Quotes about Control

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. "Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there...

Much of our problem is not, as is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down in our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have had a lot of mistaken theology in our head and it has gotten down into our heart. And it is controlling our inner dynamics so that the head and heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight.

Anything done in anger can be done better without it!

And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That's the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.

We cannot behave on the spot as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does. The on the spot episodes are not the place where we can, even by the grace of God, redirect unchristlike but ingrained tendencies of action toward sudden Christlikeness. Our efforts to take control at that moment will fail so uniformly and ingloriously that the whole project of following Christ will appear ridiculous to the watching world.

Our "kingdom" is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom.

In our spiritual disintegration we may not be able to rule the earth, but we now have the power several times over to ruin it utterly.

Recall, now, that the kingdom of God is the range of his effective will: that is, it is the domain where what he prefers is actually what happens.

Practice in not speaking can at least give us enough control over what we say that our tongues do not "go off" automatically. This discipline provides us with a certain inner distance that gives us time to consider our words fully and the presence of mind to control what we say and when we say it.

Dying to self does not exclude having a proper sense of self-worth, including the need to feel recognized and valued. Recognition from others is a good and proper thing. But it must not be what controls our lives. It must not become the goal of our existence. If we find that our need for recognition is consuming our thoughts and determining our behavior, then we need to move to a higher source for our sense of our personal worth. That source is, of course, God's love for us.

There may be times when you have to renew your commitment to release what you want, how you look, and especially what you are doing for the Lord. Much of our effort to do things for the Lord is really the resurgence of our desire to dominate and make things happen in our own strength.

Too often our "love" for family members is domination in disguise.