Don't let anything that happens ever discourage you, because if you hold on to the Lord, He will help you overcome every situation - whatever it be. Every trial is designed by Him to enable you to get to know Him better. This is where both unbelievers and worldly believers fail. Instead of turning to God, they turn to the world and experiment with forbidden substances in order to get relaxation and peace in their failure or distress. Don't ever try such things. It is very easy to get addicted even to things that look harmless initially.

Perfection is attained not by those who never fail, but by those who are honest about their failures and who jump up immediately as soon as they fall and press on.

We always face the danger of becoming `religious' and thinking that is `spirituality'. Religious people are taken up with the externals - external sacrifices for the Lord, external rituals connected with their understanding of what the minimum is that they must do in order to keep in good standing in their church, in church activities, in external details of their dress, in intellectual study of the Word (without practical application), and in emotional meetings (imagining such emotionalism to be evidence of the power of the Spirit) etc. None of these things are wrong or even unimportant. But for religious people, these activities are primary, and they imagine these to be the marks of spirituality and are thus deceived.

Truly spiritual people, however, are taken up with wanting to know God better, seeking to preserve themselves in a fervent love for Jesus and for their fellow-believers, seeking to find out what God wants them to do (rather than `doing something for God'), seeking for the power of the Holy Spirit, and cleansing themselves of selfish motives in their actions. Religious people build congregations. Spiritual people build the Body of Christ.

God is looking across the world for men who will stand up for Him; unlike the Pharisees who had truth warped and out of proportion and who strained out mosquitoes and swallowed camels (Matt. 23:24). God is looking for men who will stand for the principles of His Word, men like Elijah, John the Baptist and Paul, Martin Luther, John Wesley, and Eric Liddell, who stood for what they believed, whatever the cost might be. God is going to populate heaven with such people of principle. I pray that you will be in that number. You will have ample opportunity to stand up for the Lord. May you do so on every occasion.

Many godly men have given their lives to translate the Bible into English and to preserve the pure message of the gospel in past centuries. But unfortunately, today, many believers do not spend even five minutes to read the Bible in their homes, and much less to study it. Many godly men in past centuries may not have had the clear understanding of doctrine that we have today. But they had a fervent devotion to Christ such as is rarely found these days - and that is what matters most in the final analysis - not just correctness of doctrine.

Forgetfulness is not a serious matter like sin. But overcoming it can save you a lot of inconveniences. We are all forgetful. What I do now to overcome my forgetfulness is to write down important matters that I need to do, in a small pocketbook that I carry with me always. I also write down the things the Lord speaks to me. I find that if I don't write them down, I often forget what the Lord spoke.