Quotables - Jeremiah Burroughs

"The contentment of a man or woman who is rightly content does not come so much from outward arguments or from any outward help, as from the disposition of their own hearts. The disposition of their own hearts causes and brings forth this gracious contentment rather than any external thing.

Let me explain myself. Someone is disturbed... If you come and bring some great thing to please them, perhaps it will quiet them and they will be contented. It is the thing you bring that quiets them, not the disposition of their own spirits, not any good temper in their own hearts, but the external thing you bring them. But when a Christian is content in the right way, the quiet comes more from the temper and disposition of his own heart than from any external argument or from the possession of anything in the world.

I would unfold this further to you with this simile: to be content as a result of some external thing is like warming a man's clothes by the fire. But to be content through an inward disposition of the soul is like the warmth that a man's clothes have from the natural heat of the body. A man who is healthy in body puts on his clothes, and perhaps at first on a cold morning they feel cold. But after he has had them on a little while they are warm. Now, how did they get warm? They were not near the fire? No, this came from the natural heat of his body. Now when a sickly man, the natural heat of whose body has deteriorated, puts on his clothes, they do not get hot after a long time. He must warm them by the fire, and even then they will soon be cold again.

This will illustrate the different contentment of men. Some are very gracious, and when an affliction comes on them, though at first it seems a little cold, after they have borne it a while, the very temper of their hearts makes their afflictions easy. They are quiet under it and do not complain of any discontent. But now there are others that have an affliction upon them and have not this good temper in their hearts. Their afflictions are very cold and troublesome to them. Maybe, if you bring some external arguments to bear upon them like the fire that warms the clothes, they will be quiet for a while. But alas, if they lack a gracious disposition in their own hearts, that warmth will not last long.  The warmth of the fire, that is, a contentment that results merely from external arguments, will not last long but that which comes from the gracious temper of one's spirit will last. When it comes from the spirit of a man or woman - that is true contentment."

- Jeremiah Burroughs
The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

Quotables - Francis Schaeffer

"The young man Joshua was learning a lesson that anybody who is ever going to be worth anything in leadership must learn. None of us learns it completely, of course, and yet we must master it if we are going to be of any use in the Church of God. A leader must never confuse himself with God. When a person begins to exercise certain gifts and God brings him to a place of leadership in the Church of Christ, how easy it is to do this. Yet this is the destruction of all true spiritual leadership."

- Francis Schaeffer from Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History, page 159

Quotables - Charles Spurgeon

If you have to give a carnival to get people to come to church, then you will have to keep giving carnivals to keep them coming back.

- Charles Spurgeon

How Depression Feels

"What does mental illness actually look like and feel like? How is depression different from just feeling sad or discouraged or blue? I'm not the only one, certainly, to try to describe it. In his award-winning book Darkness Visible, William Styron writes:

'The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying - or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity - but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.' "

Darkness Is My Only Companion - Kathryn Greene-McCreight, pg 39

"Depression meant that every breath, every thought, every moment of consciousness ached, throbbed, stung."

Darkness Is My Only Companion - Kathryn Greene-McCreight, pg 55

Quotables - Charles Spurgeon

None are more unjust in their judgments of others than those who have a high opinion of themselves.

- Charles Spurgeon

Quotables - R.C. Sproul

Quotables - Francis J. Grimké