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1 " If people threw away their money as thoughtlessly as they throw away their time, we would think them insane. Yet time is infinitely more precious than money because money can’t buy time. "
― Donald S. Whitney , Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life
2 " From matters as crucial as the death of Jesus, to those as mundane as eating and drinking, the Bible presents the glo ry of God as the ultimate priority and the definitive criterion by which we should evaluate everything. "
― Donald S. Whitney , Simplify Your Spiritual Life: Spiritual Disciplines for the Overwhelmed
3 " We should pray when we are in a praying mood, for it would be sinful to neglect so fair an opportunity. We should pray when we are not in a proper mood, for it would be dangerous to remain in so unhealthy a condition. "
― Donald S. Whitney , Praying the Bible
4 " Elisabeth Elliot is more precise when she explains that “freedom and discipline have come to be regarded as mutually exclusive, when in fact freedom is not at all the opposite, but the final reward, of discipline. "
5 " Why do so many Christians neglect the study of God’s Word? R. C. Sproul said it painfully well: “Here then, is the real problem of our negligence. We fail in our duty to study God’s Word not so much because it is difficult to understand, not so much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work. Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we are lazy. "
6 " Can we expect the flames of our worship of God to burn brightly in public on the Lord’s Day when they barely flicker for Him in secret on other days? "
7 " No Spiritual Discipline is more important than the intake of God’s Word. Nothing can substitute for it. There simply is no healthy Christian life apart from a diet of the milk and meat of Scripture. The reasons for this are obvious. In the Bible God tells us about Himself, and especially about Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God. The Bible unfolds the Law of God to us and shows us how we’ve all broken it. There we learn how Christ died as a sinless, willing Substitute for breakers of God’s Law and how we must repent and believe in Him to be right with God. In the Bible we learn the ways and will of the Lord. We find in Scripture how God wants us to live, and what brings the most joy and satisfaction in life. None of this eternally essential information can be found anywhere else except the Bible. Therefore if we would know God and be godly, we must know the Word of God—intimately. "
8 " And in my own pastoral and personal Christian experience, I can say that I’ve never known a man or woman who came to spiritual maturity except through discipline. Godliness comes through discipline. "
9 " Consistent, father-led family worship is one of the best, steadiest, and most easily measurable ways to bring up children in the Lord’s “discipline and instruction. "
― Donald S. Whitney , Family Worship: In the Bible, in History & in Your Home
10 " The text of the Bible means what God inspired it to mean, not “what it means to me. "
11 " I maintain that people—truly born-again, genuinely Christian people—often do not pray simply because they do not feel like it. And the reason they don’t feel like praying is that when they do pray, they tend to say the same old things about the same old things. "
12 " So basically what you are doing is taking words that originated in the heart and mind of God and circulating them through your heart and mind back to God. By this means his words become the wings of your prayers. "
13 " If you will not worship God seven days a week,” said A. W. Tozer, “you do not worship Him on one day a week. "
14 " The reason we come away so cold from reading the word is because we do not warm ourselves at the fire of meditation. "
15 " But even though disciplining yourself is sometimes diffcult and involves struggle, self-discipline is not self-punishment. It is instead an attempt to do what, prompted by the Spirit, you actually want in your heart to do. "
― Donald S. Whitney
16 " To pray the Bible, you simply go through the passage line by line, talking to God about whatever comes to mind as you read the text. "
17 " Too much attention to a particular sin or sins, and/or too little attention to communion with God (two things that often occur in tandem) inevitably shrivel the soul of a Christian. "
― Donald S. Whitney , 10 Questions to Diagnose Your Spiritual Health
18 " We could summarize the views of our Christian heroes across the centuries with a sentence from Jonathan Edwards: “Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church. "
19 " No Spiritual Discipline is more important than the intake of God’s Word. Nothing can substitute for it. There simply is no healthy Christian life apart from a diet of the milk and meat of Scripture. "
20 " What value is there to reading one, three, or more chapters of Scripture only to find that after you’ve finished, you can’t recall a thing you’ve read? It’s better to read a small amount of Scripture and meditate on it than to read an extensive section without meditation. "
