No matter how it makes you feel, if you want to minister to others, ask God first of all to minister to you. He wants to work through you, but he can't until he works in you. He'll use you as his instrument, but he wants to sharpen and cleanse that instrument so it becomes a more effective tool in his hands

- Howard Hendricks, teaching to change lives

How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. everything is made to center upon the initial act of "accepting" Christ and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of  God to our souls. We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek him.

AW Tozer, the pursuit of God, location 133

You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again

Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection

Mere Christianity - CS Lewis, pg 88

It is seldom that any of our bad habits or flaw disappear by a mere process of natural extinction. At least, it is very seldom that this is done through the instrumentality of reasoning .. .or by the force of mental determination. But what cannot be destroyed may be dispossessed - and one taste may be made to give way to another and to lose its power entirely as the reigning affection in the mind.

The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one ... It is only .. when admitted into the number of God's children, through faith in Jesus Christ, that the spirit of adoption is poured out on us - it is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominant affection, is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires and the only way that deliverance is possible

Thomas Chalmers - The Expulsive power of a new affection

Now, the gospel brings us a new freedom from lying. How? We don't overcome lying by simply saying to ourselves, "stop lying!" Rather, we ask, why do I lie? What leads me to do it? And the answer is always that something that we delight in (i.e. worship or rely on for our worth) more than God is threatened. And so we lie. But how do we change? We cannot "just say no". The most effective way of withdrawing the heart from one object is not by turning it away upon desolate and unpeopled vacancy, but by presenting to its regard another object more alluring still.

Thomas Calmers - Expulsive power of new affection

The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness.... But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.

What do people mean when they say, "I'm not afraid of God because I know he is good"? Have they never even been to a dentist.

We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accepted it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn't for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people's sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. ...... If i had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled 'Illness' 'Pain' ' Death' and 'Loneliness'. I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. not it matters, and I find I didn't.

Bridge players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously.' Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not four counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. .... Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

CS Lewis - A grief observed

It is equally true that adoption lays on one the abiding obligation to keep the law, as the means of pleasing one's newfound Father. Adoption puts law-keeping on a new footing: as children of God, we acknowledge the law's authority as a rule for our lives, because we know that this is what our Father wants. The sins of God's children do not destroy their justification or nullify their adoption, but they mar the children's fellowship with their father. 

packer, knowing god, pg 223