"I’m re-reading Battle for the Round Tower this week, and I just had to tell you: The reminder of Jester’s incessant work has been good for my soul this week."

A temporal place cannot assuage an eternal desire. Thus, to achieve what our hearts long to realize, a dying must occur. 

The biblical picture is of a seed dying and producing what it was never capable of producing in its natural state. 

The image Jesus created doesn’t stop there. Dying is prerequisite to both connection and multiplication.

It’s hardly a news flash to say that you can’t figure out what God is going to do most of the time. After all, He’s God and you aren’t. But this isn’t to say there aren’t aspects of God that are predictable. 

There’s the promise: the relentless, determined, predictable character of God. “I am with you.” You are mine. I’m going to take care of you. I am with you. 

But the fact of the matter is, God will not, cannot, depart from or compromise in the slightest His longsuffering mercy and faithfulness. 

There are aspects of God that are predictable. There are some ways in which you know generally what He is going to do, and there are many ways in which God can’t be categorized. 

God never wastes a sorrow, but there are varying degrees of this multiplication because we, like Israel, can be prone to waste the sorrows God honors. 

This is the way of God—and knowing this about God means an opportunity for development invariably is yours when hardship finds you.  

The confident swagger of Egypt has slipped away like a desert mirage leaving a man embarrassed that he has a stutter.  

I run across folks who know a lot about God. They can quote chapter and verse from the Bible, serve in His name, and are adept guides at navigating church and Christian concerns, but when pressed, they appear to know about God but not know Him. 

A Christian who is not a person of diligence is not worth much in the realm of dependability. And when it comes to survivability, a Christian who does not approach living diligently from the proper perspective is not dependable either. 

It is crucial to know we are justified, sanctified, glorified, and righteous in Christ. But, we must move from salvation toward Christian maturity. 

It is not enough, indeed it would be cruel, to write of diligence and the critical necessity of this character quality in your life without reminding and informing you of the foundation from which you must act. 

But, there was a plan and a man of diligence executing it. The course of history was soon to be altered.

A fellow can miss a living relationship with Jesus sitting in his church pew and teaching Sunday School just as he can lying in the gutter drunk or pledging allegiance to an atheistic system. 

The devil does not kill, maim, and destroy in the same fashion here in the west as he does behind the iron and bamboo curtains. But make no mistake: He does kill, maim, and destroy. 

What’s the point in getting spiritually ready if I’m never going to get into the “real” game anyway? I can be mediocre in my spiritual life and never miss a beat as a western Christian.