Welcome to the Feminid Podcast.

This is Nancy Wilson.

Thanks so much for joining me today.

Yesterday, I came across an old favorite quote from Samuel Rutherford that I've

forgotten all about.

Here it is.

It were wisdom for us to be free, plain, honest, and sharp with our own souls,

and to charge them to brew better. Sometimes we can get ourselves into a muddle or a puddle or a fog

or a slew of despond. And this advice of Rutherford's is just what we need. Instead of looking for someone else to help us out,

and sometimes let's be real, we need help from someone outside of our own soul, but how often we can just

speak to our own soul and be free, plain, honest, and sharp without being introspective and all that, but charging our

own soul to brew better, to do a better job, make something that smells a lot sweeter than what

you've brewed up today. In other words, just take yourself by the scruff of the neck, so to speak, and give yourself a little shake.

So much better to charge your own soul to brew better than to have Samuel Rutherford take you aside.

The more we take our own selves in hand, the less we can make excuses for ourselves.

Paul says in Philippians, three, that he's forgetting

those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead. I press toward the

goal, he says, for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. This is how we should

view our daily Christian life. Forgetting what's

behind, that's the first thing. We can't coast on past successes, nor should we wallow in past

failures. We're to forget all that, because it takes our mind off what we're supposed to be doing

now in the present. Today requires that we

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