'Do you believe? Because Christ rose from the dead, we know that our world is heading for redemption, not disaster. We know that death has been conquered and that we, too, will be raised from the dead to live forever with Christ. We know that Christ is alive and ruling his kingdom, and that God's power that brought Jesus back from the dead is available to us so we can live for him in an evil world. Do you believe? Then live with joy and hope and power. Dave Veerman

'I am persuaded there are Christians as much in grace beyond ordinary Christians as ordinary Christians are beyond the profane. There are heights which common eyes have never seen, much less scaled. There are nests among the stars where God's own saints dwell and yet how many of us are content to go creeping along like worms in the dust! Would that we had grace to cleave the clouds and mount into the pure blue sky of fellowship with Christ! We do not serve God as we should. We are cold as ice, when we should be like molten metal, burning our way through all opposition. We are like the barren Sahara, when we should be blooming like the garden of the Lord. . . I fear we are scarce fit for service and yet he hath exalted us to be bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, married to him by a glorious marriage covenant. O brothers, God often calls us to higher degrees of piety, and yet we will not come.' Charles Haddon Spurgeon

'We see clearly . . . that we may be saved, yet all our works burned up. I may have a wretched, miserable voyage through life, with no victory, and no reward at the end: saved, yet so as by fire, or as Job puts it, "with the skin of my teeth." I believe that a great many people will barely get to heaven as Lot go out of Sodom, burned out, nothing left, works and everything else destroyed. It is like this: when a man enters the army, he is a member of the army the moment he enlists; he is just as much a member as a man who has been in the army ten or twenty years. But enlisting is one thing and participating in a battle another. Young converts are like those enlisted. It is folly for any man to attempt to fight in his own strength. The world, the flesh, and the devil are too much for any person. But if we are linked to Christ by faith, and He is formed in us the hope of glory, then we shall get the victory over every enemy (because He has gotton the victory over every enemy, and we are in Him). It is believers who are overcomers. "Thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ." D. L. Moody

I have a good friend who, probably, most people would consider to be a difficult - maybe 'challenging' is a better word - person to deal with. Alot of people misunderstand this person, I think, but you know what? God doesn't. God knows us just as we are and says to all of us - for we are all, by nature, difficult, challenging, sinful, me-first people - 'I made you. I love you. In my Son, Jesus, I have redeemed you. Come to me just as you are and I will make you into all that I intended you to be.' C. S. Lewis puts it this way:

"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key; and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you - you . . . the individual. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him . . . Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.