give your emotions and heart to Christ, not to problems

In handling a difficult issue concerning personal relationships and misunderstanding, Jack Miller wrote the following to a friend (emphasis mine):

I am grieved by this whole matter, very deeply, but I also forgive you and them from the bottom of my heart. But with this letter I now put it out of my mind. I suggest you do the same. Sometimes the world is a most imperfect place. It will take a while before you or I perfect it, and that includes the church. So keep your perspective. Be willing to wait as you work. Watch your emotions and heart. Give them to Christ and not to problems. Let’s keep praising Him and get our own work done.

The Heart of a Servant Leader p.190

witnesses, not stargazers

There was something fundamentally anomalous about their gazing up into the sky when they had been commissioned to go to the end of the earth. It was the earth not the sky which was to be their preoccupation. Their calling was to be witnesses, not stargazers. The vision they were to cultivate was not upwards in nostalgia to the heaven which had received Jesus, but outwards in compassion to a lost world which needed him. It is the same for us. Curiosity about heaven and its occupants, speculation about prophecy and its fulfilment, an obsession with ‘times and seasons’ - these are aberrations which distract us from our God-given mission. Christ will come personally, visibly, gloriously. Of that we have been assured. Other details can wait. Meanwhile, we have work to do in the power of the Spirit.

(John Stott, The Message of Acts, Bible Speaks Today, IVP 1990)