Life's Highest Joy - Fellowship with God

CROWN us with love, and so with peace;
Transfigure duty to delight;
Our lips inspire, our faith increase,
Brighten with hope our darkest night.
Bring us from earthly bondage free
To find our heaven in serving Thee.
HENRY WILDER FOOTE

WE often make our duties harder by thinking them hard. We dwell on the things we do not like till they grow before our eyes, and, at last, perhaps shut out heaven itself. But this is not following our Master, and He, we may be sure, will value little the obedience of a discontented heart. The moment we see that anything to be done is a plain duty, we must resolutely trample out every rising impulse of discontent. We must not merely prevent our discontent from interfering, with the duty itself; we must not merely prevent it from breaking out into murmuring; we must get rid of the discontent itself. Cheerfulness in the service of Christ is one of the first requisites to make that service Christian.
FREDERICK TEMPLE

WE doubt the word that tells us: Ask,
And ye shall have your prayer;
We turn our thoughts as to a task,
With will constrained and rare.

And yet we have; these scanty prayers
Yield gold without alloy;
O God, but he who trusts and dares
Must have a boundless joy!
GEORGE MACDONALD

TELL them that, until religion cease to be a burden, it is nothing,--until prayer cease to be a weariness, it is nothing. However difficult and however imperfect, the spirit must still rejoice in it.
EDWARD IRVING

From a weary laborer, worn with slavish and ineffectual toil, I had become as a little child receiving from God the free gift of eternal life and of daily sustenance; and prayer, from a weary spiritual exercise, had become the simple asking from the Heavenly Father of daily bread, and thanking Him.
ELIZABETH RUNDLE CHARLES