Acts 9:19b-31
One of the greatest threats to the Christian life is a
mindset.
Acts 9:26
“Some people formed a certain conception of you, one that may even have been largely accurate at some point in time. But then you grew up. You changed profoundly. And those people never updated their models to see you now for who you really are.” —David Brooks, How to Know a Person, 28-29
If we truly want to make friends and love other people, we must give others the gift of
Acts 9:27
Acts 9:22-23
Galatians 1:17-18
Spiritual growth and maturity come from seasons of
and
.
Acts 9:28-30
Galatians 2:1
“God instructs the heart, not through ideas but through suffering and adversity.” —Jean Pierre de Caussade
“To do His supreme work of grace within you He will take from your heart everything you love most. Everything you trust in will go from you. Piles of ashes will lie where your most precious treasures used to be.” —A.W. Tozer
We expect God to lower the
around us, while God intends to increase
within us.
God’s Slow Work of Maturity:
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—
let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. ——Pierre Teilhard de Chardin