Sociologist Robert N. Bellah wrote that attention is “how we use our psychic energy, and how we use our psychic energy determines the kind of self we are cultivating, the kind of person we are learning to be.” Christians are called to direct that attentive energy to the One who is the Bread of Life, the Living Water, the Word that was in the beginning with God. More than an attentional practice, this is soul cultivation.

-Susan Phillips from The Cultivated Life

For you will have peace to the extent that you have God, and the further you are away from God the less you will be at peace. Anything that is at peace has God in it to the extent that it is at peace. Thus you may measure your progress with God by measuring your peace or the lack of it. When you have unrest within you, you will be restless visibly, but the unrest comes from the creature and not from God. There is nothing in him to be afraid of, and nothing to cause sorrow. He is only lovable.

Perfectly to will what God wills, to want what he wants, is to have joy; but if one’s will is not quite in unison with God’s, there is no joy. May God help us to be in tune with him! Amen.

-Meister Eckhart

There was some talk about a certain man who wanted to make a fresh start in life and I spoke of it this way: He ought to become a God-seeker in all things and a God-finder at all times. [He should pursue this objective] in all places, among all kinds of people and by every possible method. In this way, he will always make progress and grow, and never come to the end of his way.

-Meister Eckhart

God alone is enough.

-Teresa of Avila

One cannot break attachments by force, Teresa discovered; they are the expression of an inner hunger. When that hunger is assuaged, attachments will fall away with almost no effort on our part.

-Carol Lee Flinders

Because I am human, I am weak. Because I am weak, I pray.

Augustine

When we come to the place where we can joyously “do no work” (Lev.23:3), it will be because God is so exalted in our mind and body that we can trust him with our life and our world, and we can take our hands off them.

Rest is one primary condition of Sabbath in the body. If we really intend to submit our body as a living sacrifice to God, our first step may be to start getting enough sleep. Sleep is a good indicator of how thoroughly we trust in God.

-Dallas Willard & Don Simpson

Since his only means of going to God was to do everything out of love for Him, it did not matter to him what work he was given to do, provided that he did it for God. It was God, not the work, that he considered. He knew that the more such work crossed his natural inclinations, the more valuable was the love that made him offer it to God. He knew that the pettiness of the thing did not diminish in any way the value of his offering, because God, having need of nothing, considers only the love that accompanies the work.

Let everyone who professes to be a Christian worker pause. Ask whether you are leaving your mark for eternity on those around you. It is not your preaching or teaching, your strength of will or power to influence, that will secure this. All depends on having your life full of God and His power. And that depends upon your living the truly branchlike life of abiding–close and unbroken fellowship with Christ. It is the branch that abides in Him that bears much fruit, fruit that will abide.

What one does occasionally does not define a person, but rather, what that individual does regularly.

A.W. Tozer

One of the most insidious dynamics in the modern church involves the bifurcation of life into two spheres, the sacred and secular. The life of the spirit and the life of the street, meant to be integrated, instead are ripped apart and thrown in different directions. Where this aberrant vision of the Christian life prevails, “church language” has the hollow thud of wordy noise rather than the ring of authenticity.

“When Christ-following truth is no longer spoken in street language, when it is no longer directed at street life, and when it no longer challenges men and women to live as Christ-followers in those streets, there is no longer a chance for real-world faith. People are tamed, learning how to act with deftness inside the religious institutions. But they do not learn how to live faithfully in the real world.”*

Real-world faith is replaced by a shallow substitute–a spiritual-looking, institutionalized religion that is completely irrelevant to everyday life. The vibrant, zesty fulness and realness of true Christianity is replaced by a tame spiritual vapidity that must be checked inside the door of the church lest it vaporize under the heat of the streets.

-from The NIV Application Commentary on Hebrews by George Guthrie

*Gordon MacDonald, Forging a Real-World Faith, 165