance, you might say, 'Remember, as Charles Spurgeon noted, suffering times are a Christian's harvest time, and we will see the blessings that follow.'
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.
Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ''in spirit and in truth.'' Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.
All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
Christians believe that true worship is the highest and noblest activity of which man, by the grace of God, is capable.
I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity, but because there were people willing to be nuts and bolts.
I will go peaceably and firmly to the Catholic Church: for if Faith is so important to our salvation, I will seek it where true Faith first began, seek it among those who received it from God Himself.
A single Mass offered for oneself during life may be worth more than a thousand celebrated for the same intention after death.
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