Barbara R. Duguid Quotes

If the Holy Spirit is carefully and lovingly managing all our falls into sin and using them for God's glory and our good, then there is great cause for joy and peace whether you are leaping forward or crawling through the Christian life.

Jesus, thank you for remembering the truth faithfully on our behalf. You worshiped your Father daily, with unwavering faith and unshakable hope in his goodness. Cherishing the Father's unchangeable character, you submitted to his perfect wisdom and trusted him completely in all the circumstances of your life, even when it was most painful. You took refuge in him often in your times of need and never turned toward false gods. Now your obedience becomes our strong encouragement to hope in the midst of continuing weakness, and you continue to advocate our cause as our heavenly High Priest. We have no other hope, nor do we need one.

May we always see ourselves accurately as helpless sinners in need of grace, so that we never move beyond the cross or consider ourselves better than our worst enemies.

If the goal of sanctification is actually growing in humility and greater dependence on Christ, then the Holy Spirit is doing an excellent job. Through his ongoing struggles with indwelling sin, the maturing believer will spend many years learning that he is more sinful than he ever imagined, in order to discover that he is indeed far more loved than he ever dared to hope.

We marvel that you would consider us a joy worth suffering for, and we bow humbly before you and offer you our praise, our thanks, and our very lives.

Joy blossoms in our hearts not as we try harder and harder to grow, but as we see more clearly the depth of our sin and understand more fully our helplessness.

Forgive us for relying on our own wisdom and strength; for the hours we spend trying to rescue ourselves from pain, suffering, and sin, when you have already rescued us in your Son.

Father, thank you for your deep and endless mercy to rebels like us. We have trampled on the blood of your precious and only Son, time and time again. We know that we deserve your wrath, and yet when we approach you we find grace and mercy instead. Father, we cannot fathom the cost to your heart of pouring out so much anger on your perfect Son. Father, we are so grateful that you were willing to suffer so much for us.

He also believed that the richest fruit of God's work in our hearts would be evidenced by increasing humility and dependence on Christ for everything, rather than in a victorious Christian life.

you were to ask Christians around the world what God wants from the people he has saved, most would probably answer "obedience." There is great truth in that answer, but it is not enough. If the sovereign God's primary goal in sanctifying believers is simply to make us more holy, it is hard to explain why most of us make only "small beginnings" on the road to personal holiness in this life, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it (see Catechism Q. 113). In reality, God wants something much more precious in our lives than mere outward conformity to his will. After all, obedience is tricky business and can be confusing to us. We can be obedient outwardly while sinning wildly on the inside, as the example of the Pharisees makes clear. In fact, many of my worst sins have been committed in the context of my best obedience.

Simply building a fence between a child and temptation is not the same things as preparing him to face life.

The more you come to admire God's wisdom and believe in his love and kindness to each of us, the freer you will be from envying those with more faith and stronger gifts and from feeling superior to those what are weaker than you.

You have a heavenly Father who would never let this sin and weakness remain in you if he did not plan to overrule it for your good and for his own glory.