I many no longer depend on pleasant impulses to bring me before the Lord. I must rather response to principles I know to be right, whether I feel them to be enjoyable or not.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
With my Roman Catholic upbringing, I have a set of principles that serve me well in good times and bad.
My opinion is that I follow what the Lord says. Or I try to. Others are following what they want to do, basically. They are living for their self. I am living for God.
After a long, impartial enquiry of the truth, and after much and earnest calling upon God, to give unto me the spirit and revelation in the knowledge of Him, I find myself obliged, both by the principles of reason and Scripture, to embrace the opinion I now hold forth.
Young people especially sometimes feel that the standards of the Lord are like fences and chains, blocking them from those activities that seem most enjoyable in life.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical.
I value all things as nothing in comparison with having the spirit of God to guide me.
Exhort all your household often that all those who serve you shall know to serve God and you, faithfully and painstakingly, and for the will of God to prefer in all things to do your will and pleasure in all things that are not against God.
When I took the habit, the Lord immediately showed me how He favours those who do violence to themselves in order to serve Him. No one saw what I endured... At the moment of my entrance into this new state I felt a joy so great that it has never failed me even to this day; and God converted the dryness of my soul into a very great tenderness.