For our joy, Jesus always shoots us straight.

Let us not think that we can inconvenience Jesus with our cares and needs.

“I’m a private person,” we might argue. “It’s no one else’s business,” we might say. “It’s my cross to bear,” we might conclude. And yet, we cannot weep with each other if we never see or know that we are weeping.

Let faith and life be put together, and, like the two abutments of an arch, they will make our piety enduring.

I know that the men and women around me are singing to God while they are struggling in their marriages, fighting cancer, and feeling the uncertainty of job loss. I have come to realize that worship isn’t just something we do; it does something to us.

For many Christians, myself included, regularly seeking God’s face in prayer, reading his Word, sharing the gospel, and fasting is, at one point or another, one of the most frustrating parts of the Christian life.

If it were true that direct gospel ministry and Bible reading are all that matter, that would mean that we waste most of our lives in the meaningless daily stuff of ordinary living.