People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn the literature of the whole world - all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.
You're so heavenly minded, you're no earthly good.
I was so engrossed in my sport, I wasn't thinking about the future from God's standpoint. I was thinking about just my sporting future.
The simple fact is that the World is too busy to give the Holy Spirit a chance to enter in.
We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, 'God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full - there's nowhere for Him to put it.'
I neglect God and his angles for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.
Satan is the master distracter. He is always working to keep us off track in our walk with God.
If we are not serving Jesus, and if he is not in our thoughts and hearts, then the things of the world will draw us instead to them! Moreover, the things of the world need not be sinister in order to be diverting and consuming.
While men are gazing up to Heaven, imagining after a happiness, or fearing a Hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out, that they see not what is their birthright.
The heart clings to collected treasure. Stored-up possessions get between me and God. Where my treasure is, there is my trust, my security, my comfort, my God. Treasure means idolatry.
The church that can't worship must be entertained. And leaders who can't lead a church to worship must provide the entertainment.
It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God's name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.
While we are looking at God we do not see ourselves - blessed riddance.
Pure love of God is our nature, but we are so much diverted, so much distracted by the externals that we've forgotten that it's our essence.
Miracles are supposed to point us to Him, but we can get to God without miracles. It is God himself we should long for rather than for the miracles that point to him. To get caught up in wanting miracles is a bit like thinking the destination of a road trip is the highway you're supposed to take.
God never ceases to speak to us, but the noise of the world without and the tumult of our passions within bewilder us and prevent us from listening to him
In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you, they would have not been at all.
Nets are generally defined as devices for capturing something. In a more narrow but more important sense, we might define a net as anything that entices or prevents us from following the call of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God.
Whatever keeps me from my Bible is my enemy, however harmless it may appear to be.
The devil's main purpose is not to scare us, in a horror-movie way; when we're scared of him, we're alert to him, and that might undermine his plans. Instead, he wants to quietly, subtly lure us into stepping away from God.
Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.
If the heart is devoted to the mirage of the world, to the creature instead of the Creator, the disciple is lost... However urgently Jesus may call us, His call fails to find access to our hearts... for they have already been given to another.
Leave off that excessive desire of knowing; therein is found much distraction. There are many things the knowledge of which is of little or no profit to the soul.
Many of those who once were so passionately in love with Christ now run about pursuing their own interests. They're burdened down with stress and problems, chasing after riches and the things of this world.
While [the] precious, vital message [of the Restoration] has been proclaimed across the world, Satan has been most effective in causing people to ignore it or to look in the wrong places for it. The vast majority of Father's children have not only forgotten their Father in Heaven and the purpose of mortal life, but they rarely even think of Him nor ponder for what purpose they are here in mortality. They have been led to be absorbed by mundane things that distract them from the essential ones. Don't you make that mistake.
