If

Holiness by subtraction is playing not to lose. Righteousness is going all in with God. It’s playing to win. It’s living as if the victory has already been won at Calvary’s cross. And it has.

Honestly, I’d spent more time planning vacations than planning my life!

You have to make this defining decision: permissible or beneficial? Then it must be backed up by daily decisions against yourself. God can deliver you from anything in a single day, but you’ve got to back it up with daily disciplines.

If you don’t practice spiritual disciplines day in and day out, that deliverance will be short-lived. You’ll fall back into whatever it was that God delivered you from. Anybody can say “I do” at the altar; the hard part is saying “I do” every day thereafter. Anybody can set a life goal; the hard part is going after it every day. Anybody can say no to any addiction for a day, but you have to say it day after day after day. You get into shape one workout at a time. You get out of debt one paycheck at a time. You read through the Bible one verse at a time. Whatever goal you’re going after, you’ve got to take it one step at a time, one day at a time!

the only way to break the sin habit is by establishing a prayer habit. And, I might add, a fasting habit might just double your chances!

The goal of confession isn’t forgiveness; it’s change. Too often we say we’re sorry, but we keep making the same mistake over and over again.

Here’s how it works for me. I open my Bible to wherever I am in my reading plan and start reading. I continue until I come to any verse that may suggest pausing. It’s often something I need to think about or pray about. Sometimes it’s the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and I need to have a conversation with God before I continue. That’s the quickening of the Holy Spirit. When I come to one of those verses, I do three things. First, I underline it or circle it in my Bible. Second, I write it out longhand in my journal. Third, I journal thoughts, confessions, and ideas associated with it. Then, when I feel like the Holy Spirit brings closure, I go to the next verse.

a Harvard University study found that the average person spends 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are presently doing.

In the words of George Bernard Shaw, People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

you cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit if you’re full of yourself. An emptying process needs to happen through confession and repentance.

Our prayers are limited by our lack of knowledge—we don’t know what we don’t know. That’s why I trust His intercession more than my intuition. That’s also why I often preface my prayers with a preamble: Lord, I want what you want more than I want what I want. I first heard that prayer from one of our campus pastors, Dave Schmidgall, when he and his wife were making an offer to buy their first home. That prayer is the way they put the ball back in God’s court.

“All you have to do is go to the hospital,” noted famed psychologist Abraham Maslow, “and hear all the simple blessings that people never before realized were blessings—being able to urinate, to sleep on your side, to be able to swallow, to scratch an itch.”

The key is making a distinction between immediate good and ultimate good.

We pray as if the will of God is primarily geographical, occupational, or relational. It’s not. The will of God has already been revealed—that you be conformed to the image of Christ. That’s your destiny and pre-destiny! And you can do that here or there or anywhere! You can do that no matter what job you have or who you marry. Too often our prayers revolve around changing our circumstances, when sometimes those circumstances are the very thing God is using to change us.