O LORD,

No day of my life has passed that has not proved me guilty in thy sight.       
Prayers have been uttered from a  prayerless heart;
Praise has been often praiseless sound;
My best services are filthy rags.

Blessed Jesus, let me find a covert in thy appeasing wounds.
Though my sins rise to heaven thy merits soar above them;
Though unrighteousness weighs me down to hell, 
 thy righteousness exalts me to thy throne.
All things in me call for my rejection,
All things in thee plead my acceptance.
I appeal from the throne of perfect justice  
to thy throne of boundless grace.

Grant me to hear thy voice assuring me:  
that by thy stripes I am healed,  
that thou wast bruised for my iniquities,  
that thou hast been made sin for me 
 that I might be righteous in thee,  
that my grievous sins, my manifold sins,    
are all forgiven,  
buried in the ocean of thy concealing blood.
I am guilty, but pardoned, lost, but saved,  
wandering, but found,  
sinning, but cleansed.
Give me perpetual broken-heartedness,
Keep me always clinging to thy cross,
Flood me every moment with descending grace,
Open to me the springs of divine knowledge,  
sparkling like crystal,  
flowing clear and unsullied
through my wilderness of life.
-Valley of Vision

Go buy this book. Go buy this book.

"As a Christian, my brand of perfectionism can be a little more subtle because it sometimes disguises itself in pious clothing. But even when perfectionism seems to be aimed at godly living, it is prideful because it expects from ourselves now what only God has promised to accomplish in the future. Perfectionism disregards God’s promise to make us who we ought to be by attempting in our own strength to meet the goal of that promise in the present, and by positioning ourselves as the final judges of our performance."

-Winston Hottman

I know I risk being misunderstood. More than a few would point not to the lack of power, but to the abysmal theological immaturity in the Church as the source of its struggle. I can't argue with that. Biblical illiteracy and theological naivete have reached epidemic proportions in the Church today. But more than knowledge if needed. Mere doctrine won't suffice. What the Church needs is truth set aflame by the power of the Holy Spirit. What the Church needs is the divine energy of God Himself bringing what we know to bear on how we live and how we pray and how we love and how we witness. And let's not forget that teaching is itself a spiritual gift, no less a manifestation of the power of the Spirit than tongues or miracles (see Rom. 12:7; 1 Cor. 12:29; Eph 4:11)!

-Sam Storms

...Spiritual gifts are not God bestowing to His people something external to Himself. They are not some tangible "stuff" or substance separable from God. Spiritual gifts are nothing less than God Himself in us, energizing our souls, imparting revelation to our minds, infusing power in our wills and working His soverign and gracious purposes through us. Spiritual gifts must never be viewed deistically, as if a God "out there" has sent some "thing" to us "down here." Spiritual gifts are God present in, and with and through human thoughts, human deeds, human words, human love.

-Sam Storms

Not that We loved Him, but that He loved Us

All those expressions of unworthiness which Christian practice puts into the believer's mouth seem to the outer world like the degraded and insincere grovellings of a sycophant before a tyrant, or at best a facon de parler like the self-depreciation of a Chinese gentleman when he calls himself "this coarse and illiterate person." In reality, however, they express the continually renewed, because continually necessary, attempt to negate that misconception of ourselves and of our relation to God which nature, even while we pray, is always recommending to us. No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an impulse to believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable.

The Pagans obeyed this impulse unabashed; a good man was "dear to the gods" because he was good. We, being better taught, resort to subterfuge. Far be it from us to think we have virtues for which God could love us.

...Beaten out of this, we next offer our own humility to God's admiration. Surely He'll like that? Or if not that, our clear-sighted and humble recognition that we still lack humility. Thus, depth beneath depth and subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness. It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely we must have a little--however little--native luminosity?

--C.S. Lewis, "The Four Loves"