life on planet earth on Rigidity

Don’t allow yourself to become so nostalgic, rigid, or judgmental about the way God chooses to demonstrate his message that you miss a new way forward.

The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no man...

If you keep a bow always bent, it will break presently; but if you let it go slack, it will be the fitter for use when you want it.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back i...

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Perfectionists have trouble relating to people who don’t hold a strong impulse towards perfectionism, and vice versa. The more intense your impulse towards something is and the more natural it feels f...

An obsession with righteousness (leading invariably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition.

Adulthood is the ability to be totally bored and remain standing. Supermarket line, Motor Vehicle Bureau. You hang right in there, solid as a rock.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

So fixed are our spirits in slothfulness and cold indifference that we seldom overcome so much as one evil habit.

I find it hard to be at rest and ambitious at the same time.

Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.

The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.

Perfection....it functions as a form of myopia, a preoccupation with self-image that can stunt emotional growth.

Ironically, the insistence that doctrines do not matter is really a doctrine itself.

[Maturity is] the ability to delay gratification. Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing t...

If identity is fluid, then to remain still is to die—or worse, to become irrelevant—and so we never cease our frantic movement in the direction we hope, and pray, is forward..

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong.

Patience is like good motor oil. It doesn't remove all the contaminants. It just puts them into suspension so they don't get into your works and seize them up. Patient people have, so to speak...

Do not let your conscience be hardened. It is like a body of water freezing in winter. It starts with a film of ice you can barely see. But once the film forms and the pond stays still, the glaze thic...

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have all one needs.

A taste of righteousness can be easily perverted into an overweening sense of self-righteousness and judgmentalism.

We fixate on sins of commission far too much. We practice holiness by subtraction-don't do this, don't do that, and you're okay. The problem with that is this: you can do nothing wrong and...

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromis...

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the o...

It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become toward the defects of others.

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.